Like a whole new game...

Unfadingsilence · October 10

So for the last few weeks, I have been playing on my new PC....
CPU
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
GPU GeForce RTX 5090
MEMORY
128GB DDR5
STORAGE
8TB SSD
For all of my nerds out there and I honestly have to say inside PvP during prime time its truly amazing and almost feels like cheating at this point. Does anyone else actually play on a high end gaming PC and how do you feel about it? Should they actually limit how much someone can or cant use when it comes down to their own system and what is acceptable?

Stamicka · October 10

I mean ESO can still run on the Xbox One and that thing is extremely weak. Regardless of what you’re on it’ll still be laggy cause of server issues.

I have very new hardware and I still experienced frame drops in many situations. My monitor supports 165 FPS so I cap it there. Extra frames are noticeable, but I’m originally from Xbox so I know that ESO is just as playable with much lower FPS.

What’s causing you to feel like you have an advantage in PvP? ESO isn’t a game where client performance is super important since it’s so casual. We all suffer from the same prime time lag regardless.

Anyway, hopefully you can find something that actually justifies those specs. I’ve found that most games released now will just perform badly because they’re badly optimized. Better hardware helps, but upgrading isn’t something worth the price at all atm.

Horace-Wimp · October 10

I had the same reaction the better part of 20 years ago when I was playing World of Warcraft. I bought a new top of the line gaming PC and could not believe the night and day difference in how the game looked. It was amazing.

I got to experience the same thing again a few years later when I bought another top of the line gaming PC while playing the MMO Rift. It was a completely new gaming experience. Made the open world Volan zone event in Ashora truly epic.

Gratz on your toy. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Rohamad_Ali · October 11

8T of storage what a great PC. Congratulations.

Unfadingsilence · October 11

Stamicka wrote: »

I mean ESO can still run on the Xbox One and that thing is extremely weak. Regardless of what you’re on it’ll still be laggy cause of server issues.

I have very new hardware and I still experienced frame drops in many situations. My monitor supports 165 FPS so I cap it there. Extra frames are noticeable, but I’m originally from Xbox so I know that ESO is just as playable with much lower FPS.

What’s causing you to feel like you have an advantage in PvP? ESO isn’t a game where client performance is super important since it’s so casual. We all suffer from the same prime time lag regardless.

Anyway, hopefully you can find something that actually justifies those specs. I’ve found that most games released now will just perform badly because they’re badly optimized. Better hardware helps, but upgrading isn’t something worth the price at all atm.

I'm definitely looking forward to some upcoming games and I make alot of content not gaming content so I need these specs but even in prime time p v p I am not seeing any issues.No, crashing, no lag nothing, but I am seeing other players move relatively slow or them. Just freezing outright during high intense battles

Unfadingsilence · October 11

Horace-Wimp wrote: »

I had the same reaction the better part of 20 years ago when I was playing World of Warcraft. I bought a new top of the line gaming PC and could not believe the night and day difference in how the game looked. It was amazing.

I got to experience the same thing again a few years later when I bought another top of the line gaming PC while playing the MMO Rift. It was a completely new gaming experience. Made the open world Volan zone event in Ashora truly epic.

Gratz on your toy. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Its truly beautiful like a whole new game im just so shocked with how it looks and feels, makes me want to get back into gaming content

Sarannah · October 11

Nice new PC, awesome specs! What is the RAM speed?

Really hope you also use a 4k monitor, as the game is truly beautiful with high settings in 4k! Especially on a 30+ inch monitor.

PS: ZOS should never limit anything hardware-wise.
PPS: People hardly ever believe me when I state it could be their hardware probably/possibly causing their problem(s) with the game.

SeaGtGruff · October 11

Yeah, I'm currently playing ESO on a gaming laptop and was able to start using much higher graphics setting than on my old PC that died. The game truly looks and plays amazing on a powerful PC. The other night I decided to grind some dolmens on one of my alts-- not for XP, but rather for jewelry to deconstruct for a daily endeavor-- and I don't know if it was a combination of the crisper graphics, the bright colors in the Rift on a sunny day, or what, but I swear the dolmens actually felt like they had been revamped and ramped up in intensity (such as how much the ground shook when the dark anchors dropped). I wondered if the dolmens in certain zones have been improved for the upcoming Writhing Wall event, or if it was just a combination of those things I just mentioned, but it was like the dolmens were totally awesome again.

Unfadingsilence · October 11

Sarannah wrote: »

Nice new PC, awesome specs! What is the RAM speed?

Really hope you also use a 4k monitor, as the game is truly beautiful with high settings in 4k! Especially on a 30+ inch monitor.

PS: ZOS should never limit anything hardware-wise.
PPS: People hardly ever believe me when I state it could be their hardware probably/possibly causing their problem(s) with the game.

Since im rocking 128GB DDR5 its around 5600–6000 MHz and yah 4k maxed out everything it truly is beautiful to look at even in pvp now my FPS dont drop below 250

Unfadingsilence · October 11

Sarannah wrote: »

Nice new PC, awesome specs! What is the RAM speed?

Really hope you also use a 4k monitor, as the game is truly beautiful with high settings in 4k! Especially on a 30+ inch monitor.

PS: ZOS should never limit anything hardware-wise.
PPS: People hardly ever believe me when I state it could be their hardware probably/possibly causing their problem(s) with the game.

And yes after getting this new PC and I see people in chat talking about performance i now also wonder if it is a hardware problem on their end with the game because yes im seeing the "lag" still but what I see is way different im seeing other people moving slow or stopping all together while im still seeing ball groups just run over these frozen people and killing everything in their path

Northwold · October 11

Beyond the resolution I'm not understanding why this would give anyone an advantage (unless they had eg a deeply problematic internet connection before). ESO simply isn't performance-intensive enough client side for a switch from anything but the worst performing PC to make any difference to things like lag, which is server related. I occasionally play on 4k and it's great to see chests etc miles and miles away (and that genuinely is game changing, especially on a very big screen), but beyond that I've not found having a decent pc makes a great deal of difference. Indeed, historically in battles on the rare occasions I've done PvP I've found doing things very, very fast then results in a crash / getting out of sync because of what's (not) happening server side.

StihlReign · October 11

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

So for the last few weeks, I have been playing on my new PC....
CPU
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
GPU GeForce RTX 5090
MEMORY
128GB DDR5
STORAGE
8TB SSD
For all of my nerds out there and I honestly have to say inside PvP during prime time its truly amazing and almost feels like cheating at this point. Does anyone else actually play on a high end gaming PC and how do you feel about it? Should they actually limit how much someone can or cant use when it comes down to their own system and what is acceptable?

Nice! Yep, I've been blessed to play on some pretty nice machines since the game started and I believe it makes a difference. I cap my fps to 100 for this game (from the ingame menu), the ROGs can run super fast OC so ESO is no issue, Samsung hasn't had any problems either. Ran a 5 series for a bit but switched ESO back to the 3090 24GB machine. Really no issues on the 3090 24, except when everyone else is crashing, so am I lol. Game looks awesome, every setting on ultra, rock solid.

Unfadingsilence · October 12

Northwold wrote: »

Beyond the resolution I'm not understanding why this would give anyone an advantage (unless they had eg a deeply problematic internet connection before). ESO simply isn't performance-intensive enough client side for a switch from anything but the worst performing PC to make any difference to things like lag, which is server related. I occasionally play on 4k and it's great to see chests etc miles and miles away (and that genuinely is game changing, especially on a very big screen), but beyond that I've not found having a decent pc makes a great deal of difference. Indeed, historically in battles on the rare occasions I've done PvP I've found doing things very, very fast then results in a crash / getting out of sync because of what's (not) happening server side.

There's huge differences when it comes down to performance on what you're actually running.So I'll give you an example.My old setup, I had a gaming laptop that was extremely old "2020" gaming laptop my old CPU was Intel Core i5-9300H (4 cores / 8 threads, 2.4–4.1 GHz) my new one is AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (8 cores / 16 threads, 3D V-Cache ~5.0 GHz) making the game run ~3× faster in games, much larger cache = smoother frames, zero stutter

My GPU was NVIDIA GTX 1050 (4 GB VRAM, ~2 TFLOPs) and my new one NVIDIA RTX 5090 (~32–40 GB VRAM, > 100 TFLOPs est.) Making it ~40–50× more raw power, supports full ray tracing & DLSS 4

My old RAM was 16 GB DDR4 (2400 MHz) and my new RAM 128 GB DDR5 (6000 MHz) making it able to be 8× capacity, 2.5× speed, huge multitasking / future-proofing

My old gaming laptop has DX 12 (Basic) and this new setup has DX 12 Ultimate making it able to have Full ray tracing, mesh shaders, DLSS, frame generation

Giving it a full 2,000–3,000 % increase in performance

And what people don't understand is ESO is heavily CPU-bound in crowded zones (like Cyrodiil, trials, or high-traffic hubs).
That means:

The game engine leans on the CPU more than the GPU.

Weaker CPUs or older ones (like my old i5-9300H) get bottlenecked when the game has to process hundreds of players’ actions simultaneously.

So when there’s lag or frame drops, it’s often not network lag, but your client choking on all that data.
Your PC is trying to draw hundreds of spells, animations, and models every second.

So there are those times where people talk about.Maybe it's your own setup.That's the issue, it might be correct

zaria · October 12

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

So for the last few weeks, I have been playing on my new PC....
CPU
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
GPU GeForce RTX 5090
MEMORY
128GB DDR5
STORAGE
8TB SSD
For all of my nerds out there and I honestly have to say inside PvP during prime time its truly amazing and almost feels like cheating at this point. Does anyone else actually play on a high end gaming PC and how do you feel about it? Should they actually limit how much someone can or cant use when it comes down to their own system and what is acceptable?

Now that is quite an monster, and yes it's make quite an difference then system get stressed, with my very old graphic card I got lag in trials but with an 4070ti problem is solved.

What was your previous system? I had quite a good system, only the gpu was old, upgraded with covid grant from office because home office and did not upgrade the gpu, did that later.

zaria · October 12

Northwold wrote: »

Beyond the resolution I'm not understanding why this would give anyone an advantage (unless they had eg a deeply problematic internet connection before). ESO simply isn't performance-intensive enough client side for a switch from anything but the worst performing PC to make any difference to things like lag, which is server related. I occasionally play on 4k and it's great to see chests etc miles and miles away (and that genuinely is game changing, especially on a very big screen), but beyond that I've not found having a decent pc makes a great deal of difference. Indeed, historically in battles on the rare occasions I've done PvP I've found doing things very, very fast then results in a crash / getting out of sync because of what's (not) happening server side.

You hear lots of people complaining, lots of bad hardware around, also ESO demand much more now than at launch.
Easy fix would be separate graphic settings for PvP and trials, and an test cell for it with lots of effects and npc running around for configuring it easy. But people has issues in busy towns and during event.

So yes *** hardware and cranking setting up to max during the tutorial.
But yes you also have network lag, but don't think server lag is much of an problem anymore.

Unfadingsilence · October 12

zaria wrote: »

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

So for the last few weeks, I have been playing on my new PC....
CPU
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
GPU GeForce RTX 5090
MEMORY
128GB DDR5
STORAGE
8TB SSD
For all of my nerds out there and I honestly have to say inside PvP during prime time its truly amazing and almost feels like cheating at this point. Does anyone else actually play on a high end gaming PC and how do you feel about it? Should they actually limit how much someone can or cant use when it comes down to their own system and what is acceptable?

Now that is quite an monster, and yes it's make quite an difference then system get stressed, with my very old graphic card I got lag in trials but with an 4070ti problem is solved.

What was your previous system? I had quite a good system, only the gpu was old, upgraded with covid grant from office because home office and did not upgrade the gpu, did that later.

Just a few posts above, I posted my old specs compared to my new specs like this is outrageous in pvp during prime time no lag at all everything is smooth

Unfadingsilence · October 25

Giving a little update... i've had the new PC for over a month i have not crashed and I have not seen a single lag spike in PvE or PvP during prime time at all and that counts for both the NA server and EU server!!!! New PC for the win!!! Now, I truly believe that anyone that says anything about lag during prime time. It is definitely their own setup without a doubt

spartaxoxo · October 25

I felt a huge difference when I swapped from PS4 to PS5 too. Some of the performance issues in this game definitely stems from them allowing people with older hardware to play. But it's not everything. They definitely find plenty of issues on their own end which is why they've been doing the tests that they've been doing.

CAB_Life · October 25

Plays like a dream on GeForce now too. And you never have to worry about upgrading/ grandfathering your PC. They do need to fix the lack of addon issue though.

Sailor_Palutena · October 25

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

Beyond the resolution I'm not understanding why this would give anyone an advantage (unless they had eg a deeply problematic internet connection before). ESO simply isn't performance-intensive enough client side for a switch from anything but the worst performing PC to make any difference to things like lag, which is server related. I occasionally play on 4k and it's great to see chests etc miles and miles away (and that genuinely is game changing, especially on a very big screen), but beyond that I've not found having a decent pc makes a great deal of difference. Indeed, historically in battles on the rare occasions I've done PvP I've found doing things very, very fast then results in a crash / getting out of sync because of what's (not) happening server side.

There's huge differences when it comes down to performance on what you're actually running.So I'll give you an example.My old setup, I had a gaming laptop that was extremely old "2020" gaming laptop my old CPU was Intel Core i5-9300H (4 cores / 8 threads, 2.4–4.1 GHz) my new one is AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (8 cores / 16 threads, 3D V-Cache ~5.0 GHz) making the game run ~3× faster in games, much larger cache = smoother frames, zero stutter

My GPU was NVIDIA GTX 1050 (4 GB VRAM, ~2 TFLOPs) and my new one NVIDIA RTX 5090 (~32–40 GB VRAM, > 100 TFLOPs est.) Making it ~40–50× more raw power, supports full ray tracing & DLSS 4

My old RAM was 16 GB DDR4 (2400 MHz) and my new RAM 128 GB DDR5 (6000 MHz) making it able to be 8× capacity, 2.5× speed, huge multitasking / future-proofing

My old gaming laptop has DX 12 (Basic) and this new setup has DX 12 Ultimate making it able to have Full ray tracing, mesh shaders, DLSS, frame generation

Giving it a full 2,000–3,000 % increase in performance
And what people don't understand is ESO is heavily CPU-bound in crowded zones (like Cyrodiil, trials, or high-traffic hubs).
That means:

The game engine leans on the CPU more than the GPU.
Weaker CPUs or older ones (like my old i5-9300H) get bottlenecked when the game has to process hundreds of players’ actions simultaneously.
So when there’s lag or frame drops, it’s often not network lag, but your client choking on all that data.
Your PC is trying to draw hundreds of spells, animations, and models every second.
So there are those times where people talk about.Maybe it's your own setup.That's the issue, it might be correct.

My CPU is a i7 6700K

I have 32GB of RAM and a RTX4060ti, whenever I approach any place with people, the more the badder. Full of stuttering, low FPS no matter what resolution. Your post clarified it all. ESO hates my old CPU. It has been there since before Geforce was in the 1000 series... What a disrespect to veteran CPU warriors.

YstradClud · October 25

I just upgraded to 2T SSD so I didn't have to keep reinstalling every time I wanted to switch mmorpgs (I play three), but it doesn't really make any difference what my specs PC are. Because ESO is the only one I play that is on a megaserver with high ping for me. I don't do trials or pvp in this game, just a casual who likes taking screenshots.

Unfadingsilence · October 25

Sailor_Palutena wrote: »

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

Beyond the resolution I'm not understanding why this would give anyone an advantage (unless they had eg a deeply problematic internet connection before). ESO simply isn't performance-intensive enough client side for a switch from anything but the worst performing PC to make any difference to things like lag, which is server related. I occasionally play on 4k and it's great to see chests etc miles and miles away (and that genuinely is game changing, especially on a very big screen), but beyond that I've not found having a decent pc makes a great deal of difference. Indeed, historically in battles on the rare occasions I've done PvP I've found doing things very, very fast then results in a crash / getting out of sync because of what's (not) happening server side.

There's huge differences when it comes down to performance on what you're actually running.So I'll give you an example.My old setup, I had a gaming laptop that was extremely old "2020" gaming laptop my old CPU was Intel Core i5-9300H (4 cores / 8 threads, 2.4–4.1 GHz) my new one is AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (8 cores / 16 threads, 3D V-Cache ~5.0 GHz) making the game run ~3× faster in games, much larger cache = smoother frames, zero stutter

My GPU was NVIDIA GTX 1050 (4 GB VRAM, ~2 TFLOPs) and my new one NVIDIA RTX 5090 (~32–40 GB VRAM, > 100 TFLOPs est.) Making it ~40–50× more raw power, supports full ray tracing & DLSS 4

My old RAM was 16 GB DDR4 (2400 MHz) and my new RAM 128 GB DDR5 (6000 MHz) making it able to be 8× capacity, 2.5× speed, huge multitasking / future-proofing

My old gaming laptop has DX 12 (Basic) and this new setup has DX 12 Ultimate making it able to have Full ray tracing, mesh shaders, DLSS, frame generation

Giving it a full 2,000–3,000 % increase in performance
And what people don't understand is ESO is heavily CPU-bound in crowded zones (like Cyrodiil, trials, or high-traffic hubs).
That means:

The game engine leans on the CPU more than the GPU.
Weaker CPUs or older ones (like my old i5-9300H) get bottlenecked when the game has to process hundreds of players’ actions simultaneously.
So when there’s lag or frame drops, it’s often not network lag, but your client choking on all that data.
Your PC is trying to draw hundreds of spells, animations, and models every second.
So there are those times where people talk about.Maybe it's your own setup.That's the issue, it might be correct.

My CPU is a i7 6700K

I have 32GB of RAM and a RTX4060ti, whenever I approach any place with people, the more the badder. Full of stuttering, low FPS no matter what resolution. Your post clarified it all. ESO hates my old CPU. It has been there since before Geforce was in the 1000 series... What a disrespect to veteran CPU warriors.

Yeah, that actually makes total sense — ESO today is way more CPU-demanding than it used to be, especially in heavy areas like Cyrodiil or big towns.

Your i7-6700K was a beast back in its day, but it’s an 8-year-old architecture now. It only has 4 cores and 8 threads, and ESO’s engine heavily depends on strong single-core performance and fast memory.

The newer CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7700X or Intel’s 13th/14th gen chips have double the cores and much faster IPC (instructions per clock), so they can feed your GPU the data it needs instead of bottlenecking it.

That’s why your RTX 4060 Ti isn’t really the problem — your CPU just can’t keep up anymore. ESO’s engine simply chokes when there are too many players or NPCs to process.

When I upgraded to a newer setup, the difference was night and day — smoother frames, almost no stutter, and the world just loads instantly. It really shows how far hardware has come since the 6700K era.

Unfadingsilence · October 25

YstradClud wrote: »

I just upgraded to 2T SSD so I didn't have to keep reinstalling every time I wanted to switch mmorpgs (I play three), but it doesn't really make any difference what my specs PC are. Because ESO is the only one I play that is on a megaserver with high ping for me. I don't do trials or pvp in this game, just a casual who likes taking screenshots.

I love some good screen shots

ArchMikem · October 25

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

So for the last few weeks, I have been playing on my new PC....
CPU
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
GPU GeForce RTX 5090
MEMORY
128GB DDR5
STORAGE
8TB SSD

So you dropped a couple grand to play a game originally developed over a decade ago and came to the conclusion every problem is just other people's hardware. You bolted a brand new jet engine onto a prop plane and are amazed how much faster it goes.

wolfie1.0. · October 25

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

Sailor_Palutena wrote: »

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

Beyond the resolution I'm not understanding why this would give anyone an advantage (unless they had eg a deeply problematic internet connection before). ESO simply isn't performance-intensive enough client side for a switch from anything but the worst performing PC to make any difference to things like lag, which is server related. I occasionally play on 4k and it's great to see chests etc miles and miles away (and that genuinely is game changing, especially on a very big screen), but beyond that I've not found having a decent pc makes a great deal of difference. Indeed, historically in battles on the rare occasions I've done PvP I've found doing things very, very fast then results in a crash / getting out of sync because of what's (not) happening server side.

There's huge differences when it comes down to performance on what you're actually running.So I'll give you an example.My old setup, I had a gaming laptop that was extremely old "2020" gaming laptop my old CPU was Intel Core i5-9300H (4 cores / 8 threads, 2.4–4.1 GHz) my new one is AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (8 cores / 16 threads, 3D V-Cache ~5.0 GHz) making the game run ~3× faster in games, much larger cache = smoother frames, zero stutter

My GPU was NVIDIA GTX 1050 (4 GB VRAM, ~2 TFLOPs) and my new one NVIDIA RTX 5090 (~32–40 GB VRAM, > 100 TFLOPs est.) Making it ~40–50× more raw power, supports full ray tracing & DLSS 4

My old RAM was 16 GB DDR4 (2400 MHz) and my new RAM 128 GB DDR5 (6000 MHz) making it able to be 8× capacity, 2.5× speed, huge multitasking / future-proofing

My old gaming laptop has DX 12 (Basic) and this new setup has DX 12 Ultimate making it able to have Full ray tracing, mesh shaders, DLSS, frame generation

Giving it a full 2,000–3,000 % increase in performance
And what people don't understand is ESO is heavily CPU-bound in crowded zones (like Cyrodiil, trials, or high-traffic hubs).
That means:

The game engine leans on the CPU more than the GPU.
Weaker CPUs or older ones (like my old i5-9300H) get bottlenecked when the game has to process hundreds of players’ actions simultaneously.
So when there’s lag or frame drops, it’s often not network lag, but your client choking on all that data.
Your PC is trying to draw hundreds of spells, animations, and models every second.
So there are those times where people talk about.Maybe it's your own setup.That's the issue, it might be correct.

My CPU is a i7 6700K

I have 32GB of RAM and a RTX4060ti, whenever I approach any place with people, the more the badder. Full of stuttering, low FPS no matter what resolution. Your post clarified it all. ESO hates my old CPU. It has been there since before Geforce was in the 1000 series... What a disrespect to veteran CPU warriors.

Yeah, that actually makes total sense — ESO today is way more CPU-demanding than it used to be, especially in heavy areas like Cyrodiil or big towns.

Your i7-6700K was a beast back in its day, but it’s an 8-year-old architecture now. It only has 4 cores and 8 threads, and ESO’s engine heavily depends on strong single-core performance and fast memory.

The newer CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7700X or Intel’s 13th/14th gen chips have double the cores and much faster IPC (instructions per clock), so they can feed your GPU the data it needs instead of bottlenecking it.

That’s why your RTX 4060 Ti isn’t really the problem — your CPU just can’t keep up anymore. ESO’s engine simply chokes when there are too many players or NPCs to process.

When I upgraded to a newer setup, the difference was night and day — smoother frames, almost no stutter, and the world just loads instantly. It really shows how far hardware has come since the 6700K era.

Its not always hardware settings sometimes its other factors.

My main build is:
Ryzen 9800x3D
64 GB RAM
4080 super
Storage doesnt really matter other than its an SSD and it can fit the game.

Secondaries:
2x legion LOQ laptops
Amd ryzen 7 7 7435hs
4060
32GB RAM

And a Steam Deck.

I get the best graphics on the desktop. I get better performance on the laptops and best mobility on the steam deck.

Biggest performance loss is addon related. My biggest bottleneck? The fact that my isp options stink.

Unfadingsilence · October 26

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

Sailor_Palutena wrote: »

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

Beyond the resolution I'm not understanding why this would give anyone an advantage (unless they had eg a deeply problematic internet connection before). ESO simply isn't performance-intensive enough client side for a switch from anything but the worst performing PC to make any difference to things like lag, which is server related. I occasionally play on 4k and it's great to see chests etc miles and miles away (and that genuinely is game changing, especially on a very big screen), but beyond that I've not found having a decent pc makes a great deal of difference. Indeed, historically in battles on the rare occasions I've done PvP I've found doing things very, very fast then results in a crash / getting out of sync because of what's (not) happening server side.

There's huge differences when it comes down to performance on what you're actually running.So I'll give you an example.My old setup, I had a gaming laptop that was extremely old "2020" gaming laptop my old CPU was Intel Core i5-9300H (4 cores / 8 threads, 2.4–4.1 GHz) my new one is AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (8 cores / 16 threads, 3D V-Cache ~5.0 GHz) making the game run ~3× faster in games, much larger cache = smoother frames, zero stutter

My GPU was NVIDIA GTX 1050 (4 GB VRAM, ~2 TFLOPs) and my new one NVIDIA RTX 5090 (~32–40 GB VRAM, > 100 TFLOPs est.) Making it ~40–50× more raw power, supports full ray tracing & DLSS 4

My old RAM was 16 GB DDR4 (2400 MHz) and my new RAM 128 GB DDR5 (6000 MHz) making it able to be 8× capacity, 2.5× speed, huge multitasking / future-proofing

My old gaming laptop has DX 12 (Basic) and this new setup has DX 12 Ultimate making it able to have Full ray tracing, mesh shaders, DLSS, frame generation

Giving it a full 2,000–3,000 % increase in performance
And what people don't understand is ESO is heavily CPU-bound in crowded zones (like Cyrodiil, trials, or high-traffic hubs).
That means:

The game engine leans on the CPU more than the GPU.
Weaker CPUs or older ones (like my old i5-9300H) get bottlenecked when the game has to process hundreds of players’ actions simultaneously.
So when there’s lag or frame drops, it’s often not network lag, but your client choking on all that data.
Your PC is trying to draw hundreds of spells, animations, and models every second.
So there are those times where people talk about.Maybe it's your own setup.That's the issue, it might be correct.

My CPU is a i7 6700K

I have 32GB of RAM and a RTX4060ti, whenever I approach any place with people, the more the badder. Full of stuttering, low FPS no matter what resolution. Your post clarified it all. ESO hates my old CPU. It has been there since before Geforce was in the 1000 series... What a disrespect to veteran CPU warriors.

Yeah, that actually makes total sense — ESO today is way more CPU-demanding than it used to be, especially in heavy areas like Cyrodiil or big towns.

Your i7-6700K was a beast back in its day, but it’s an 8-year-old architecture now. It only has 4 cores and 8 threads, and ESO’s engine heavily depends on strong single-core performance and fast memory.

The newer CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7700X or Intel’s 13th/14th gen chips have double the cores and much faster IPC (instructions per clock), so they can feed your GPU the data it needs instead of bottlenecking it.

That’s why your RTX 4060 Ti isn’t really the problem — your CPU just can’t keep up anymore. ESO’s engine simply chokes when there are too many players or NPCs to process.

When I upgraded to a newer setup, the difference was night and day — smoother frames, almost no stutter, and the world just loads instantly. It really shows how far hardware has come since the 6700K era.

Its not always hardware settings sometimes its other factors.

My main build is:
Ryzen 9800x3D
64 GB RAM
4080 super
Storage doesnt really matter other than its an SSD and it can fit the game.

Secondaries:
2x legion LOQ laptops
Amd ryzen 7 7 7435hs
4060
32GB RAM

And a Steam Deck.

I get the best graphics on the desktop. I get better performance on the laptops and best mobility on the steam deck.

Biggest performance loss is addon related. My biggest bottleneck? The fact that my isp options stink.

ESO’s engine is still very single-thread sensitive, but once you remove the CPU bottleneck and memory latency issues, it runs incredibly stable. At that point, the biggest limiter becomes the network layer — packet loss or jitter from your ISP can create the illusion of stutter even when the hardware is performing flawlessly.

Addons can compound the issue too, since every script call adds CPU overhead to an already busy main thread. So yeah, even with strong hardware, optimizing addon loadouts and keeping a low-latency connection are just as critical as raw specs.

It’s interesting though — after upgrading, I’m seeing consistent frame pacing and almost zero CPU saturation even in full campaigns. ESO really does scale beautifully once the system isn’t being choked by older silicon or slow DDR4.

Unfadingsilence · October 26

ArchMikem wrote: »

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

So for the last few weeks, I have been playing on my new PC....
CPU
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
GPU GeForce RTX 5090
MEMORY
128GB DDR5
STORAGE
8TB SSD

So you dropped a couple grand to play a game originally developed over a decade ago and came to the conclusion every problem is just other people's hardware. You bolted a brand new jet engine onto a prop plane and are amazed how much faster it goes.

I get where you’re coming from — ESO’s engine is ancient by today’s standards, but that’s exactly why the upgrade made such a dramatic difference. The 9800X3D’s 3D V-Cache architecture drastically reduces frame-time variance by keeping draw-call data in cache instead of round-tripping to memory.

The 5090’s overkill, sure, but the real win is how the CPU’s latency and memory subsystem finally let the GPU run at full utilization without stalling on render instructions. ESO still doesn’t scale perfectly across cores, but it’s amazing how much the 3D V-Cache architecture cleans up the main thread.

So yeah — definitely a jet engine on an old frame, but at least now the turbulence is gone.

Stamicka · October 26

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

Giving a little update... i've had the new PC for over a month i have not crashed and I have not seen a single lag spike in PvE or PvP during prime time at all and that counts for both the NA server and EU server!!!! New PC for the win!!! Now, I truly believe that anyone that says anything about lag during prime time. It is definitely their own setup without a doubt

This is so ridiculous and reductive. Your hardware doesn’t do anything about server side issues. ZOS themselves acknowledges that there’s serious server side issues and they’ve been trying to fix them for years.

How are you claiming that your hardware completely got rid of PvP lag when so many of the calculations going on in PvP aren’t even happening on your PC? Nothing has changed, the servers are still going to be overwhelmed and then your abilities might be delayed when you try to cast them if they even go off at all. Only ZOS can fix that.

And please don’t respond with more AI generated content about how the hardware works.

Unfadingsilence · October 26

Stamicka wrote: »

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

Giving a little update... i've had the new PC for over a month i have not crashed and I have not seen a single lag spike in PvE or PvP during prime time at all and that counts for both the NA server and EU server!!!! New PC for the win!!! Now, I truly believe that anyone that says anything about lag during prime time. It is definitely their own setup without a doubt

This is so ridiculous and reductive. Your hardware doesn’t do anything about server side issues. ZOS themselves acknowledges that there’s serious server side issues and they’ve been trying to fix them for years.

How are you claiming that your hardware completely got rid of PvP lag when so many of the calculations going on in PvP aren’t even happening on your PC? Nothing has changed, the servers are still going to be overwhelmed and then your abilities might be delayed when you try to cast them if they even go off at all. Only ZOS can fix that.

And please don’t respond with more AI generated content about how the hardware works.

the server lag in PvP isn’t going anywhere until ZOS overhauls their backend. I’m not saying my hardware fixed that.

What I meant is that the client-side part — the frame dips, stutter, and inconsistent frame pacing — basically disappeared after upgrading. The 9800X3D’s cache keeps the game’s CPU workload stable even when the server is struggling.

So yeah, ability delay is still a ZOS problem, but at least my system isn’t adding its own lag on top of that anymore.

And who is responding using AI generated content lol if you don't understand how hardware works then you can just ask because yes I no longer experience lag

Stridig · October 26

I've had very few issues since building a new PC. ESO hated my i7 but with an i9, PvP has been awesome.

Unfadingsilence · October 26

Stamicka wrote: »

Unfadingsilence wrote: »

Giving a little update... i've had the new PC for over a month i have not crashed and I have not seen a single lag spike in PvE or PvP during prime time at all and that counts for both the NA server and EU server!!!! New PC for the win!!! Now, I truly believe that anyone that says anything about lag during prime time. It is definitely their own setup without a doubt

This is so ridiculous and reductive. Your hardware doesn’t do anything about server side issues. ZOS themselves acknowledges that there’s serious server side issues and they’ve been trying to fix them for years.

How are you claiming that your hardware completely got rid of PvP lag when so many of the calculations going on in PvP aren’t even happening on your PC? Nothing has changed, the servers are still going to be overwhelmed and then your abilities might be delayed when you try to cast them if they even go off at all. Only ZOS can fix that.

And please don’t respond with more AI generated content about how the hardware works.

That’s where CPU bottlenecking comes in.
A bottleneck happens when one part of your system — usually the CPU in MMOs — can’t process data fast enough to keep the GPU fully fed with frames. The result is lower FPS, hitching, and frame pacing issues, even if your GPU is barely being used.

In ESO, especially in crowded areas like Cyrodiil or large towns, the CPU has to calculate everything happening around you — the positions, animations, and effects of hundreds of players and NPCs — before the GPU even draws the scene. If the CPU falls behind, your framerate tanks.

So yeah, once you fix your issue with CPU bottlenecking you will see a completely different game no lag even during prime time