A Performance Oddity ...

Gabriel_H · April 11

I get what I am about to show isn't the biggest thing in the world, but it's an oddity I think needs a little looking into. So, long story short: Got myself some hardware upgrades. I have been monitoring performance to see if I need to tune it differently for Overland, Trials and Cyro - during my little logging sessions I stumbled upon this oddity. Green numbers on the right are the salient part.

Me, stood outside the Prime Cataloger World Boss facing away:

Me, stood looking into the Prime Cataloger Boss Area, up at the seekers:

Me, in Kvatch Arena, with 20+ players, 6 combat pets, all firing skills at the same time:

Me, stood outside the Prime Cataloger World Boss, looking directly across the area, with no fight happening:

That last one isn't an aberration. I stood there for 5 minutes, multiple times, and got the same results. That seems a little odd, right?!

YandereGirlfriend · April 11

You have a cap of 72 FPS set?

I think that it is probably fairly explicable. Old zones like Kvatch have much more basic geometry and textures whereas the opposite is true for newer zones. The biggest comparison would probably be the Apocrypha sky shot versus the final shot since it is in the same zone just with a different camera angle.

Do you have CPU Occlusion Culling enabled? If not, your GPU might be rendering all of the obscured geometry in the background that you cannot even see. The scene is fairly complicated, so that extra work could account for the added load.

Sluggy · April 11

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

You have a cap of 72 FPS set?

I think that it is probably fairly explicable. Old zones like Kvatch have much more basic geometry and textures whereas the opposite is true for newer zones. The biggest comparison would probably be the Apocrypha sky shot versus the final shot since it is in the same zone just with a different camera angle.

Do you have CPU Occlusion Culling enabled? If not, your GPU might be rendering all of the obscured geometry in the background that you cannot even see. The scene is fairly complicated, so that extra work could account for the added load.

Yep.

I also think that combat will likely cause the most performance issues simply because of all the state changes needed for simulating and rendering effects. More textures need displaying which on older renderers usually requires more state changes on the GPU. Some of them might also need to use real transparency rather than screen-door dithering which can have a significant impact in a deferred renderer like what ESO uses.

Marto · April 11

We'll also need to know your settings.

Are you using LSAO or Screen Space Global Illumination? SSGI in particular is very poorly optimized, and should only be used for taking screenshots unless you have a pretty beefy GPU. Which is fine, because LSAO is the same technology and looks 90% as good, with half the performance cost.

Gabriel_H · April 11

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

You have a cap of 72 FPS set?

I think that it is probably fairly explicable. Old zones like Kvatch have much more basic geometry and textures whereas the opposite is true for newer zones. The biggest comparison would probably be the Apocrypha sky shot versus the final shot since it is in the same zone just with a different camera angle.

Do you have CPU Occlusion Culling enabled? If not, your GPU might be rendering all of the obscured geometry in the background that you cannot even see. The scene is fairly complicated, so that extra work could account for the added load.

Yes, have a cap of 72 FPS. All other settings are at max, and software occlusion on or off doesn't alter the utliization % spike.

It just seems very odd that there is a load spike from ~65% to 100%. There isn't additional usage on VRAM either.

I've tried several settings, and the outcome is still the same - a massive spike in GPU usage when looking into that area. That includes being in the area for the boss fight.

It's like a Black Hole of performance and I'm left wondering if other such holes exist in the world of Tamriel.

Sluggy · April 11

Gabriel_H wrote: »

Yes, have a cap of 72 FPS. All other settings are at max, and software occlusion on or off doesn't alter the utliization % spike.

It just seems very odd that there is a load spike from ~65% to 100%. There isn't additional usage on VRAM either.

I mean, if you're hitting your target framerate, who really cares? I guess you could argue for power consumption or longevity of your hardware but as far as in-game performance goes you are clearly doing fine as is.

Gabriel_H wrote: »

It's like a Black Hole of performance and I'm left wondering if other such holes exist in the world of Tamriel.

As a PvPer, you of all people should know they do

The EP section of the Imperial Sewers is an absolute slideshow!

There used to be a lot of issues in Glenumbra as well. I made some small change to my settings as some point that mostly fixed it though. Can't recall what it was exactly. I think I just toned down the shadow resolution but I really don't remember.

EDIT: Formatting