ESO unplayable due to FPS issues on a high end PC

Issaro · August 2017

Hello ESO Community,

ever since HoR launched im not getting enough FPS anymore to play anymore. Whenever there is a lot of action on the screen my framerate drops below 10 fps which i consider unplayable. This includes pretty much all 4 player and above content.

I first thought it to be a driver issue however my drivers are up to date any other game runs fine (honestly its not hard to run smother than ESO ;-). Also keep in mind that my drivers didnt change that day, it was ESO that changed when the issue started.

To get deeper into the issue i ran 3 tests with 3 different graphical settings at the same in game location in game. As you can see the game roughly uses only 8% CPU in the task manager. I expect the difference to the process explorers value to be system calls and calls to drivers. In any case .. the question is why doesnt ESO use more of my PCs resources?

ZOS_Bill · August 2017

@Issaro We're sorry you are running into this frame rate problem. We see that you currently have a support ticket open, 170823-001746, where extensive troubleshooting has already been tried to fix this. You should be receiving another response from support soon as your issue had been escalated.

tommalmm · September 2017

I've just wanted to note that you're not the only one having some terrible fps on a decent rig with very low resources usage. What I'm getting is:

GPU1 usage: 18% @58*C (both gpus are gtx 970 asus strix OC)
GPU2 usage: 18% @55*C
GPU1/2 vmem: ~1.5GB (out of 4GB)
Memory usage: 4.0-5.5GB (out of 16GB)
CPU usage: ~20% (on a 4 core cpu, so not even a single core fully utilized it's core i5 @4.5GHz, running it at stock speeds doesn't seem to fix anything)
CPU Temp: ~40*C

FPS: anywhere between 15 and 40.

When I disable SLI, the usage stats are pretty much the same (single GPU), but the FPS drop is just much more severe.
I tried disabling all mods and it happens just as well. Reloadui usually fixes it for a short time (minutes to hours, it really varies), but eventually it comes back. Changing presets to low/minimum does have an impact, but it never goes above 60fps when this problem occurs)

Drivers/system up to date (win10 x64 using 64 bit game binary). Everything installed on an ssd drive. I'm not getting similar issues in any other games, even with both cards and cpu utilization near 100% for hours.

It's been happening for a while, but recently it started to annoy me so much more.

It usually happens during or after fights, sometimes zone changes trigger that. I can't really pin it down.

bigdeal15 · September 2017

I have also had this same issue since HoR. Wild FPS drops and stutter. i just play for short stretches and log out in frustration most days.

Azphira · September 2017

I get something similar, game runs bad while barely pushing the hardware, SLI causes fps bleed, 1 card is not enough for 4k, so I just just stick to games with proper sli scaling and don't buy crowns, buy plus or play until nVidia's next $1200 card comes out in 2018.

Kronuxx · September 2017

So I'm not the only one then getting FPS drops. I have a very powerful rig (5930K oc'd to 4.5 ghz stable using aida64, with r9 390) and I still get FPS drops. No, I'm not talking about latency or ping spikes, which I do get and I know the difference. I literally get FPS drops to 10, almost every play session. I have to close out of the game and reload. I never had this issue before pre-Morrowind.

Ajintse · September 2017

Try to decrease your view distance. Set it around 30-40. And all those particles turn it all the way down. Use Ultra settings and run game on Full Screen. Turn off V-Sync. Or Turn on, and set it by NVIDIA pannel the V-Sync on Fast if you have 120+ Hz monitor. Or Adaptive for 60Hz.

Edit your UserSettings.ini to unlock the FPS from 100 to 144, also we make some changes to improve performance a little.

Navigate to Documents/Elder Scrolls Online/live/
Open the UserSettings.txt file (notepad, wordpad, etc)

Edit all these settings:
SET MinFrameTime.2 "0.00694444
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "0" I have set this to 4, it's much smoother for me for some reason*.
SET High_resolution_shadows "0"
SET GPU_SmoothingFrames "0"
SET MIP_LOAD_SKIP_LEVELS "-1"
SET MULTI_GPU_CHECK "0" <- Do this only if you have 1 GPU.

And also, you can use Park Control from Bitsum. This parks your cores in order to gain performance with some calculatings. I do not use this anymore because my i7-7700k do not need it.

If NONE above tweaks improve your performance, please run some checks for your Network. (Latency, packet loss, etc.)

+ If your CPU and GPU use more, it means they are running on max. Try to find out if your PC is set to Maximum Performance in Configuration Panel. And, I had to overclock my GPU (GTX 1080) to 2.2Ghz and set Maximum Voltage and Power to MAX.
On older GPU's you can FORCE the power (Core) to run at a desired speed. On pascal GPU's (new) we are not allowed to edit the bios.

Juhasow · September 2017

On lower spec computers game is unplayable atm.

Rohamad_Ali · September 2017

Same here . I hope ZoS puts that performance improvement patch through before clockwork city . I'm loging in less now because of this .

sadownik · September 2017

Looks like memory leak to me from descriptions.

Dottzgaming · September 2017

anyone ever resolve this issue?

jjjozo · September 2017

i think this problem cant be solved until they at least change games core usage distribution... as we know, this game utilize mostly only 1 core (thats why you see overall low usage of CPU, try to check utilization per core) and as we know in MMO your game client getting tons of information from all players and everything around... these two things just cant go together... they are experts on creating tons of new content, but performance going down

i tried so many game and windows optimization things, i read hundreds of different forum posts all over internet, you just cant solve that with anything real, its a game, not your PC... only thing you can do is make one-core processor with 40000MHz speed and crazy motherboard which will run that beast

Brumme · September 2017

It must be you..

i have a 5 year old pc with a hd radeon 7990 card , im running at 100 fps, (90 in a city )
only thing i know that really cant mess up fps is master merchant add on

my old pc, is this crap can do 100 fps, yours can too
Mobo
ASUS Maximus VI Extreme

Cpu
CPU Intel Core i7-4770K

GPU
ASUS Radeon HD 7990 6GB GDDR5

Ram
DDR3 16GB PC 1866 CL9 G.Skill RipjawsX (4x4)

Main disk
Samsung SSD - 256GB

Slave disk
WD VelociRaptor 600 GB

power supply
XFX ProSeries P1-850B-BEFX - Black Edition

dvd/blueray
ASUS BW-16D1HT 16x2x12x, Serial ATA

Kabinet
Cooler Master HAF X

water cooling
Swiftech H320 Kit

Microsoft Windows 7 Prof. 64-bit SP1 DK <----better than win 10 crap hehe