ESO Frame Rate Drops with High-End PC

[x1HxTakeNotez]

I just recently have gotten into gaming on PC so be gentle, I know some, but not all. My PCs specs are GTX 1070, 16gb RAM and I7 processor. I'm also using a 144hz QHD monitor with G-Sync. Every game I've tried playing on it so far all have been able to play at all max settings.

Ok, now with all that out of the way, to my ESO question. I just picked this game up yesterday and is my 1st MMO. I set all graphics to max, ultra, 100% everything and even set resolution higher than my monitor can handle, because it still will give some better resolution(I've been told). All day yesterday and most of today, the game fluctuated between 90 to 100 FPS. This afternoon, I started to get all sorts of frame rate drops to as low as 25 and it kept doing this for about 30 minutes, so I ended up getting off and playing another game.

I did some research online on multiple forums and talked to a few long time PC user friends of mine and what I'm hearing is this is normal for ESO and even MMOs in general. I get that running everything at max and also multiple other players in the same area doing their own things can put stress on my frames, but is this common? Will this happen all the time I'm near a few other players? Where is this most common at? What can I do to relieve some of the stress on my system or is it best to just leave everything alone and accept it will happen? I know Anti aliasing, shadows, render distance and water reflection help relieve pressure on a graphics card, but earlier when I was getting these frame rate drops, I turned all these off and the frames were still in the 40s. Any advice or help would be appreciated.

[DJ_Lae]

I have nearly identical specs (7700K, 16GB RAM, 1070) and that 90-100fps sounds about right at 1440p, with it much higher in smaller, solo instances. It does take a pretty large hit when there are a lot of people around, and large cities are the worst with the game dipping to the 40s at times. However, I've never noticed the performance lower than that, especially for a prolonged period of time.

I find the performance in Summerset itself to be worse than any other area, too, which I chalk up to the population on there as well as what seems to be a higher level of detail. I don't think you should be seeing quite the dips that you are, though.

[Yakuza]

Try disabling vsync altogether and the restricting framerate to your desired target. I have 60hz screen so I use 60 fps limit. For some reason I'm able to run it 60 fps all the time unless it's a place with lot of other players. The jitter is related to network as well just like in World of Warcraft where lot of players in same area will bring the framerate down no matter what kind of setup it's running on. There are few places in which I will get jitter and it starts to dump towards 50s. For me disabling vsync altogether and forcing 'fast' vsync from nvidia panel did work well. I have similar machine but with GTX 1080 and 32 gigs memory.

[Psyringe]

MMOs are as varied as any other genre - some can give a high-end PC quite a workout, others run fine on a potato. ESO _does_ put stress on your machine, especially at max settings, but I wouldn't expect the effect to be as severe as you describe.

I would suggest to install MSI Afterburner and check GPU temperature, CPU temperature, GPU workload, CPU workload, RAM usage, and VRAM usage when the effect occurs. That should cover the most common causes for large FPS drops.

Also make sure that your machine isn't doing anything work-intensive in the background (Windows downloading and installing updates, Steam downloading huge updates for other games, Antivirus scanning your hard drive, an automated task defragmenting your drive, etc.). Those tasks shouldn't directly influence FPS, but with a game that has to transfer lots of data during play, they can have a noticable effect.

[x1HxTakeNotez]

Originally posted by Hideo:

Try disabling vsync altogether and the restricting framerate to your desired target. I have 60hz screen so I use 60 fps limit. For some reason I'm able to run it 60 fps all the time unless it's a place with lot of other players. The jitter is related to network as well just like in World of Warcraft where lot of players in same area will bring the framerate down no matter what kind of setup it's running on. There are few places in which I will get jitter and it starts to dump towards 50s. For me disabling vsync altogether and forcing 'fast' vsync from nvidia panel did work well. I have similar machine but with GTX 1080 and 32 gigs memory.

How do you lock frame rates in ESO? I could never find this option.

[x1HxTakeNotez]

Originally posted by DJ_Lae:

I have nearly identical specs (7700K, 16GB RAM, 1070) and that 90-100fps sounds about right at 1440p, with it much higher in smaller, solo instances. It does take a pretty large hit when there are a lot of people around, and large cities are the worst with the game dipping to the 40s at times. However, I've never noticed the performance lower than that, especially for a prolonged period of time.

I find the performance in Summerset itself to be worse than any other area, too, which I chalk up to the population on there as well as what seems to be a higher level of detail. I don't think you should be seeing quite the dips that you are, though.

One good thing to note is I played ESO again this morning in the same area where I was getting those terrible FRs and everything was perfect again. Back to the 90s. Idk if playing to long can build up memory problems or if it was just a population problem. If it's the latter, I guess I'm going to hate going to markets in this game.

[philhinton71]

I did notice yesterday (Sunday) there was some stuttering and FPS drops, I run a 1080 on a ultrawide 3440 monitor and get basically 100fps (monitors only 100mhz) but yesterday I did get quite a few stutters and fps droping to 50fps or so. It seemed if it was server side as opposed to lots of people in the area.