Elder Scrolls: Online BETA First Thoughts

General Gameplay

Okay! I get to try out a bit of Elder Scrolls Online (ESO for short). So I just decided to screw around a little bit.

Test Rigs:
Desktop
Core i7 2600K OC 4.5GHz
Corsair H70
Corsair HX1000
GTX 780 GHz (Zotac GTX 780 AMP! Edition Card)
16GB RAM
Testing in 1920 x 1080 and 5760 x 1080.

Laptop - Clevo W110ER Aftershock X11 - for Image Comparison
Core i7 3630QM
GT 650M
8GB RAM
Testing in 1366 x 768 and 1920 x 1080

Now hardware requirements aren't particularly demanding, seeing that game engine in Skyrim looks very similar to ESO's. So theoretically, most mid-range hardware can run this hardware on pretty decent settings. My laptop is starting to show signs of being obsolete with the Clevo W230ST fulfilling the new role. Still the last generation smallest gaming laptop holds its own well and can handle the game within its native settings at 1366 x 768 at Full maximum quite fluently. Frame rates will vary depending on the location, whether indoors or out, big or small battles. But more primarily location as it seems to be. Big areas with lot of combat will drop frames to around 20. But it's not spiking too much so it's still somewhat fluent. To me these MMOs are perfectly acceptable at 25-28 fps. It would be best to turn off AA but oddly doesn't really improve performance all that much.

As of the update 5th-April-2014: Tom's Hardware have released their performance review of ESO. It also concurred that something as low end as an AMD R7 240 can handle at Medium at 1280 x 720 and up to the GTX 650 at 1920 x 1080. And then Notebookcheck has published their benchmark reviews on notebook GPUs required to play ESO. Links follow:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/the-elder-scrolls-online-performance,3789.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Elder-Scrolls-Online-Benchmarked.115100.0.html

Here's the screen quality as you tweak the settings:

1366 x 768 - Low Preset, AA is off by Default

1366 x 768 - Medium Preset,  Big difference, big difference. A GT 650M can handle this no problems.

1366 x 768 on High: Now Anti Aliasing turns on by default.

1366 x 768: Maximum Settings, it's still playable on a GT 650M,
with stutters every now and again. 

As I've already tested with 5760 x 1080, the game runs no problem in Surround on a single GTX 780. Running in excess of 60 fps with Surround completely maxed out means that running on a single 1920 x 1080 should be quite overkill. And the GTX 780 Ti that Tom's Hardware used in their reviews performs pretty much where it should be; seeing my Zotac GTX 780 is already heavily overclocked to perform around this performance. Frame rates will start to cap at around the 100 mark. You can even get away with the HD 4600 Graphics at Medium Settings at 1366 x 768.

CPU PERFORMANCE

It seems in general that Intel leads the Battle as shown in Tom's Hardware, with even the low end Dual-Core Quad Threaded Core i3-3220 slightly edging out the former FX 8XXX Flagship 8350 that. The performance hit becomes more obvious to the APUs. For that one Notebookcheck used a GTX 680 to completely remove the GPU limitation, and becomes quite a CPU Bottleneck.

PROBLEMS

There are 2 problems with 5760 x 1080 which is this:

Yeah, the dialogue screen is bloated. It wasn't like this when I tested on a single screen: that case was the Laptop. And if you have surround setup, it's near impossible to get 1920 x 1080 to work properly and get it on a single screen. What reducing to 1920 x 1080 does is reducing the pixel density across the screens. Skyrim had these problems when I tried playing at 5760 x 1080 when it comes to bloated UI and I'm surprised that this problem still exists in ESO but albeit when switching between 5760 x 1080 and 1920 x 1080.  So I hope Bethesda gets that patched up soon. So to compare I had to screenshot a window mode at 1920 x 1080. For now, there is no easy way to swap between 1920 x 1080 and 5760 x 1080 except turning off / on nVidia Surround completely when changing resolutions.

Speaking of 1920 x 1080, here's some comparing 16:9 1920 x 1080 to 48:9 surround 5760 x 1080.

1920 x 1080 - 16:9

5760 x 1080 - 48:9 Surround

1920 x 1080 - 16:9

5760 x 1080 - 48:9 Surround

Another optimization problem that Tom's Hardware found is that this game hasn't been optimized for Dual GPU cards quite yet. I would have done that but I don't have any Dual GPUs in my store. From their 5760 x 1080 Benchmark at full max, the Radeon 7990 and the GTX 690 seems to struggle quite a lot and its frame pacing shows.

General

One thing I seem to discover that loading times shrunk dramatically and the game responses a bit better when this game is installed on a SSD, which is also evident on Diablo III.

Aside from the display flaws, the game looks absolutely fantastic, especially once you get to the great outdoors. Even with Mid-ranged hardware on a single screen, the visuals are respectable. How you play this game is very similar to Skyrim. Now here's some shots all in nVidia Surround.