Bad Performance When I Probably Should Not Have

[Dusklite]

System is:

AMD Phenom II X4 945 @3GHz

AMD Radeon HD5770 1GB

4GB RAM

OS: Win7 64bit

I can't really play with other people for long since I find the low fps (down to below 20) frustrating. In Solo it's barely enough if the map isn't that big.

On everything maxed out, my system only utilizes about 1/3 of the resources available: ~1 GB RAM, CPU load while playing about 35% (up to 60+% on core 0, but never even close to maxing out - 15 - 35% on the other 3 cores) GPU load also about 35% and it's getting DOWN as I deactivate things like bloom, dyn. lighting, etc.

Vsync also has no impact on performance - sometimes I even think that I've got more fps with it on, but that might me my imagination.

Regardless of settings my performance stays about the same. I/O (hard drive) activity is pretty low throughout the map. Dx9 and Dx11 differences are superficial (Dx11 might be a bit slower), the 32bit executable runs slower as soon as there is activity.

Or more concise: performance is not dependant on settings AT ALL.

The problem is directly related to the ongoing action and the size of the map: defense missions with only one big room take 4 players and a lot of enemies to get me below 40 fps, whereas some solo missions on bigger maps crawl below that when the enemies are just starting to pour in.

I would've said it's CPU bound, but with the CPU load never reaching more than ~40%...

The system is up to date, I've tried with Catalyst 12.10, 13.1 and the 13.3 beta with no discernable difference. BIOS is as updated as it gets. I've also tried it on my alternate OS (XP 64 bit). Only difference was small loading freezes I haven't got on Win7.

My CPU and GPU are staying cool - much cooler than in games like Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3 or, very recent, Bioshock Infinite which all run pretty fine (45-60 fps at all times on medium to high settings).

Background processes do not seem to matter: I've tried without pretty much everything (even non-essential Windows services), I've tried the launcher from steam and the standalone version.

I don't have AMD Cool 'n' Quiet active, I don't use energy saving which interferes with gaming.

I haven't played Warframe on an earlier version than 7.5 - just for clarity.

I've just reinstalled my Win7, updated my essential stuff (just not my onboard sound drivers) and tested it again.

Sadly with the same results and that's why I'm posting here. ;)

DxDiag on pastebin:

http://pastebin.com/4BNHFtzN

To sum things up:

- bad performance

- settings do not matter

- getting worse with bigger maps, more players and more enemies

- system resources are not really used

- no discernable bottleneck

- no overclocking, no overheating

- drivers up to date

- also on different OS and on fresh install of same OS

P.S.: It's not just the low fps that I'm suffering from, but input lag when I've got low fps: Pistols don't fire when I click, reload or using powers is ignored sometimes... the worse the fps, the more often the game "misses" my input.

Edited April 1, 2013 by Dusklite

[Deathstrik3]

From my own experience a poor internet connection will actually cause framerate issues with this game which will in turn cause the input lag you described.

[Dusklite]

From my own experience a poor internet connection will actually cause framerate issues with this game which will in turn cause the input lag you described.

I'm on a 16MBit DSL connection. According to speedtest.net I'm actually getting 12MBit down and 1MBit up. Hosting for 4 players isn't really on my agenda, but surely over a megabyte of download speed should be enough for joining?

Also, I don't actually know what the client sends to the player database during maps when I play solo... I don't think that's lag-related.

Thanks for the answer though.

[Drainel]

100 percent agree with you : in single player no problem but when i play in multi i have so much lags it s unplayable

ps: internet connection is not the problem i use 100 mega

Edited April 1, 2013 by Drainel

[Senkojin]

i have the smae exact problem its so annoying i played this game a couple months ago and i could play multiplayer fine, but now i can play single player with max graphics settings and get no lag but once one to 3 more people join my match even the lowest graphics setting causes my screen to stutter i dont understand whats happening

[Yogotiss]

100 percent agree with you : in single player no problem but when i play in multi i have so much lags it s unplayable

ps: internet connection is not the problem i use 100 mega

Your 100mb connection doesn't matter if the host doesn't have enough to support. Do you lag when when having friends connect to you or anyone connect to you with you as a host?

Edited April 1, 2013 by Yogotiss

[Dusklite]

Just a quick update: after the small 11 MB patch rolled out a few hours ago I have a big boost in performance (and shield/health/energy :P). I only tested solo, but my framerate has about doubled! Sadly, that means when I've had 15 fps in very big fights I now get about 30, not 40 or more...

My graphics card still stays too cool and isn't utilized fully, but boy oh boy: If getting such a patch out on Easter Monday is any indication of the commitment of the developer I almost think I can play this on a 486/100 with Windows 3.1 at the end of the month.

Good job.

(Either that, or it was the now removed bunny ears that caused this.)

Edit, just for clarity: For me "lag" is a connection issue (mostly a high ping) which causes things like delayed hit registering, enemies teleporting or rubberbanding in games and "bad performance" or "bad framerate" is always just that: low number of frames per second or stuttery gameplay. It's pretty much that what wikipedia says. Also, I am not really bothered by the lag I'm sometimes having when joining a game as this is pretty much NORMAL in online gaming, depending on your connection and the capabilities of the host. I'm just saying this because I never have a clue what people mean by "lag". It's about a 50/50 chance they are not talking about latency. And that causes confusion...

Edited April 2, 2013 by Dusklite

[Dusklite]

Update: no, playing with two people is still bad. Playing with more than two is no fun at all. Also had graphical artifacts in a 3 player game once today when I turned everything down (yellow triangles flashing across the screen). Almost thought my card was dying, but actually turning everything UP again solved that problem and netted me about 5 frames more (20 instead of 15) and I never had that problem again since. (Or before for that matter.)

Bottom line: nope, still borked.

edit: I blame the repeated switching between fullscreen, borderless fullscreen and windowed and the Catalyst 13.3 beta drivers for the artifacts. Please disregard, it was almost certainly only the driver acting up.

late edit 2: Forgot to mention that I've got rid of 13.3 beta3 after that and went back to 12.10 since that's the last one actually improving performance on the 5xxx series. Drivers didn't make any difference anyway and other games like 12.10 better. ;)

Edited April 2, 2013 by Dusklite

[Missile]

same issue, i described GPU stays at 0%/Ram usage 4,2 GB/16 GB/CPU ~20-30%

[Dusklite]

same issue, i described GPU stays at 0%/Ram usage 4,2 GB/16 GB/CPU ~20-30%

0% GPU strikes me as really odd, though. Are you positive that the game is actually using your graphics card? Not that you have your on-board graphics chip handle the game...

Anyways: after all the hotfixes and updates: no changes for me. Could even be it's gotten a bit worse again.

[Dusklite]

So, one week has passed, update 7.7.3 came with some multiplayer-related CPU usage optimizations and... nope, still the same issue.

 

I'm not asking to play Warframe with 60 fps and everything maxed out at all times with my system, but I would be honestly thrilled to be able to actually set graphics options so I can get 45+ fps at all times... which should be totally easy to get once my CPU and GPU usage at least doubles.

 

Since only a bunch of people with strong enough systems have this issue I'm really suspecting a bug here.

Edited April 13, 2013 by Dusklite

[HexCaliber]

After reading this thread I ran the game on as similar a system as I was able,

Amd 965 X4 @ stock

ATI 5850 @ stock

8 gig mem

Win 7 64 bit.

 

Sorry to tell you the game ran fine, and this is with the latest beta drivers; I would suggest you have a problem elsewhere causing your performance issues. Even with everything on @ 1920 X 1080 including  the Micky mouse effects I was seeing around 40-50 fps, once I turned off bloom, colour correction, dof ,and motion blur as I would normally I was seeing 70-80 fps.

 

I can tell you that some older AM2 and AM2+ motherboards have performance issues if you overclock by increasing clock speed instead of increasing the multiplier; they use a single timing signal that causes problems with the northbridge chip, which controls the FSB, PCI bus, cpu, and ram timing, try running your cpu at stock and see if that helps.

Edited April 13, 2013 by HexCaliber

[CheeseHasLeafs]

Someone posted something like this, and it seems that his GPU was running on 2D clocks for some reason. What does GPU-Z say about your clocks?

[HexCaliber]

Someone posted something like this, and it seems that his GPU was running on 2D clocks for some reason. What does GPU-Z say about your clocks?

I forgot about this, some implementations of windowed border-less, and windowed mode look like a standard desktop to the graphics card. The cards run at a greatly reduced clock speed when on the desktop to keep temps down.

 

One way round it is to disable ACPI in the bios, but this is not recommended unless you know your cooling is up to snuff as the system runs with max clocks all the time. The other clearly is to run in full screen, I also believe there are some apps that allow you to override ACPI for specific programs, so the system realises you need the clocks to run in gaming mode while that program is running.

[Gajeel]

same problem here :c

 

ati hd 7950

x4 965 4x4ghz

8 gb ram -.-

[Dusklite]

I'm running in full screen. Yeah, I've got an older motherboard, but I haven't overclocked anything. If it was something like that, I could not run something like Far Cry 3 or Bioshock Infinite at a steady, good framerate (40+) with decent (medium/high) settings.

 

Running it on a similar system and having no problems doesn't actually mean anything but that it SHOULD run fine. And the last post shows that even stronger systems than mine have this issue. I kinda suspect that system doesn't run on an AM2/AM2+ motherboard, but correct me if I'm mistaken, Gajeel.

 

Also, I don't think my GPU runs at 2D clock speed, since that would have had even more of a negative performance impact, but I'll check if I remember to do so the next time I play.

 

To be fair, I've tested it in multiplayer now and that runs almost as good as solo which wasn't the case before. So their "nice little boost" actually helped. But sadly, not quite enough.

[Zpraycle]

Ah as i started a topic a while ago i see this topic seems to be having the same problem as me :) let's all make this 1 big thread (or even multiple) so the devs will look into this. i hope it can be fixed soon. i also think they should put in multithreats like in bf3 that would optimize the game so much better.

[kucingmlete]

maybe the other players that joined you is the problem? i think when you host, the connection that other people had will affect you as the host, thus affecting the others. i've hosted 4 player game with my friends, and nobody's got any trouble. but when my friend hosts, suddenly we all had the lag. that's just opinion though. i'm not really sure myself if that was the case

[kucingmlete]

oh and my spec:

AMD Phenom II X6 2.8GHZ

8GB RAM

GeForce GTX 660 TI TwinFrozr

 

i don't think i should be getting any trouble playing the game. except maybe i opened 2 or 3 games all at once

[Dusklite]

The fps go down even in solo, so no, it's not "lag". Lag is something entirely different to a low number of frames per second. If I was talking about lag (which I also get but I know why - bad hosts - and it doesn't bother me) I would be calling it "lag".

 

Also I stated all of that stuff above. Yeah, I know, wall of text and all. ^^

Just trying to be thorough.

 

And for an update: no, my GPU clocks are normal when running Warframe. Actually after playing a while with a friend I think it's gotten better in general.

 

Just hope for optimizations and/or finding&fixing performance hogging bugs in the code. At least I'm able to somewhat play it now.

[Zpraycle]

The fps go down even in solo, so no, it's not "lag". Lag is something entirely different to a low number of frames per second. If I was talking about lag (which I also get but I know why - bad hosts - and it doesn't bother me) I would be calling it "lag".

 

Also I stated all of that stuff above. Yeah, I know, wall of text and all. ^^

Just trying to be thorough.

 

And for an update: no, my GPU clocks are normal when running Warframe. Actually after playing a while with a friend I think it's gotten better in general.

 

Just hope for optimizations and/or finding&fixing performance hogging bugs in the code. At least I'm able to somewhat play it now.

I think we have the exact same problem.

May i know which motherboard you have?

I have a N68-S3 UCC motherboard. it only has pcie 1.1 support so it might be that but still that wouldn't make this gtx 660 that i have, worse enough for the fps i get i think. since the requirements (for the graphic card) are very low. i think it has to do with something else then gpu or cpu but i want to know what it is xD

[Vertutame]

My PC's spec :

CPU : I7-3820 3.6 GHz

MB : Asus X79 sabertooth

GPU : XFX7970

Ram : all 2 GB = 16 GB

Still having problem with Framerate(SOLO) while I can run BF3 Ultra just fine!

[BoogieMan82]

System is:

AMD Phenom II X4 945 @3GHz

AMD Radeon HD5770 1GB

4GB RAM

OS: Win7 64bit

I can't really play with other people for long since I find the low fps (down to below 20) frustrating. In Solo it's barely enough if the map isn't that big.

On everything maxed out, my system only utilizes about 1/3 of the resources available: ~1 GB RAM, CPU load while playing about 35% (up to 60+% on core 0, but never even close to maxing out - 15 - 35% on the other 3 cores) GPU load also about 35% and it's getting DOWN as I deactivate things like bloom, dyn. lighting, etc.

Vsync also has no impact on performance - sometimes I even think that I've got more fps with it on, but that might me my imagination.

Regardless of settings my performance stays about the same. I/O (hard drive) activity is pretty low throughout the map. Dx9 and Dx11 differences are superficial (Dx11 might be a bit slower), the 32bit executable runs slower as soon as there is activity.

Or more concise: performance is not dependant on settings AT ALL.

The problem is directly related to the ongoing action and the size of the map: defense missions with only one big room take 4 players and a lot of enemies to get me below 40 fps, whereas some solo missions on bigger maps crawl below that when the enemies are just starting to pour in.

I would've said it's CPU bound, but with the CPU load never reaching more than ~40%...

The system is up to date, I've tried with Catalyst 12.10, 13.1 and the 13.3 beta with no discernable difference. BIOS is as updated as it gets. I've also tried it on my alternate OS (XP 64 bit). Only difference was small loading freezes I haven't got on Win7.

My CPU and GPU are staying cool - much cooler than in games like Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3 or, very recent, Bioshock Infinite which all run pretty fine (45-60 fps at all times on medium to high settings).

Background processes do not seem to matter: I've tried without pretty much everything (even non-essential Windows services), I've tried the launcher from steam and the standalone version.

I don't have AMD Cool 'n' Quiet active, I don't use energy saving which interferes with gaming.

I haven't played Warframe on an earlier version than 7.5 - just for clarity.

I've just reinstalled my Win7, updated my essential stuff (just not my onboard sound drivers) and tested it again.

Sadly with the same results and that's why I'm posting here. ;)

DxDiag on pastebin:

http://pastebin.com/4BNHFtzN

To sum things up:

- bad performance

- settings do not matter

- getting worse with bigger maps, more players and more enemies

- system resources are not really used

- no discernable bottleneck

- no overclocking, no overheating

- drivers up to date

- also on different OS and on fresh install of same OS

P.S.: It's not just the low fps that I'm suffering from, but input lag when I've got low fps: Pistols don't fire when I click, reload or using powers is ignored sometimes... the worse the fps, the more often the game "misses" my input.

Have you tried setting your minimum processor state to 90% just to see if it helps?  It's under your power options.

[Zpraycle]

My PC's spec :

CPU : I7-3820 3.6 GHz

MB : Asus X79 sabertooth

GPU : XFX7970

Ram : all 2 GB = 16 GB

Still having problem with Framerate(SOLO) while I can run BF3 Ultra just fine!

 

Wow look this guy has a beast pc and even he has fps problems!

May i know what your motherboard and your avg framerate is in warframe?

Btw i also run bf3 on high settings just fine, but warframe gives me bad fps too.

 

 

Have you tried setting your minimum processor state to 90% just to see if it helps?  It's under your power options.

Where exactly do you see that? do you mean power options in control panel?

 

EDIT: just took a look there but saw no such option.

Edited April 14, 2013 by DuTchEr95

[Zpraycle]

As many people post their specs. i'll do also here.

 

Specs:

 

Motherboard: N68-s3 ucc

CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 40 (originaly a x3 740 but with ucc enabled on motherboard made a x4 40).

RAM:G.Skill 8GB 1333MHz 

GPU: PNY nvidia gtx 660 XLR8 edition.

HDD: 1TB HDD samsung.

 

GPU usage: 11-25%

CPU usage: 40-60%

RAM usage: 2.60GB used in total in-game.

 

Please devs look into this! i don't see this as a hardware problem anymore but probably a game bug.

I get fine avg minimal 60+ fps in other games on high settings.