Regular Ctds, Game Becoming Unplayable

[alienspacebats]

Since the last update, I've been getting fairly regular crashes to desktop (CTD) that always occur at the exact same point: the four-second countdown from the solar map to the Liset loading screen. This happens regardless of squad size, solo play, doing a mission, going to Dojo or visiting a relay (I have noticed the game crashes VERY regularly if I go to Larunda relay in Mercury). I encounter the error reporting tool each time informing me that an internal error has occurred with the game. I have tried verifying and optimizing the download cache from the launcher to no avail.

 

I have been playing since June 2013 and haven't encountered anything like this before. I play on a gaming PC, and do not experience errors playing any other games.

 

Quick specs:

 

Win7 64-bit | AMD Phenom II X4 955 | GA-MA7700T-UD3 mainboard | 4GB DDR3 ram | AMD Radeon HD 6900 gpu.

 

Nothing is overheating or performing poorly. I usually run the game in 64bit, multi-threaded rendering is on, general in game settings are set to medium, in display options everything is checked except Adaptive Exposure, constant weapon trails and bloom. AA is set to low, 

 

I currently have a support ticket open, they have my EE log and dxdiag but so far nothing has worked; at present I have been asked to try:

 

Disabling 64-bit mode.

Disabling DirectX 11.

Disabling Runtime Tesselation.

 

Together or trying one at a time I still get the same crashes.

 

I have no recent hardware/software changes and afaik all drivers are up to date.

 

So I was wondering if anyone here has experienced anything similar or can help in any way. The game is quickly becoming unplayable, I am experiencing these crashes with increasing regularity.

 

Thanks in advance.

Edited February 24, 2015 by alienspacebats

[ZizWing]

I have no idea what may be causing this but I do have some suggestions for you to check out: check the RAM usage, I had a similar case yesterday where Battlefield 4 started using 15.9 GB of RAM (no idea how).

 

Other than that... do you use any recording software? This includes things like shadowplay (or your equivalent). It may be possible the recent update of warframe would somehow be incompatible with the software. I personally use shadowplay but havent noticed any change.

 

Over a year ago I used Dxtory to try and record some stuff and which would then crash the game when both 64-bit and DirectX 11 were enabled but since that is not the case here I highly doubt any of that.

 

The first thing I could think of is it either being an issue with the game itself or you simply run out of RAM during the loading screen which the crashes the game.

 

EDIT: typo

Edited February 24, 2015 by zY_Spartan_Yz

[Rydian]

What screen/display type?

[alienspacebats]

I have no idea what may be causing this but I do have some suggestions for you to check out: check the RAM usage, I had a similar case yesterday where Battlefield 4 started using 15.9 GB of RAM (no idea how).

 

Other than that... do you use any recording software? This includes things like shadowplay (or your equivalent). It may be possible the recent update of warframe would somehow be incompatible with the software. I personally use shadowplay but havent noticed any change.

 

Over a year ago I used Dxtory to try and record some stuff and which would then crash the game when both 64-bit and DirectX 11 were enabled but since that is not the case here I highly doubt any of that.

 

The first thing I could think of is it either being an issue with the game itself or you simply run out of RAM during the loading screen which the crashes the game.

 

EDIT: typo

 

Thanks for replying!

 

I don't use any recording software and have nothing else open when playing except Steam (overlay enabled - not sure if that could be a cause).

 

I did consider that perhaps I didn't have enough memory, but I've been on 4GB for nearly 2 years without a problem so I discounted it.

 

I did check physical memory after last crash, about 3GB was being used, and sometimes after playing I will get the Win7 colour scheme message ("do you want to change the colour scheme to improve performance?").

 

But the weird thing is I can sometimes play for a day or two without a crash like when I first disabled 64-bit mode. Two days later it was back.

 

I'm beginning to suspect a lack of memory, though why this is suddenly an issue is beyond me. Maybe the game is just getting greedier.

 

Cheers.

[Frawg]

Have you checked the game files' integrity?

Is your filesystem corrupted (chkdsk)?

Did you overclock (I crash often if I do so; I don't have voltage control)?

Disable Ambient Occlusion (as that was added recently)?

 

 

I had a similar case yesterday where Battlefield 4 started using 15.9 GB of RAM (no idea how).

That is called a memory leak. The devs use a system call ask the OS to allocate and give them a (specified) chunk of memory. It's a common mistake for devs to lose the location of the memory, so it just sits there eating up space until the program closes (or tells the OS to explicitly 'free' it, but it needs an actual pointer to the address of the allocated memory in question, which the devs lost). There are programming langs that does such housekeeping for you, but it requires some amount of 'abstraction' (the separation of an idea from realistic implementation), so the program will be considerably slower (even if the devs wrote optimal code).

Edited February 24, 2015 by Frawg

[alienspacebats]

Have you checked the game files' integrity?

Is your filesystem corrupted (chkdsk)?

Did you overclock (I crash often if I do so; I don't have voltage control)?

Disable Ambient Occlusion (as that was added recently)?

 

I've re-verified and optimized via the game launcher numerous times, if that's what you mean?

Just ran chkdsk twice, no errors.

No overclocking.

Ambient Occlusion is on as far as I'm aware, will uncheck it and see how I get on.

 

Thnx!

[ZizWing]

Have you checked the game files' integrity?

Is your filesystem corrupted (chkdsk)?

Did you overclock (I crash often if I do so; I don't have voltage control)?

Disable Ambient Occlusion (as that was added recently)?

 

 

That is called a memory leak. The devs use a system call ask the OS to allocate and give them a (specified) chunk of memory. It's a common mistake for devs to lose the location of the memory, so it just sits there eating up space until the program closes (or tells the OS to explicitly 'free' it, but it needs an actual pointer to the address of the allocated memory in question, which the devs lost). There are programming langs that does such housekeeping for you, but it requires some amount of 'abstraction' (the separation of an idea from realistic implementation), so the program will be considerably slower (even if the devs wrote optimal code).

thanks for the info, it happened within a minute or 4 just after entering the game. I simply restarted the game and it worked fine though :)

[ZizWing]

Thanks for replying!

 

I don't use any recording software and have nothing else open when playing except Steam (overlay enabled - not sure if that could be a cause).

 

I did consider that perhaps I didn't have enough memory, but I've been on 4GB for nearly 2 years without a problem so I discounted it.

 

I did check physical memory after last crash, about 3GB was being used, and sometimes after playing I will get the Win7 colour scheme message ("do you want to change the colour scheme to improve performance?").

 

But the weird thing is I can sometimes play for a day or two without a crash like when I first disabled 64-bit mode. Two days later it was back.

 

I'm beginning to suspect a lack of memory, though why this is suddenly an issue is beyond me. Maybe the game is just getting greedier.

 

Cheers.

unfortunately I am not too experienced with RAM but getting the message about windows aero does indicate your pc is lacking power in some way or another. Usually you can ignore this because this message is a bit eager to show up at times. Even my pc has had it a couple times, though I don't remember what I was doing back then. if you want to know I run windows 64 bit, i5 3570K cpu, GTX660Ti and 16Gb of ram... so it doesn't always mean your pc is "too slow".  In your case however... the only thing I can come up with is the RAM (by looking at you specs). But to be honest 3 out of 4 gb in use shouldn't cause this. Even when my BF4 was using 15.9/16 my pc kept the game running. (untill I closed it via taskmanager due to unresponsiveness.) Anyway I hope you can find the issue! I'd like to help but I dont think there's much more i can do :(

[alienspacebats]

unfortunately I am not too experienced with RAM but getting the message about windows aero does indicate your pc is lacking power in some way or another. Usually you can ignore this because this message is a bit eager to show up at times. Even my pc has had it a couple times, though I don't remember what I was doing back then. if you want to know I run windows 64 bit, i5 3570K cpu, GTX660Ti and 16Gb of ram... so it doesn't always mean your pc is "too slow".  In your case however... the only thing I can come up with is the RAM (by looking at you specs). But to be honest 3 out of 4 gb in use shouldn't cause this. Even when my BF4 was using 15.9/16 my pc kept the game running. (untill I closed it via taskmanager due to unresponsiveness.) Anyway I hope you can find the issue! I'd like to help but I dont think there's much more i can do :(

 

No worries! I'm going to buy another 4GB of RAM to see if that helps, I've been meaning to do this for quite a while and this is the perfect excuse. Thanks for the help anyway! :)

[Rydian]

To check a memory leak in a game like Warframe, do not check "physical memory", that's not an accurate assessment of what a single process is doing.

 

Check what Warframe.exe (or Warframe.64.exe) is using up in the Processes tab.

[alienspacebats]

To check a memory leak in a game like Warframe, do not check "physical memory", that's not an accurate assessment of what a single process is doing.

 

Check what Warframe.exe (or Warframe.64.exe) is using up in the Processes tab.

 

I just checked this, Warframe goes from using 1,003,716K  to 1,700,000-ish in 32 bit mode, and more or less the same in 64 bit (monitored in Liset, and then in mission respectively).

 

I haven't had a crash since disabling ambient occlusion, but it's early days yet.

[ZizWing]

I just came across this: https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/408527-warframe-devouring-virtual-memory-for-no-reason/?p=4507670#entry4507670 Might be worth checking out for you if it turns out to be the game's issue and not your ram (though this is a problem with ram usage)

[alienspacebats]

I just came across this: https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/408527-warframe-devouring-virtual-memory-for-no-reason/?p=4507670#entry4507670 Might be worth checking out for you if it turns out to be the game's issue and not your ram (though this is a problem with ram usage)

 

Sorry this took a while to reply to, but I have heard back from support! They said it was an error with Catalyst Control Center/GFX card driver causing the problems. I'm using now using a previous version and have been crash-free ever since.

 

I'll still be upgrading RAM though!

[BEEF_SWELLINGTON]

What version of the CCC did you have to roll back to? I'm running into this same exact problem, and it's been pretty persistent since the update that added particle effects to non-nvidia cards.

 

Radeon 6950, i53570k@4.2ghz (though the same crashes happen when not OC'd), 8 gig ram.