Jump to content
Dante Unbound: Known Issues ×
Dante Unbound: Share Bug Reports and Feedback Here! ×

Local Reflections: Brings Fps Down By Half.


Kratos
 Share

Recommended Posts

Tried and true, any time I were to turn on Local Reflections, my FPS would have dunked into the 13-15 range. While easily with all the other settings I can get 27-30. Reflections on any other game do not do this to me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Reflections are brutal in this game. Not sure why, exactly, but my own experience with this game on two different machines with three different GPUs are illustrative.

 

Most of my time in Warframe was spent with a 2500K/580GTX rig. I run at 2560x1600 resolution. With reflections, I'd generally see 25-40fps. Without, you can about double that. Normally, I'd just play without and not worry about it. This is presently a six year old machine and the 580 was always a little marginal at this resolution when cranking everything to the max, but it was the only game in town when it was built to run this resolution.

 

I've spent some small amount of time playing (not my idea, either) on an i5 750/260GTX rig at 1920x1200 resolution. This is an old machine (8-9 years) and it shows on modern games like Warframe. To get barely tolerable framerates (30ish) means medium settings and no reflections. I never even tried reflections and I'm pretty sure it'd be a slideshow with them.

 

The 580 failed somewhat unexpectedly about a month ago. Good card, but, well, these things happen. Since too much is never enough (and it's the start of a long term upgrade cycle that I've put off for two years), a TitanX was chosen to replace it. Brute force approaches generally do work in gaming and this was no exception. The machine pretty much runs a solid 60fps (300+ without vsync) no matter what you do--with one exception: Baro Fridays in the relay(s). Then it's 40ish, which says to me the game is very CPU dependent (we'll find out when I get a Devil's Canyon, Skylake, Broadwell or whatever technological terror Intel comes up with this next coming year).

 

So...yeah, the game requires a lot of video muscle to crank all the sliders to the right. Also, it seems to be heavily reliant on a strong CPU as well, so balanced approaches are best when upgrading. I can't speak to the efficiency of whatever code DE uses to implement this stuff, but the game is definitely of the "upgrade or die" syndrome typically seen in PC gaming.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Local reflections vary based on which tile set you are in. If you look at the floors or walls of certain levels, for example Jupiter's Corpus Gas City or the Orokin Void, you will notice many more reflections than you would on Mercury's Asteroid levels. This is intentional and as a result may cause some tile sets to be more taxing on your GPU than others. Keep in mind that we are frequently addressing older levels for further optimization and local reflections could possibly be reduced on specific tiles if they prove to be a serious enough of a problem. 

 

With that said, this setting is intended for players who have slightly more powerful GPUs. I would not be surprised if an Nvidia GTX 5xx series video card may struggle in some places with local reflections since those came out several years ago. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

which says to me the game is very CPU dependent

Warframe is completely CPU bottlenecked. creating a GPU bottleneck in Warframe is almost impossible pretty difficult.

between a 2500k and say, a 4690k, or whatever the Broadwell equivelant will be - don't expect more than perhaps, a 15% improvement.

for the past decade(give or take), CPU's in Video Games have been heavily under-utilized. slightly to the fault of Developers (always more optimization tweaks you can make) but mostly, that the middleware and other software that runs the game, was just never really written to handle Multi-Core Processors well. fully utilizing one Thread works great, and progressively gets much worse as you increase the number of Threads available.

come nowadays, where we have CPU's that are very, very capable, but atleast half of the Processor's computational capabilities just aren't being used. because the middleware that games are built on, just doesn't know how to do it.

new games should be rid of this problem within 4-5 Years though. scary to think, that the first full application of a Multi-Core Processor on the Consumer market was ~2005... and it's still going to be a few more years before Multi-Core Processors actually get correctly utilized.

- - - - -

a little more on topic - keep in mind that Local Reflections is realtime rendering dozens upon dozens of sets of lighting in the game, whereas when it's off, Lighting is only calculated as pure lighting, with very little... Reflection for lack of a better term (that isn't defining the word with the word :|).

being able to turn off Lighting this heavy, allows for lower minimum requirements for Warframe - and not being able to in pretty much any other game, is why minimum requirements in many of those are much higher.

realtime simulated lighting and reflections is heavy! and there's just only so much you can do about that (Digital Extremes does a pretty good job of trying to do something about it). especially when you have Explosions and Plasma and other stuff flying around constantly, which all need to be taken into account for the Realtime Reflections.

if your GPU isn't a high end model, you may want to infact consider leaving it off, as it's pretty taxing for GPU's that may be somewhat outdated.

Edited by taiiat
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On my old rig (i3-2100, HD 5770) I had trouble keeping a constant 60 with settings on low-medium ish.

 

On the new one (i5-4690k, R9 280x) I have everything maxed and a twitch stream on the side screen and it holds a steady 60.

Time to upgrade. You won't regret it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have an i5 2500k and a Radeon 6850, and I maintain a steady 60 most of the time. The only time I notice a drop in my fps with local reflections on is when water is involved. It's most noticeable on the orokin tile set where there is water and on Europa in the big ice cavern with the stream of water. There is a little drop in fps when there is a lot of stuff going on, but that's expected.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

well i got a amd radeon 7970 matrix platinum and an amd fx9370 processor and it runs full graphics 100-200fps without vsync and as you think with vsync constant 60fps but if i turn on constant weapon trail it drops very low and i say very low (below 60fps sometimes even 20-30) compared to what it can do with reflections and considering that this processor costs around 200-300 dollars it depends where you buy it so yeah its a lot cheaper then intel and it can run warframe on full graphics (except constant weapon trail which i dont really understand why not)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm running FX-8350 @ 4.5 GHz with R9 290X. Getting 30-120 FPS. Solo and <= 3 players: 100-120 except void: 50-90, 4+ players: 30-70. Settings seem to have no impact on framerate (at least lowest) in my case. Can't wait any longer for AMD "Zen" CPUs or DX12 since Mantle won't happen.

Edited by Melchiah
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2560x1080, all settings maxed with an Athlon 860K @ 4.5 Ghz/2.0 NB  and a GTX 960 (Win 8.1) and I have no issues...granted I have to use Vsync to keep the fps locked at 60 to avoid tearing (IPS panels can tear lots even above their Hz). Even in raids I Manage to hold my fps @ 60. 
Even my GTX 750 Ti was able to handle it...even though I would have to accept constant drops to 45 or even 30 fps. 

Older Nvidia hardware gets terrible optimization, though...so I expect older than Maxwell to perform horrible. As for AMD...can't say...I also used to play this maxed out (with SMAA traded for FXAA) without PhysX of course since that's Nvidia only and could run this locked at 30 fps. 


Maybe it's generally older architectures that struggle with this game? (Which is a possibility)

Edited by Shehriazad
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tried and true, any time I were to turn on Local Reflections, my FPS would have dunked into the 13-15 range. While easily with all the other settings I can get 27-30. Reflections on any other game do not do this to me.

 

You can't just say "because other game", that's not an argument.

In fact I dare you to find any other games with good resolution real time reflections. There have been a couple of UE2.5 with very low res reflection (like in splinter cell). And then there is GTA5 and Tomb Raider (which has 1 stupidily awesome high resolution mirror, for 1 scene).

 

Reflections like these are really taxing, and is something developers generally avoid doing (how many times have you seen broken or dirty mirrors in games?).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tried and true, any time I were to turn on Local Reflections, my FPS would have dunked into the 13-15 range. While easily with all the other settings I can get 27-30. Reflections on any other game do not do this to me.

 

You can't really clear cut compare in that fashion. The same way there are a multitude of different anti aliasing that each have their own performance&quality, there are multiple ways to handle reflections. Some are a lot more taxing then others, and WF is one of the the latter kinds. whether the tax is worth it is another, personal matter.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I say they should just use shiny, fake reflections, like old games used to do. It still looks good, but isnt taxing like real reflections. Plus, reflections serve no practical purpose anyway.

Remember there are people who care about seeing they're own shadows in games. They could add a option that turns own the shiny, fake reflection, but as this is activated. Local reflections are auto cut off and the same with local reflections when cut on, but also add a "reflections on/off. When on, you choose from the two, when off, well reflections are cut off(mostly self-explanatory, but oh well).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...