Issues With The New Refresh Rate Setting...

[ahferroin7]

So, I already mentioned something about this myself in the 18.2.2 patch note thread, and saw at least one other person with a probably related issue.

 

In my case, my monitor runs at 60Hz natively, with an option to do 50 or 59.  It claims to support both progressive and interlaced scanning, but only displays things correctly with progressive scan (it works sometimes with interlaced, but most of the time it doesn't).  Warframe is only offering options for 50 and 59.94 Hz refresh rates, and has no option to specify progressive or interlaced, and regardless of the combination of the option in Warframe and the GPU configuration, I get noticeable vertical jitter when running Warframe (and _only_ when running Warframe).  This is most noticeable in the Steam Overlay, and when in the options screen, but it is still noticeable in the regular HUD.  This ends up making the redicule position unstable, causes most text to be almost unreadable, functionally halves my frame rate, and is giving me a serious headache, so altogether, it means that I'm not playing again until this gets fixed.  Prior to 18.2.2, everything worked just fine.  This jitter is 100% consistent with one of the issues my monitor has when the system tries to use interlaced instead of progressive scan.

 

Someone else mentioned issues with trying to use HDMI video output with this, which makes sense as a lot of inexpensive HDMI capable monitors and TV's don't identify correctly, and have issues with over-scan (when the actual visible display is smaller than the reported resolution, it's like letter-boxing in reverse) when not configured for the right refresh rate.

 

This whole idea of being able to set the refresh rate in game is great, except for two things:

1. The reason most games don't have a setting to control refresh rate is not oversight, it's intentional because the GPU and the OS are supposed to be able to figure out what refresh rate the monitor wants.  This doesn't always work of course, but that would be why there is an option in almost every graphics driver out there to manually specify the refresh rate.  If somebody is having an issue that they can 100% verify is due to their refresh rate, then the problem is not in the game, it's in the GPU drivers and/or the hardware.

2. There is no option to use the OS's default for the refresh rate, like Warframe was doing before.  This is important because in some cases Warframe isn't setting up the GPU correctly with the requested refresh rate, leading to various issues such as indicated above.  While I admire adding configurability, something like this that has serious potential to break things in a way that makes the game unplayable for some people should have an option to use the old method, and default to using that.

3. No matter what excuse you use, this did not get tested enough prior to release.  I could understand if it was something with game-play, but a change in the core graphics system without an option for backwards comparability not being thoroughly tested before going to production (and yes, the live version of the game is a production level piece of software, no matter how much you try to claim otherwise) is absolutely inexcusable.  I understand that some bugs get through testing, it's practically unavoidable, but this is exactly the type of thing that shouldn't be in that category.  This is the exact reason that most companies with similar business models have an entirely separate closed beta environment where stuff gets released prior to a full release.

 

[ahferroin7]

Based on what I've been able to figure out:

1. Things work fine over VGA.  While this is technically a workaround, it is by no means an acceptable one.  I shouldn't have to change such hardware related things just to make this work (that's like saying that we can't use USB keyboards anymore and have to go out and get old PS/2 ones, or that we can't use WiFi and have to use Ethernet).

2. Things work fine with some monitors and TV's, but not all.  It seems to be ones that don't properly support interlaced scan mode but report that they do.  Getting new hardware in this case isn't an acceptable workaround either, as all of the hardware that doesn't work now did before.

3. Warframe is for some insane reason unconditionally setting interlaced scan mode.  This in and of itself is absolutely stupid design, as on most digital displays, it effectively halves your frame rate.

4. This could be trivially fixed by adding an option to use the refresh rate configured by the OS (in other words, an option to do what the game is supposed to be doing anyway).