GPU not being used.

[mextra43]

So I booted Warframe up today and was treated to some unexpected lag.
It used to run perfectly fine, but now it doesn't, even though I haven't changed my hardware or graphics settings.
So I think my GPU isn't being used and I don't know how to fix it.
 

[taiiat]

but you don't actually know, and we're just firing a cannon off into the darkness.

are you on a Notebook? if so going into your Video Driver properties and setting the dedicated GPU to be used to make sure that games use it, is one of the most common problems for Notebooks so that's a good place to start.

if it's not a Notebook, then... data has to be collected as to what's wrong before anything can be blamed (it's unlikely to be GPU related).

[mextra43]

I'm on a desktop and according to task manager the GPU is doing something, though the usage difference between Warframe and idle is only 2%

[Xzorn]

There has been a weird stutter recently that happens once in a while. Most likely based on server handshakes.

Far as the GPU not being used. That's very common for multiplayer games. No idea what causes it. People claim it's CPU / Thread limited but I've benched it on my system and it's not. Least not strictly.  I made a post about it a few days ago because it's been a problem with Warframe forever.

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1028863-will-warframe-ever-utilize-my-hardware/?tab=comments#comment-10302276

In the post you can see that none of my CPU cores are being saturated and my GPU is under utilized when other players are around but Solo it's fully utilized and there's little change in CPU core usage. If you want to test more make sure to get things like GPU-Z, Riva Tuner, ect to give a good example of what's going on with your system and try to compare Solo vs grouped. I dunno if it's the Unity Engine or just spaghetti code but it's annoying.