game locks up during Orb Vallis encounters - only when in multithreaded mode

[pt314]

Warframe completely freezes from time to time while fighting in Orb Vallis. It does not crash properly (it does not exit and I do not get the crash reporter), it simply becomes completely wedged. It's not just sleeping either - I've once left it for over 25 minutes, and it didn't recover. When I Alt+Tab out and back, Windows declares the game "Not responding" and offers to kill the process.

It always dies during encounters - I haven't had any issues while fishing, mining, hunting, or going AFK for an hour or two. It also only happens when I'm hosting the game - I usually play solo, I only played as a guest once or twice, but those lasted pretty long without any problems. I haven't had any issues anywhere else than Orb Vallis either - I could safely hunt ghouls for Konzu.

I first got the freeze after the 24.0.9 update I think. Windows 10 64bit, AMD Radeon R9 380, and an ancient Athlon II X3 in case it matters. OS and graphics drivers are up-to-date. Suspecting hardware issues, I ran a memory test, but it came up negative. I've set the in-game graphics options to the lowest possible, turned off DirectX 11 in the launcher, then DirectX 10 too. Cleaned the insides of the computer. Nothing helped so far.

Is there anything else I can do to troubleshoot or maybe work around the issue?

Edited December 1, 2018 by pt314

[pt314]

Turning off "Multi-Threaded Rendering" in the launcher seems to help. The game became kinda choppy at times, as expected, but I was able to murder Taxmen for half an hour without any lock-ups. Setting the process affinity to a single core via Task Manager does not prevent the freeze.

It doesn't seem to be an overheating issue - I've made it lock up several times with the system temperature just over 50°C, GPU at 70°C and CPU around 46°C.