Game freezes up system since Hotfix 24.4.2, after introduction of Buried Debts

[Naryndel]

Looking through the forums I'm seeing vague hints that some others are experiencing similar or the same as my issue, but the mentions are tucked away in comments where people seem focused on other matters, so it seems to be overlooked.

Ever since the hotfix to resolve the issue of controllers no longer functioning properly, I have been experiencing an issue where the game will freeze up (along with my whole system) in several situations:

- While on my ship and accessing my Arsenal the game will randomly (not always) freeze up when changing a weapon, Warframe, mod, etc.

- When opening the Navigation on the ship the game will randomly freeze up.

- No matter what mission (or type) I select, the game will progressively begin to stall before completely freezing up and this always occurs within less than -3- minutes of starting the mission.

I am running the following:

Dell XPS 8700
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (x64-based processor)
Installed RAM: 16.0 GB
OS: Windows 10 Home (ver. 1803)
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 645

Before the hotfixes I never experienced the game freezing to the point of crashing the game and my system. Before this the most I experienced was the occasional lag at times when other players exited Defense missions, or when the action and/or number of enemies in the game became quite intense (very rare), or when first entering Orb Vallis or The Plains.

At this point it is proving impossible for me to play the game. I am not able to completely even the lowest level Exterminate mission on Earth without the game freezing up my whole system.

One thing of note that I did discover in Task Manager when I was able to exit out of the game one time before it completely crashed my system is that the "Superfetch" process had spiked on it's Disk Usage - hitting 50%. Since noticing this I have made an effort to check for the same in future attempts to play missions and I have found that this occurs every single time.

If I manage to exit the game before it crashes my system, this spike in the "Superfetch" stalls up even my browsers (Chrome and Firefox), for at least 2-4 minutes before they function smoothly again. On Firefox, JavaScript errors end up prompted somehow every time this occurs.

* Note: I have tested this out while having Warframe in DirectX 10 mode and DirectX 11 mode - same results in both modes.

I hope this helps towards a resolution.. I'd really like to be able to play again. 🙂

[Mindbulletz]

I don't know if it's the same issue, but I similarly recently started getting couple-second freezes occasionally when in missions. This time it was long enough to time me out of an hour-long kuva survival attempt, so less frustrating than not being able to play but still plenty frustrating. I was running over to pick up an ayatan star in a different tile at the time.

i7 5960X overclocked

Asus MB

32GB ram

Windows 10

Nvidia GTX 980ti (evga "classified")

Game and Windows installed on Samsung 960 Pro 1TB NVMe

DirectX 11 x64 game version

The NVMe drive is why I suspect I'm only getting couple-second stalls instead of the previous poster's inability to play, if I had to guess. I haven't been able to see my disk usage at the time, since MSI AB doesn't track that, but my CPU usage dropped sharply across nearly all cores and my GPU usage went to zero during the stall.

[markus230]

I've got a similar problem, my PC gets completely frozen and has to be restarted, but it never happens during missions (I am able to run around Vallis for over an hour and everything is fine), only during loading screens or right after the game is loaded. 

Ryzen 5 1600x

16GB RAM

RX580 8GB

Never happened before the update.

[XanSteel]

I have the same issue, except I can't diagnosis it because once it freezes, about 5 seconds later I get a blank "Red Screen of Death" and then the whole system auto reboots. Windows doesn't give me any information on what is happening, even looking in the event viewer as it's not saving any information.

I've tested my hardware and everything is coming back fine. This only started happening with this new update "Buried Debts" even though it happens at random regardless of whether I'm in a mission (any) or not.

PC

AMD 9850 BLACK EDITION

8 gigs of ddr2 800

AMD RX 560 4gig card

All drivers are up to date.

[Naryndel]

I attempted to test further.

I put the game in DirectX 10 mode and I disabled the "Superfetch" Windows Service. This seemed to speed up the game some and it didn't freeze up in the mission so quickly, but it still lagged at random places.

With this attempt I managed to make it through the lowest level Exterminate mission on Earth, though partway through it did freeze up. It didn't take down my whole system this time, but it did lock it up for at least 3 minutes or so.

After this I checked the Task Manager and the GPU usage by the Warframe process was over 80%. I switched the Display Setting in the game to "Medium" and that dropped it to around 75-77%, so I switched it to the "Low" setting and it dropped it down to around 60-65%.

I attempted the same Exterminate mission again and experienced the same locking up, but made it through the mission. After this, I attempted a Defense mission on Earth and the game locked up very quickly. When it locked up I managed to bring up the Task Manager and it showed GPU, RAM, and Disk usage for the Warframe process had flat-lined, but the whole system was lagging/locked up. After a few minutes, when it started showing signs of activity again, I managed to exit the mission and I monitor the Task Manager. After recovering from locking up the GPU usage by Warframe kept spiking to 99% one second, down to 49% the next second - and that kept repeating until I managed to end the process through the Task Manager.

Before trying any of this out I explored other posts here in the forum and one member, in several topics, suggested that it may be related to a recent Microsoft Update. I looked up the specific update he had provided reference too and checked my system for that update. The update isn't on my system, which rules out the possibility of that being the cause - at least, in my case.

This issue specifically started right after the hotfix I mentioned in my original post here, so all signs appear to point towards the update itself. 

[Qmoney]

Same here, I'm trying to play the new event (and purchased a resource booster to do so), but the new update has broken Orb Vallis for me (and introduced other intermittent crashing on loading screens).

I have:

 - Re-installed Warframe
 - verified cache
 - optimized cache
 - Lowered settings to medium (even though I'm running Vega64 and Ryzen 1700)
 - Updated to recommended video card drivers
 - Stopped all non-essential background programs

Every time I try to load orb vallis I crash during the loading screen... I've tried for hours now.
 

[TheGoldenTip]

My problem doesn't freeze my entire PC, just freezes the game, though I can here everything as if nothing was frozen (i.e. Menu opening and closing, shooting weapons, abilities, etc). And Of course like everyone else, I have been playing for 5 years now and this is the first time it's happening to me.

[Naryndel]

So I did some further testing as I saw that the Warframe process in my Task Manager wasn't the only thing using the GPU.

I did some searching around online for this process/service - "Service Host: GameDVR and Broadcast User Service" - and discovered it's a Windows 10 service for recording audio/video while in games.. Though I've never used this (knowingly), it appears to have been turning itself on whenever I turned on Warframe, ever since the latest rounds of updates/hotfixes.

I did a bit more digging and found this page which shows how to easily turn it off under Window Settings (nothing technical required):

https://appuals.com/how-to-fix-high-cpu-disk-usage-by-broadcast-dvr-server-bcastdvr-exe/

I've since tried an Exterminate and a Defense mission and both played smoothly without any lag at all.

So, at least for me, this appears to be the culprit.

I hope this maybe helps some others. 🙂

[TheGoldenTip]

Can anyone confirm if the most recent hotfix fixed the issues you're having?

[markus230]

On 2019-03-12 at 1:49 AM, TheGoldenTip said:

Can anyone confirm if the most recent hotfix fixed the issues you're having?

Just had my PC crash during loading into Orokin Derelict

[nellone]

I was thinking my pc was going to need a change of fresh thermal paste, because it was continuosly crashing after few minutes of gameplay.
But it was strange because sometimes i could play for hours wihtout problems.

After a couple of days, i noticed sometimes (i don't know when precisely) warframe gets at insane CPU usage with no reason....
sometimes happens on menus, sometimes during the map loading, sometimes inside the orbiter... it's quite random.

Here are 2 screenshots, the first with the crazy CPU usage:

 and the second is in normal conditions, during an intense combat situatuation.

Edited March 13, 2019 by nellone

[sam686]

Sound still working and only Warframe freezes picture, maybe the graphics card is the problem. Close game (Alt+F4) and look at bottom of EE.log for some errors.

CPU voltage problem, or CPU / RAM overclocks can cause "Warframe has Crashed" or complete computer freeze / hangs requiring power cycle. Prime95 CPU stress test even showed errors after 1 or 2 hours.

My old intel i7-2600 on Asus P8H77-M CSM, no overclock, yet it needs CPU voltage offset +0.02 to be fully stable. No more crash / freeze. Prime95, option, torture test can now run for 10 hours without errors. My newer Ryzen 2400g also needed a few adjustments to speed and voltages be fully stable. DDR4 at 2933 speed works, 3200 is unstable, i guess my CPU is not stable when going that fast.

 

1 hour ago, nellone said:

After a couple of days, i noticed sometimes (i don't know when precisely) warframe gets at insane CPU usage with no reason.

This is likely the high CPU usage for graphics shader initialize and compile. Often happens after loading screen up to a few minutes. Shader cache avoids this CPU usage problem from happening again on the same location. AMD/Nvidia control panel, check if shader cache is on. Video of manually delete shader cache and CPU usage:

 

Edit: That shader cache CPU usage applies when most of CPU usage is coming from Warframe (2:40 in video). If it is coming from a different process, like maybe anti-virus or windows defender, turn that off or close that program, and see if the problem goes away.

Edited March 13, 2019 by sam686

[TheGoldenTip]

Bump

[TheGoldenTip]

bump

[WaggneR]

Still freezes the entire pc.

Edited April 2, 2019 by WaggneR

[jimmy_01]

R9 290x; R51600x; 16GB 3000mhz; samsung EVO 860 500GB Windows and the game.

when left the computer idle for several hours, the game just broke and freezes every 3 seconds until i reboot the computer

all windows energy saving options are disabled, game mode disabled and graphics preference in performance mode (this reduces the freezes a bit)

[Zeranov]

Similar problem here. When playing the game it can randomly freeze in different situations. It just froze right after starting the game and opening the star chart. Another time it was within a mission or at the end of a mission. Hard to pinpoint the cause, because it can also run for hours without a problem.

When freezing it either completely locks up my system with a brown screen and a "RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR" sound shortly before going entirely silent or the current screen freezes and the audio goes on normally. The latter occurs less often.

I can play and run other games and applications just fine, but Warframe is causing problems lately.

 

System specs

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600X

GPU: AMD Radeon RX 480 (Driver 19.4.1)

RAM: 16 GB @3000MHz

OS: Windows 10 64-bit (Build 17763)

Warframe is installed on a SSD connected via SATA

 

Also EE.log doesn't seem to track the crash. Maybe because the system locks up before it can report anything.

[ImmortalisEL]

Same thing happening to me. I have to alt+f4 every time -.-

Edited April 9, 2019 by ImmortalisEL

[sam686]

For most of you, it can be anything listed here: https://www.warframe.com/hardwarefail

6 hours ago, Zeranov said:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600X

RAM: 16 GB @3000MHz

Maybe drop the RAM speed down to 2667. Ryzen 1600X was only designed or tested up to 2667 RAM speed.
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_5/1600x
https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-5-1600x

Anything overclocked beyond the speed depends lucky silicon lottery that it might or might not be stable. I use Prime95 for testing for stability of CPU and RAM. For me, My Ryzen 2400g shows it was designed or tested up to 2933 RAM. My RAM is 3200 1.35v, but my CPU can't go that fast. For me, it have been fully stable at 3066 RAM for weeks. If I go any higher like 3133 or 3200, random crash, BSOD, Prime95 errors, or computer beeps on power up.

[Zeranov]

On 2019-04-09 at 8:32 PM, sam686 said:

Maybe drop the RAM speed down to 2667. Ryzen 1600X was only designed or tested up to 2667 RAM speed.
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_5/1600x
https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-5-1600x

I tried Memtest86+ and it passed 9 test cycles in 10h without any problems. But I reduced the speed afterwards because my OC increased performance by merely ~1%.

Anyway, I went on with standard clocks anywhere in my system and today Warframe froze again while standing for half an hour in the Orbiter. So I tested every other component in my system and came to the conclusion that it's either a problem within Warframe or my graphics card is somehow faulty...