FPS Drop/Freezing during Crossplay

[Salenstormwing]

In solo, I can play Warframe just fine. And a few weeks ago, I had no issues. After the last major update though, playing with Crossplatform Play has caused the game to stutter very badly and threaten to crash, or crash outright.

I play on PC, via Steam. I have an i7-10700KF, 32GB ram, a 4070, and all stored on an M2, so it should be very fast, yet the game is real bad at times.

I've crashed at the start of playing, by launching a mission and having the game become a stuttery mess, then it would crash, or it could be quite a few missions things are fine and then suddenly the game just stutters and acts unplayable.

I tried Solo after a crash and I had no problem there. I even turned down my graphic settings to try and stop these weird issues. Once I had it occur while scanning a Simaris target. Again there were 3 other players in the match at the time. I might see if NO Crossplay fixes the issue, or just be stuck running solo missions.

I'm just not sure, I just know when it happens, it seems like there are 4 players and something is going wrong with the game.

[Nekomian]

I'd make sure you have your GPU drivers updated for that RTX 4070 and that you've verified & optimized the install from launcher settings. I don't think this is related to crossplay (it's quite literally just connecting to a different matchmaking service and may use different ports) since it does not affect rendering times whatsoever, but what may be happening is you're getting a ton of invalid shader cache issues or possibly corrupt files. That tracks with it stuttering, since it would continually be trying to resolve this and it usually occurs after major / mainline updates.

You can attempt to clear it by removing everything in the "%LocalAppData%\NVIDIA\DXCache" directory, though it will cause stutters when it rebuilds during gameplay. I'd also suggest switching to DX11 if DX12 is causing issues, as it's more stable for this game in my experience (I only ever get crashes on DX12).

[Salenstormwing]

1 hour ago, Naroxas44 said:

I'd make sure you have your GPU drivers updated for that RTX 4070 and that you've verified & optimized the install from launcher settings. I don't think this is related to crossplay (it's quite literally just connecting to a different matchmaking service and may use different ports) since it does not affect rendering times whatsoever, but what may be happening is you're getting a ton of invalid shader cache issues or possibly corrupt files. That tracks with it stuttering, since it would continually be trying to resolve this and it usually occurs after major / mainline updates.

You can attempt to clear it by removing everything in the "%LocalAppData%\NVIDIA\DXCache" directory, though it will cause stutters when it rebuilds during gameplay. I'd also suggest switching to DX11 if DX12 is causing issues, as it's more stable for this game in my experience (I only ever get crashes on DX12).

I did a driver update on Sunday night. Haven't played enough to see if that was the issue or not. I know the previous drivers were from earlier in October, so it's possible that they were corrupted. I would expect if it was the drivers though, that there would have been issues in other games I play, but only Warframe seemed to be effected.

If it happens again, I might try downgrading the video settings to DX11 then, in case that is what is at fault.

Edit: Oh yeah, I also verified and optimized the files. That was one of the first things I did.

Edited October 31, 2023 by Salenstormwing
Quick edit.

[Salenstormwing]

For whatever reason, I disabled UPnP and NAT-PMP and changed the ports, and things worked fine, but when I turned UPnP and NAT-PMP back on, it got super laggy when I hosted because the FPS went down to like 5 FPS, according to the in-game FPS meter. Everything else seemed fine, but it might be that UPnP and NAT-PMP are at fault.

Also, I have DX11 being used in the launcher, so I'm not using DX12.

[Nekomian]

On 2023-11-03 at 9:40 PM, Salenstormwing said:

For whatever reason, I disabled UPnP and NAT-PMP and changed the ports, and things worked fine, but when I turned UPnP and NAT-PMP back on, it got super laggy when I hosted because the FPS went down to like 5 FPS, according to the in-game FPS meter. Everything else seemed fine, but it might be that UPnP and NAT-PMP are at fault.

NAT-PMP is probably not doing anything (unless you have an Apple Airport device or some custom router firmware that specifically is set to use this protocol), but UPnP should only be called / checked prior to matchmaking and not during in-game sessions. The only thing it does is dynamically open ports you have set in-game rather than you manually forwarding the traffic via the routing table from your network equipment, so you can host and join others correctly. It should not affect anything related to performance itself. Could you get a recording of video next time this happens and post it, possibly with some additional hardware metrics (just for the sake of brevity, like CPU / GPU / disk utilization mainly would be the most important)?

It's possible there's some issue with network congestion or the polling rates between connected devices are wildly inconsistent and the engine lowers frame timings to compensate (if it's getting overwhelmed with data and risks constant packet loss), but these routines should run independently from frame rate so I don't think it's likely. I'd need more info to identify and troubleshoot what exactly is going on here, but I don't think it's related to UPnP whatsoever since that's quite literally setting forwarding in your router and that's it. The only thing that could be related is some network config issue since turning off UPnP may cause strict-NAT and a fallback server relay might be used to connect you to squads, which would handle the load on your behalf and directly transmit it to you (acting as a sort of proxy or intermediary step), but I find it really odd that this would cause issues by itself so I honestly don't think it's this (since network problems should just result in disconnects and not crashes or FPS issues).

[Salenstormwing]

14 hours ago, Naroxas44 said:

NAT-PMP is probably not doing anything (unless you have an Apple Airport device or some custom router firmware that specifically is set to use this protocol), but UPnP should only be called / checked prior to matchmaking and not during in-game sessions. The only thing it does is dynamically open ports you have set in-game rather than you manually forwarding the traffic via the routing table from your network equipment, so you can host and join others correctly. It should not affect anything related to performance itself. Could you get a recording of video next time this happens and post it, possibly with some additional hardware metrics (just for the sake of brevity, like CPU / GPU / disk utilization mainly would be the most important)?

It's possible there's some issue with network congestion or the polling rates between connected devices are wildly inconsistent and the engine lowers frame timings to compensate (if it's getting overwhelmed with data and risks constant packet loss), but these routines should run independently from frame rate so I don't think it's likely. I'd need more info to identify and troubleshoot what exactly is going on here, but I don't think it's related to UPnP whatsoever since that's quite literally setting forwarding in your router and that's it. The only thing that could be related is some network config issue since turning off UPnP may cause strict-NAT and a fallback server relay might be used to connect you to squads, which would handle the load on your behalf and directly transmit it to you (acting as a sort of proxy or intermediary step), but I find it really odd that this would cause issues by itself so I honestly don't think it's this (since network problems should just result in disconnects and not crashes or FPS issues).

I've been trying to see if it happens lately with no real success. But I did turn UPnP off so maybe that has something to do with it, or maybe it's just the because I'm not getting hosting.

Also, I've been having weird issues with Windows firewall built into Windows 11, and since just turning it off makes it complain that it's off, I just swapped over to a different firefall application that let me easily unblock Warframe and its traffic.

Network analysis on the System tab in-game shows everything should be fine. So I'll see if anything happens.

As for NAT-PMP, yeah, didn't really know about that. I don't have a ton of hands-on time with Apple products at my workplace.

[Salenstormwing]

Any/all of the changes I made seemed to be fine when I hosted a simple Exterminate Relic on Earth. Super basic but no issue. It did seem to not be totally smooth but it never got into a death spiral where the framerate dipped super low.

I'm not sure what to say. On the plus side, Comodo Firewall seems to have fixed my issues with the game ports being blocked for some reason.

I'll stop posting this (unless the issue comes back), but I still think something happened in one of the previous patches that made the FPS get all weird at times.