game freezes if screen saver comes on

[cha0sWyrM]

take 2...i posted this a few days ago but...seems to have vanished....anyway...

as the title says. if i step away from the game long enough for my screen saver to come on, the game will freeze up when i come back to it.

i can tab out and return, at which point the game will unfreeze for a second or 2 and then freeze again. i can do that over and over as many times as i like. if i need to i can manage to properly exit by moving my mouse and clicking during the 2 seconds it works. usually though ill just end the task.

this started with the recent whispers in the wall update, but is not directly related to that content. it happens 100% of the time the screen saver comes on regardless of what im doing in the game.

[Nekomian]

Are you running in exclusive fullscreen, or borderless fullscreen? I'd recommend borderless fullscreen if you're not, because it can solve the majority of issues where the application is tabbing out or loses focus for some reason or another.

That said, you could also extend the time until screen saver comes on if this is a regular occurrence where you're going to be away from your game for a while, or you could just close the game and re-open it later to save power if it's an extended period. I don't think many people use screensavers anymore nowadays and this might be extremely low priority for their dev team to look at, as it's likely not unique to Warframe but many DX applications.

[cha0sWyrM]

On 2023-12-29 at 12:38 PM, Naroxas44 said:

Are you running in exclusive fullscreen, or borderless fullscreen? I'd recommend borderless fullscreen if you're not, because it can solve the majority of issues where the application is tabbing out or loses focus for some reason or another.

That said, you could also extend the time until screen saver comes on if this is a regular occurrence where you're going to be away from your game for a while, or you could just close the game and re-open it later to save power if it's an extended period. I don't think many people use screensavers anymore nowadays and this might be extremely low priority for their dev team to look at, as it's likely not unique to Warframe but many DX applications.

so yeah...it was in fullscreen. i havent even looked at that setting in years. switching to borderless fullscreen seems to have done the trick, thanks.

i know most people dont use screensavers anymore. i use it because i leave my computer on all the time, its also a source of home media in my "game room".  this ss makes cool psychedelic visuals that literally never repeat ever, and it will sync to music if im playing any. i have kids and a family...sometimes i get up and i think ill be right back and i dont make it back to the computer for 3 hours....lol.

now im just curious...is this a new bug introduced with the whispers in the wall update? or did the update change my settings?

eh...whatevs...its sorted now.
😁👍

[Nekomian]

50 minutes ago, cha0sWyrM said:

its also a source of home media in my "game room".  this ss makes cool psychedelic visuals that literally never repeat ever, and it will sync to music if im playing any. i have kids and a family...sometimes i get up and i think ill be right back and i dont make it back to the computer for 3 hours....lol.

That's a really neat idea! I mostly mentioned closing the game because even in borderless fullscreen it'll keep rendering in the background, which will cause the system to use a lot more power and wear out things like fans faster (since they need to spin faster to keep it within' reasonable temps). It might help to put a background FPS limit in place for situations like this then, so when the screensaver comes on any other apps in the background will be limited since you can't see them. I'm not sure how loud Warframe makes your system either tbf, but it ramps up mine quite a bit so maybe it'll help with that too haha.

57 minutes ago, cha0sWyrM said:

now im just curious...is this a new bug introduced with the whispers in the wall update? or did the update change my settings?

I think in U35 they adjusted some scaling stuff, namely Window Scaling Mode was removed and the enhanced engine is now the only one available (they retired classic). So, it's totally possible that either (or both) are true, if you were using classic or if they messed with some other settings internally. I do know that most exclusive fullscreen apps just don't like to lose focus to anything though, they will often crash if their renderer is halted (which happens when they're "minimized" / lose exclusive monitor focus) and it's why most modern titles support borderless modes (and Windows has "fullscreen optimizations" for apps that don't to try and minimize context switching / the flashing to black that occurs).

Older titles used to only support fullscreen / windowed (with fullscreen getting better performance, bypassing Windows' compositor) because of system limitations and monitor resolution / polling rates able to be configured by the game directly (i.e. you want your desktop to be 800x600 but your game to be 640x480, at different Hz rates), but most modern hardware (and modern games with internal resolution settings & upscaling options) doesn't need to deal with these issues at all and works effectively just as well in modes besides exclusive fullscreen.