Long booting time since i recently switched to DirectX 12 - Is that normal ?

[Yulfan]

Alright. I really don't know if it's a bug or if it's me who needs to change something in my PC settings. But since this is a purely technical question, i thought it would be better to come here rather than in Helping Players.

As stated in the title, i switched from  DirectX 11 to DirectX 12 in the launcher. I never really paid attention to it before (because it is written it is in a beta state), but this video convinced me to try it out.

As recommended by the youtuber, i've verified and optimized the Download Cache right after the launcher completed his download. And overall, i followed all the settings he is showing, both in the Nvidia Control Panel and in Warframe.

Since then, i have absolutely no problem whatsoever when the game is running. No bug, no crash, and a steady 60 fps. Btw, i'm really impressed with how fast the game is loading now between missions, orbiter, hub, etc… Really nice stuff.

However, when launching the game (when i click Play on the launcher), the game take way more time to boot compared to when it was running with DirectX 11. The game appear in my taskbar, but the window is invisible and the mouseover only show a greyed window.

I can alt+tab and do other things without any problem. It takes a little over 2 minutes (timed) for the keyart of the update (Loid and Excalibur) to finally appear. And as i said, once the game is running, no problem at all.

The question is: is this normal? Is this inherent to DirectX 12 or is this a sign of a problem with my settings?

My specs:

• AMD Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon Graphics 2.90 GHz
• 16GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU

Edited January 24 by Yulfan

[Yulfan]

Bumping up this because even after multiple updates and after trying to change setting here and there, this 2 min booting time still persist. I have no idea how to fix it. Please, send help :(

[Nekomian]

Load / boot times shouldn't be significantly impacted by the D3D driver, those would solely be related to disk read speeds. I'd open task manager while it's loading and see what your disk usage is like - if it's stuck at 100% active usage the whole time, it's probably some bottleneck related to that.

[Yulfan]

Le 01/03/2024 à 05:29, Naroxas44 a dit :

Load / boot times shouldn't be significantly impacted by the D3D driver, those would solely be related to disk read speeds. I'd open task manager while it's loading and see what your disk usage is like - if it's stuck at 100% active usage the whole time, it's probably some bottleneck related to that.

I'm not familiar with Task Manager stats and metrics, but at the very least i can assure that nothing have ever reached 100%, be it during the booting of the game or during gameplay. I can even run a buttload of tabs on Firefox and even run Youtube on my second monitor at the same time, no problem.

[Nekomian]

It would be in the "performance" tab, under one of your disks (whichever one you have Warframe installed on). I'm specifically referring to the "active time" stat, like here: 

5 hours ago, Yulfan said:

I can even run a buttload of tabs on Firefox and even run Youtube on my second monitor at the same time, no problem

These aren't affected by disk activity at all and are more reliant on how much RAM you have (each tab allocating some space for itself and the video feed caching into RAM to be read by the GPU / put in some frame buffer to display on the monitor when ready). Something that would be equivalent would be if opening Firefox or other games or apps also take a while, or if booting Windows takes a prolonged amount of time too.

[Yulfan]

Ok, i understand. Thank for the explanation ^^

Il y a 7 heures, Naroxas44 a dit :

It would be in the "performance" tab, under one of your disks (whichever one you have Warframe installed on). I'm specifically referring to the "active time" stat, like here: 

So i check the active time during the booting and during gameplay (a ~20 min solo run in Circulus) with nothing else opened:

• During booting, it stay very low, around 0-1%, with spikes between ~30% and ~60%.
• During gameplay, it also stay around 0-7% most of the time with very rare spikes between ~10% and ~50%.

What do you think?

[Nekomian]

As long as it's not at constantly 100%, it should be fine - my main concern was if it's on a drive that's failing or struggling to reach high read speeds, it might be stuck at 100% active usage, and would cause slow program loads.

I'm thinking it's probably not that then - we could try and look in the EE log it generates and see if that has more info though. You can get that from either the launcher settings (get logs button) or go to the '%localappdata%/Warframe' directory in file explorer. It has some sensitive info in it (like email and PC name) so don't post the full thing anywhere here, but it should give you timestamps of when everything is loaded. There might be something it's specifically getting stuck on if you take a look there, would be my next suggestion.

[Yulfan]

I took a look at the EE.log but it's a mess of data, i don't know what to look at :S

There's a lot of executing timer for most of the lines, but it's always in milli or micro seconds, nothing that's seems really slow.

The only thing i find suspicious is this:

11.709 Net [Info]: Created virtual connection for: REDACTED [handle: 0]
11.709 Net [Info]: NetDriver::SetConnectionTimeout setting connection 0 timeout to 20 * 1
11.709 Sys [Info]: Contact received; sending challenge to Joueur. Setting connection timeout to 20
129.566 Sys [Info]: Resloader REDACTED (16 root types) starting
129.571 Sys [Info]: Loaded 0/9601 resources at 0 ms/frame
129.575 Net [Info]: NetDriver::SetConnectionTimeout setting connection 0 timeout to 7.5 * 1

(idk what i redacted, but the 1st one look like an ip adress so just in case)

I have absolutely no idea what does that mean, but it's weird how this specific value jump from "11.709 Sys" to "129.566 Sys" while it increases more or less linearly everywhere else in the document. But no idea if it's normal or not.

 

EDIT: I realized that 129 seconds (or 2 min 09) is exactly the time i am waiting between pressing Play on the launcher and the keyart finally appearing. So my problem is clearly related to what is happening at this moment.

Edited March 3 by Yulfan

[Yulfan]

I noticed something else in Defrag.log:

7.576 Sys [Info]: Defragmenting /Cache.Windows/B.Misc.cache
130.013 Sys [Info]: >>> Wrote 5,261,885,323 bytes at 42,976,267 B/s

5,261,885,323 / 42,976,267 ≈ 122, or 2 min 02, which is once again rougly the time i am waiting. Is the time taken for defragmenting this thing the root of the problem? Or just the consequence?

Edited March 3 by Yulfan

[Nekomian]

3 hours ago, Yulfan said:

Is the time taken for defragmenting this thing the root of the problem? Or just the consequence?

Is that file the same date as the last session? Mine is dated from December 2023 - I think this is just the general logging for the "optimize" process the launcher does, so it shouldn't run through this every time. That speed is rather slow though, it's showing 42MB/s writes, which is what I'd expect from a HDD rather than any modern SSD (both SATA III & NVME), but it's possible it's a lot of smaller files causing some overhead here. Mine looks like this:

6.444 Sys [Info]: Defragmenting /Cache.Windows/B.Misc.cache
18.224 Sys [Info]: >>> Wrote 5,301,162,064 bytes at 450,051,962 B/s

So about 12s at 450MB/s. I guess I should confirm to make sure - what disk specifically do you have Warframe installed to (just like, the name of it and/or model should be sufficient, like Samsung 980 Pro or something similar)? I'm curious if moving the game to another disk would resolve this or not, but I'm not sure if that's an option for you or if it's the main cause of the issue still, just that the reported speeds in that defrag log are a bit slow by modern drive standards.

Looking at my own EE log, yours should say something like: "Sys [Info]: Startup time" as well - could you take a look at that? Mine says 8.86s, I'm curious to see what yours is reporting - if it's a high value, it's likely waiting on something during the startup portion to complete. It looks like the majority of that process is setting up / detecting hardware, loading caches, and establishing a localhost connection and loading the level for the session, which has me thinking - without trying to spoil anything too much since I'm not sure how many quests you've played, have you changed your default "starting point" or do you load into the Orbiter on logging in (i.e. you just see space and planets in front of you)? If not, I'd try to set it to that and see if that helps.

12 hours ago, Yulfan said:

idk what i redacted, but the 1st one look like an ip adress so just in case

Bit of a tangent but, if it was 127.0.0.1, that is "localhost" - it's just a self-referential IP systems use to basically talk to themselves / establish connections locally in a loopback, bypassing any other network hardware. If it started with 192, it's likely a private / local IP - these are assigned by your network hardware (i.e. router) and used internally, so it knows how to route traffic to whichever client. Both of these don't need redacting since they're solely for local use.

[Yulfan]

My Defrag.log is from 2024/01/11 so right when i switched to DirectX 12 (and i started this topic the day after) but yes, it was not recreated since then.

My PC Laptop (ROG Strix G713IC) only have one SSD named "INTEL SSDPEKNUS512GZ". It has 453Go total capacity, with 342Go used and 110Go left.

My EE.log say "12.166 Sys [Info]: Startup time: 12.2s" so not far from yours.

And about the spoilery part, no: it's been month i haven't moved from the default starting point, even before switching DirectX. I prefer space.

 

Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions and trying to find a solution 😘

[Nekomian]

21 minutes ago, Yulfan said:

INTEL SSDPEKNUS512GZ

OK sweet, so this is a perfectly fine drive - definitely not an issue with it or anything. More info about it is here, but it should be perfectly serviceable for the majority of tasks you can throw at it: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Solidigm/SSDPEKNU512GZ?qs=DRkmTr78QARg5a9xrcyEGg%3D%3D

23 minutes ago, Yulfan said:

My EE.log say "12.166 Sys [Info]: Startup time: 12.2s" so not far from yours.

OK, so this is telling me that the actual startup time that the game spends detecting and loading things, before it kicks off the main loop, only takes 12s or so. So, something is pausing and/or preventing the game itself from proceeding after it opens at all, but I don't think it's anything caused by Warframe itself.

The only other thing I could think of would be some external software - I'm seeing reports of stuff like ASUS Armory Crate causing problems (https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/17kd2un/steam_games_taking_forever_to_launch/), and other OEM bloatware can cause similar issues. It's "supposed" to enhance gaming experiences but, in my experience it's often very rushed development and extremely buggy / untested - MSI dragon center straight up blue screens my entire system when I used it, as an example. I'd remove or disable these (if present) and test it again to see if that helps - you can always reinstall them later too, but seeing if they're causing the problems should isolate them at least.

31 minutes ago, Yulfan said:

Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions and trying to find a solution 😘

Of course! I'm happy to help others out where I can!😸

[Yulfan]

Il y a 6 heures, Naroxas44 a dit :

The only other thing I could think of would be some external software - I'm seeing reports of stuff like ASUS Armory Crate causing problems (https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/17kd2un/steam_games_taking_forever_to_launch/), and other OEM bloatware can cause similar issues. It's "supposed" to enhance gaming experiences but, in my experience it's often very rushed development and extremely buggy / untested - MSI dragon center straight up blue screens my entire system when I used it, as an example. I'd remove or disable these (if present) and test it again to see if that helps - you can always reinstall them later too, but seeing if they're causing the problems should isolate them at least.

I uninstalled Armory Crate but no change. I already had it before switching without any problem so i don't think this is the cause. The OP in the reddit post say that all his games were impacted by this problem but in my case, it's only Warframe. All my other games are booting normally.

I am trying to verify/optimize again in the launcher to see if it can do anything but (nope) i may ends up having to uninstall/reinstall the game to try clean things up. Not sure if it will work tho… *sigh*

EDIT: uninstall/reinstall the game didn't solved the issue T.T

Edited March 4 by Yulfan

[Eternal]

I figured I'd throw my two cents in here I have a few ideas for you. One thing that might be causing this is the inital shader preload with the dx12 shaders. So the nvidia driver will handle these into a shader cache once things have compiled so it doesn't have to compile a new effect everytime you see it in game. However if there are other shader files already in your gpu driver, warframe could be exceeding your maximum shader cache size allowance which by default is 4gb I believe? which would delete your shader cache everytime you quit out of the game. There's a simple way to test this, inside nvidia control panel under "Manage 3D settings" in global settings you can set your shader cache size limit to whatever value you want, you can try 10gb first to see if this helps you out.

The other thing that comes to mind is your gpu, the rtx 3050 only has 4gb of vram. Now this should be enough for warframe but under dx12 with the specialized shaders you can actually exceed that really fast, especially with other open programs on your pc like chrome. To give an example I actually use almost 8gb of vram in the new entrati labs tileset while in dx12 vs in dx11 I only use about 4gb, and that's just the in game reporting. I'd look at task manager again and see in the performance tab how much vram is pooling up on your gpu, if it's hitting over 100% vram usage while on startup as it loads your shader file that could possibly be the problem as well as it will start to offload that to system ram until the game finishes loading and then memory swaps that back onto your gpu (or even worse your system ram is filling up into a pagefile you can look at this in task manager as well).

And the simplest thing if all else fails, do a clean install of your gpu drivers, there's a really great tool called DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) that will clean your entire registry and any remnants of your gpu driver so you can do a nice fresh install of the latest nvidia driver, usually the first thing I do when I have weird performance issues with any of my games as over time there can be conflicts with older drivers as you constantly install over them

Hope you figure it out 🙂

[Yulfan]

Il y a 9 heures, Zenviscerator a dit :

I figured I'd throw my two cents in here I have a few ideas for you. One thing that might be causing this is the inital shader preload with the dx12 shaders. So the nvidia driver will handle these into a shader cache once things have compiled so it doesn't have to compile a new effect everytime you see it in game. However if there are other shader files already in your gpu driver, warframe could be exceeding your maximum shader cache size allowance which by default is 4gb I believe? which would delete your shader cache everytime you quit out of the game. There's a simple way to test this, inside nvidia control panel under "Manage 3D settings" in global settings you can set your shader cache size limit to whatever value you want, you can try 10gb first to see if this helps you out.

The other thing that comes to mind is your gpu, the rtx 3050 only has 4gb of vram. Now this should be enough for warframe but under dx12 with the specialized shaders you can actually exceed that really fast, especially with other open programs on your pc like chrome. To give an example I actually use almost 8gb of vram in the new entrati labs tileset while in dx12 vs in dx11 I only use about 4gb, and that's just the in game reporting. I'd look at task manager again and see in the performance tab how much vram is pooling up on your gpu, if it's hitting over 100% vram usage while on startup as it loads your shader file that could possibly be the problem as well as it will start to offload that to system ram until the game finishes loading and then memory swaps that back onto your gpu (or even worse your system ram is filling up into a pagefile you can look at this in task manager as well).

And the simplest thing if all else fails, do a clean install of your gpu drivers, there's a really great tool called DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) that will clean your entire registry and any remnants of your gpu driver so you can do a nice fresh install of the latest nvidia driver, usually the first thing I do when I have weird performance issues with any of my games as over time there can be conflicts with older drivers as you constantly install over them

Hope you figure it out 🙂

Thank you for your input 👍

So, i tried to change the shader cache size to 10Gb and even 100Gb, but it didn't change anything. The game still has this long booting time. So i set it back to the default value.

When it come to the task manager, since i'm not sure what value to check, i took screenshots (it's in French, but the values should be at the same places). But overall, nothing seems to reach insanely high values.

- Here is what it look like when the "invisible" game window appear (during ~2 minutes):

Révélation

- And here is what it look like when the update keyart appear, followed by the login screen after a short loading:

Révélation

I haven't tried the DDU yet since it seems like a fairly heavy procedure. I'm currently reading their guide: https://www.wagnardsoft.com/content/DDU-Guide-Tutorial

[Nekomian]

Apologies for the late reply, it's been a busy week and it slipped my mind haha.

9 hours ago, Zenviscerator said:

However if there are other shader files already in your gpu driver, warframe could be exceeding your maximum shader cache size allowance which by default is 4gb I believe? which would delete your shader cache everytime you quit out of the game.

I would think it would cause stutters at runtime then, as opposed to increased start loads - this game doesn't do any sort of precompiling like others do, it's only on-demand shader compilation. It's possible this could be introducing its own issues sure, but I'm not sure how likely it is - unless OP plays a ton of games (or very very large ones), mine is only at 1.6GiB after 4 months (and like 15 different games), so not even half of the default size. I'd also think the cache would be smart enough to remove the oldest compiled shaders that aren't needed anymore to store new ones for more recent games, but I dunno about that / would have to see how the driver handles that.

I don't think it's a RAM / VRAM issue either - 4GB is plenty serviceable for anything this game has, mine never even goes above 3GB when I check. Even if it gets filled, it should just rely on RAM to keep values it may need to access or retrieve into VRAM later, and that's still orders of magnitude faster than disk (i.e. shouldn't take 2 mins for anything whatsoever). I could understand a pagefile might be used with 4 or 8GB of RAM on modern games, just because they have so many assets that are required at once, but I don't think it's the case here since only this one game is affected too. I do know they mentioned a ton of Firefox tabs, but those should auto-suspend as memory is needed.

On 2024-03-04 at 12:28 AM, Yulfan said:

EDIT: uninstall/reinstall the game didn't solved the issue T.T

I still think it might be some other program causing problems - do you just use default Windows Defender for stuff like virus / malware protection, or do you use something more involved? If so, I'd try briefly swapping to Windows Defender (it should let you set which one to use in Windows settings, at least that's how it works with Malwarebytes) and seeing if that could also resolve things. You could also take a look at msconfig and disable any startup services or programs that aren't Microsoft related or absolutely needed - I'd usually suggest safe mode with networking, but I don't think Warframe will even attempt to get past the launcher with the default VGA driver they use in this mode haha. More info about that tool is here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/msconfig-the-system-configuration-tool/273dea8e-4cbe-47e9-8489-f400e879ce17

[Yulfan]

Le 06/03/2024 à 21:41, Naroxas44 a dit :

Apologies for the late reply, it's been a busy week and it slipped my mind haha.

Haha, don't worry, i've been busy too. And it's not really an urgent issue: it's just 2 min in the end x)

Le 06/03/2024 à 21:41, Naroxas44 a dit :

unless OP plays a ton of games (or very very large ones)

No, i don't play a lot of games at the same time, and i tend to uninstall the ones i'm not actively playing to free space. For example right now, i've Warframe, FFXIV, No Man's Sky and Helldivers 2 installed on my computer. And i don't think they can be considered as very very large.

Le 06/03/2024 à 21:41, Naroxas44 a dit :

do you just use default Windows Defender for stuff like virus / malware protection, or do you use something more involved?

I'm using Avast, but i've put Warframe on it's exception list, so it shouldn't even try to mess with it.

But maybe i've done it wrong. The path i gave is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Warframe\*". Should i put the Steam folder as a whole in the exception list?

 

I'll try Defender and msconfig this weekend.

Edited March 8 by Yulfan

[Yulfan]

Problem solved in the weirdest way possible: i installed GeForce Experience Ôõ

I was quite busy recently so i didn't had time to try the last few advices (DDU, Defender, msconfig). But i wanted to do a bit of recording yesterday for another game (more specifically, i needed to "last 5 min record" feature) so i installed GFE. And later when launching Warframe, i discover that the game started immediately… \o/

My guess is that when i installed GFE, i also updated my driver. It still confuse me tho because i always keep my PC up to date, but maybe GFE have access to driver update earlier than regular Win Update, or it completely ignored it all this time (is this even possible??).

Anyway, problem solved. No more 2 minutes waits, it's all that matters ^^

Edited March 17 by Yulfan

[Nekomian]

9 hours ago, Yulfan said:

maybe GFE have access to driver update earlier than regular Win Update

Ah. I would not use Windows Update for driver updates - they're horribly outdated. I would always use the manufacturer's direct support page any time you need updates, or in this case their application (GeForce Experience). You can even set it to download them in the background and it'll let you know when there's an update, that's what I do. It's usually only once a month or so, and takes a few minutes to update.

Glad you got it sorted!