A Little Advice?

[Kanaris]

DE has already explained that system resources usage is capped in Warframe. However, that doesn't quite explain why I'm having problems of my own. My FPS is great most of the time at 50 to 60 FPS then tanks at other times for no apparent reason. It's not even a case of alot of actors or effects going on. It just drops to 10 to 20.

Nothing is running in the background, I'm not using Steam, and I'm playing solo when this happens.

My relevant specs:

AMD A6-3420M 1.5 GHz

6 GB DDR3 System RAM

500 GB HDD (230 GB free)

AMD Radeon HD 6520G 512 MB Dedicated RAM + 7670M 1 GB Dedicated RAM

The CPU is quad-core.

Now I am playing on a laptop so I've considered that the power available to my system might be the culprit. This laptop is kind of unique, though, it's an Acer Aspire 7560G. It has a Crossfire configuration with the on-board graphics and the dedicated graphics. It has both. So before anyone says I don't know what I'm talking about, look it up.

On paper, this machine should have no problem running Warframe. I've stripped my running processes down to the bare bones minimum, cleaned up my hard drive, defragmented, and even turned off Aero. It still happens. I set Warframe's application profile to run at various settings. Doesn't seem to help at all.

Am I right that since it's a laptop it just doesn't have the power to run Warframe well? This doesn't make much sense as other games run just fine without any performance hits to speak of (Skyrim, for example, runs at a steady 40+ FPS on medium settings). I've turned all my Warframe settings down to the lowest I can already.

Can anyone help me out here? Tell me some tweaks to try?

Is Warframe's built-in resource allocation cap to blame?

Edited April 2, 2013 by Kanaris

[shoudra]

It might be...might also be the funny p2p going on. As the matchmaking doesn't take it into account you might get a FPS drop from lower connections either the host or you. I just did Phorid and half my shots didn't count because of host connections. Do you get FPS drops in solo?

Edited April 2, 2013 by shoudra

[Kanaris]

I do, yes, but it is far worse in multiplayer.

As a matter of fact, Can You Run It? shows me that not only does my machine pass in every category, it does so with flying colors.

Edited April 2, 2013 by Kanaris

[shoudra]

Sounds like a combo, P2P and maybe hardware. Are you playing with power plugged in and setting power settings to let you do "high performance"?

[Kanaris]

It's always plugged in and I set it to high performance in the application profile, and set the battery manager to high performance.

Can You Run It? doesn't seem to recognize my second graphics card but it's there. Maybe Warframe isn't optimized for Crossfire so it's not utilizing it?

Edited April 2, 2013 by Kanaris

[shoudra]

Could be I have crossfire off myself. The game might not support it sincei it is not in options. Are those drive update messages valid? If so it might help a small bit to do the driver updates.

Edit: Careful with the AMD drivers, I accidently loaded Catalyst 13.x on my computer and mine is no longer supported.

Edited April 2, 2013 by shoudra

[honeybadger]

This situation isnt unique to you. Many others (including myself) have rigs that are more than capaple of running Warframe at a solid 60 fps at bare minimum settings.

When I am in a game with others (host or not) my FPS will tank once S#&$ goes down.

[shoudra]

Either of you reported? Seems like some coding is necessary to get this fixed if they don't know about it. (haven't checked the bug forums)

[Kanaris]

Could be I have crossfire off myself. The game might not support it sincei it is not in options. Are those drive update messages valid? If so it might help a small bit to do the driver updates.

Edit: Careful with the AMD drivers, I accidently loaded Catalyst 13.x on my computer and mine is no longer supported.

Interesting. Yes, I have the latest Catalyst drivers for my hardware, according to AMD's auto updater. That could be the problem.

[shoudra]

I quickly saw a post about the "above spec" and low fps problem give that a bump too. I like how this community for the most part is constructive and like to keep it that wa (might be why I am addicted to the forums here).

[Imbaland]

As requested, my laptop specs. I get impeccable performence, though I play on quite low settings at abut 1300x or so.

[Kanaris]

Thank you, Imbaland, very much. Your laptop is better than mine, though, and I assume your hard disk is an SSD which is much faster.

Still, at least I know that the power supply for my laptop is not the issue.

[Athros]

There are a lot of problem with multi-GPU/Hybrid system, my guesses is :

1. Crossfire if somewhat somehow disabled for Warframe, and your system run it with the integrated GPU only (happened a lot with Nvidia+Intel systems because of crappy Optimus GPU switching detection). Is there any way to force it to run with your discrete GPU, just to make it sure?

2. There aren't any special Crossfire app profile for Warframe yet. Considering that AMD's Hybrid Crossfire is downsided on CPU-side, it's possible that the load on integrated GPU is not balanced enough with the discrete GPU, and that impacted on CPU performance, thus the erratic FPS. Needs some confirmation on other games with the same engine as Warframe, like The Darkness II or Homefront.

I'm not an expert in any of this thing (not even an enthusiast, just a casual gamer), so don't take my words too much...

Edited April 3, 2013 by Athros

[Morcant]

There are a multitude of things you can try. Disable DirectX 11 and/or 64-bit mode in the launcher. Disable any potential power-saving modes your laptop might be running in. Disable asynchonous Crossfire with your CPU's IGP. Buy faster system RAM, since that hamstrings your CPU's IGP. Try different Catalyst driver versions, up to and including the latest beta driver.

The one thing you should not have done, is make another fresh post referring to this post in another sub-forum because you didn't think you got enough attention in the < 90 minutes since your original post. You are the reason forum mods have a hellish task to keep things organized.

Just my $0.02.

[Kanaris]

There are a lot of problem with multi-GPU/Hybrid system, my guesses is :

1. Crossfire if somewhat somehow disabled for Warframe, and your system run it with the integrated GPU only (happened a lot with Nvidia+Intel systems because of crappy Optimus GPU switching detection). Is there any way to force it to run with your discrete GPU, just to make it sure?

2. There aren't any special Crossfire app profile for Warframe yet. Considering that AMD's Hybrid Crossfire is downsided on CPU-side, it's possible that the load on integrated GPU is not balanced enough with the discrete GPU, and that impacted on CPU performance, thus the erratic FPS. Needs some confirmation on other games with the same engine as Warframe, like The Darkness II or Homefront.

I'm not an expert in any of this thing (not even an enthusiast, just a casual gamer), so don't take my words too much...

1. Yeah, I'll try that. I just have to disable Crossfire.

2. I made a new application profile for it, toying with AFR Friendly and Optimized 1x1. I do see an FPS boost overall which gives me some hope.

There are a multitude of things you can try. Disable DirectX 11 and/or 64-bit mode in the launcher. Disable any potential power-saving modes your laptop might be running in. Disable asynchonous Crossfire with your CPU's IGP. Buy faster system RAM, since that hamstrings your CPU's IGP. Try different Catalyst driver versions, up to and including the latest beta driver.

The one thing you should not have done, is make another fresh post referring to this post in another sub-forum because you didn't think you got enough attention in the < 90 minutes since your original post. You are the reason forum mods have a hellish task to keep things organized.

Just my $0.02.

I've tried all of the above except investing in new RAM. I can try that next paycheck.

What I did had nothing to do with attention but with research (helps to have numbers all in one place). You can have your two cents back.

EDIT: Considering I'm a moderator on two other high-traffic boards, I fail to see how me making a few posts here or there would be an issue. Why you're going so far off-topic, though, that's another matter entirely.

Edited April 3, 2013 by Kanaris