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Hunting Hitches


[DE]Glen
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Great post.

 

Something else I think most don't really look out for are the other processes running in a computer. The only time I've ever had hitches was with something like a browser window open in the background, or windows update downloading the latest whatever when trying to play. Luckily my antivirus usually knows when not to do scans, so that has rarely been an issue.

 

My specs for most of the time I've played Warframe (I've recently upgraded):

Intel E8500 (Core 2 Duo)

4-8GB RAM

GTX 560 (non-Ti)

Windows 7 64-bit

 

My drivers were mostly always up to date (even better now with GeForce Experience), and I rarely experienced any hitches, with the exception of those outlined in the OP; loading of adjacent tiles, or those shaders and processor not being able to pre-cache everything necessary.

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Shader streaming is bad performance. Look what happened to Thief

Not saying to stream everything, just what's appropriate. Additionally, that's using a different engine. That would be putting a layer on top of the engine they used, since it wasn't theres. Obvious problems there.

 

That aside: If it's causing hitches when it all loads at once, having a hitch that's 100 milliseconds during 1 second(100/second average), is obviously a bigger issue than having that 100 milliseconds spread out over 30+ seconds(3/second average or less).

 

And this would only be while it's still finding the shaders--at some point, the maps eventually have run out of "new stuff" they need.

 

It wouldn't be hard to do, it'd just be necessary for the game to make sure it optimizes what it bothers with. That shouldn't be too overwhelming to automate.

 

The game still has to load the stuff, any way you cut it, but if it figures it out ahead of time, then there's very little that needs to happen when it actually gets to the points where the hitches occur now.

 

Very few people are going to notice a 3/1000th of a second difference during the beginning parts of a mission. If the probabilities are done correctly, it would most likely not even occur during actual battles.

 

I don't think anything in the game is quite that precise as to be worried about it.

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As someone who has a lot of experience  with low-end PCs for around 15 years, I've seen them all, and 90% of times I upgraded it did solve my problems with the game I was aiming to improve (FPS wise). 

 

But Warframe is baffling me...currently I'm running on a  i5 650 @ 3.2 GHZ, 4GB RAM, GTX 460, and the game's running at around ~40 FPS all maxed, which is fine for me.

Back in the closed beta days It had its fairly low FPSs drops but really no hitches.

 

Nowadays since U12, everytime I'm not host (but not always) the game hitches...or rather...simply stops for around 10 seconds. I mean it literally freezes for so long that the host won't receive any data from me so it's assuming I lost connection, kicking me from the room or forcing me into a host migration where I find myself all alone. ( This seems to have been fix by a lot since U12.6, because now it freezes for 2 seconds at the most, never been kicked since then)

Strangely tho, when I host the game it actually runs smoother (which doesn't make any sense) and I have almost NO hitches, besides a small stutter when it's processing shaders.

 

But yes, I am assuming that the shader loading problem is what most people are having the hitches from.

Could you maybe somehow save the processed shaders into the end-match info, look over them, see which were the ones loaded the most and make them load while in the loading screen instead of on-demand...focusing on vertex shaders...since for me (at least) using Volt's speed zorencoptering across a wide area almost always results in a 0.5 second stutter.

I mean, the game has dynamic lights, but even so, pre-processing a whole level's light sources wouldn't really take that much time if I'm correct (levels aren't exactly open world 100 km maps) ,even taking into account reflections from certain surfaces, right?

Even if the loading time increases by 20 seconds, I'm sure everyone will appreciate a more FPS happy game.

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I had those hitches yesterday, every 5 seconds one, but only while in the menus. Ingame everything was ok. But when i finish the mission and return, they came back. Relogging wouldnt help, restarting Warframe either. After i restarted my PC tho, its fine.

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Currently I had two weird type of hitches.

One is when the game was completely stuck for a few seconds, it happened to me in the new grineer cell block. After entering the room, I immediately went to the left to avoid patrols, so until I arrived to the bottom left side of the room, I almost haven't had any look on the room.

The other type of hitch was a constant 10 fps for a time, which disappeared immediately when I went through a door.

I'm using an athlon x2 @3ghz with 6gb of ram and an ati 7790.

From the writeup I'd suspect that it might be a combination of the random level generation, the shader compilation and the used machines (I have pretty slow HDD for example). Why I'm saying this, is mostly that the shader load can easily become unpredictable with random tiles after each other, so maybe the problem lies in the caching/memory management system which can be easily (dunno how to say it) overloaded (?) when it comes to drop a lot of stuff immediately when a bunch of new stuff wants to come in.

Edited by tmtke
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Have you got runtime tessellation enabled?

 

I did indeed, I'll try with it off, I got a i5 3570K 3.4GHz, HD6970 btw

 

Still find it odd my performance is just fine 95% of the time and only crawls in certain rooms, they seem to have those orokin trees/tentacles in common.

Edited by KriLL3
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For issue number 1 on the drivers, there's often two causes.

A - People are relying on the Device Manager's driver update function.
B - People are only checking the site of the company that assembled the laptop/desktop.

Both might be helped somewhat if DE pointed out (whenever/wherever driver updates are mentioned) that the player needs to go to the company that designed their main GPU chip (Nvidia, ATI, etc.) and check for updated drivers there, as that's the place to actually get the most recent updates, while options A and B are most often outdated for varying (some understandable and some not) reasons.

 

EDIT: Clarified something.  Old habits die hard when talking about end users and driver issues!

Edited by Rydian
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This is good stuff. As for me, after U13 I'd start getting occasional split-second hitches apparently at random playing both online and solo. Once or twice I've seen like a blank beige color the instant after a door opens but then it resolves into whatever's supposed to be there. I play on a high-end laptop (i7-4900 CPU, 32gb RAM, GTX780M video card, Win8.1) and never noticed any problems until after U13 deployed. I'm running the latest release of Nvidia drivers (thanks, Geforce Experience!).

 

I do usually have Chrome running in the background so I'll give it a try without it up and see how that does, though it was never an issue in the past. I was playing for a few hours last night and I don't think I noticed any hitches, so maybe there's a bit of light at the end of my particular tunnel.

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B - People are only checking the site of the company that assembled the laptop/desktop.

 

Do laptops still have locked drivers you can only install from the laptop OEM? Remember that being a thing a bunch of years ago and it causing all kinds of problems because laptop OEMs usually just released a few driver versions, when they got new models they stopped supporting the older ones, it's silly though because as far as I know those drivers are the same ones AMD/Nvidia put out, the OEM just acted some weird QA.

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Do laptops still have locked drivers you can only install from the laptop OEM? Remember that being a thing a bunch of years ago and it causing all kinds of problems because laptop OEMs usually just released a few driver versions, when they got new models they stopped supporting the older ones, it's silly though because as far as I know those drivers are the same ones AMD/Nvidia put out, the OEM just acted some weird QA.

Unfortunately some companies still do that crap, but from what I've seen it's gotten a little better.

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Since latest hotfix, horrible, horrible hitches.

I'm not talking split seconds, lockups for a second or two, every couple of seconds, BUT :

 

ONLY when going towards a new area of the map, it seems to be the loading of the unexplored tiles that causes it.

Once loaded everything is buttery smooth as normal, like the game has always been for me.

 

This is a new problem, was fine yesterday on the same tileset (Jupiter - Elara)

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The one I experienced many times for seemingly no reason at all. just moving through a mission at a normal pace and boom my game drops to what appears to be 1 fps. But I've seen some weird stuff with these "hitches" like watch my character get frozen but the water on the floor is still shimmering with local reflections. It was like time slowed down but the water was unaffected.

 

This slow down only lasted 2-4 seconds in most cases and happened to me in nearly every mission type, and every tileset. but only after U13. Since then it appears to have been patched out. Somehow I get the feeling that it was game engine related. The water lead me to think this.

Edited by Sirabot
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Some people have speculated that hitches coincident with doors opening were caused by content being loaded; this is extremely unlikely as we do not stream worlds this way. Tiles may go to sleep but their geometry and low-resolution textures stay resident; furthermore we don't actually respect doors when deciding if something should sleep so any issues related to it would not occur right as the door opens.

 

What about this?

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I really want Glen's avatar :P

 

Warframe is a bit odd for me: My 3 year old gaming rig (now mostly used by my kids) runs perfectly, no issues at all. My twin titan monster hits places that send it into spasms,.

 

Go figure.

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I personally have been experiencing these "hitches" since the time of the new Earth tilesets, with the Cicero Event. Been trying to get it fixed via support for a month and so far none of the methods have been working permanently.

 

Some of my friends suggested increasing my virtual memory on my computer, and even then that didn't work for sure. I shall test restoring my defaults, though.

 

*EDIT*

 

I've noticed that mine aren't mostly with door-opening issues but rather TURNING issues when I'm moving too fast; the game lags and hitches when I just sporadically turn around or try to move too fast, even with zooming in.

Edited by Etsoree
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I have been experiencing hitches since u13 but it would mostly occur when i join a game or start a game with other people. The times it does happen, one of two things happen. The hitch lasts for about 10-15 seconds and goes away or after the hitch i lose everyone in the mission and im by myself.

 

I run on an intel core i3-3110 at 2.4 ghz

-6gb ram

x64 bit system

Intel HD 4000

Disk drive running at 5400 rpm

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I have been experiencing hitches since u13 but it would mostly occur when i join a game or start a game with other people. The times it does happen, one of two things happen. The hitch lasts for about 10-15 seconds and goes away or after the hitch i lose everyone in the mission and im by myself.

 

I run on an intel core i3-3110 at 2.4 ghz

-6gb ram

x64 bit system

Intel HD 4000

Disk drive running at 5400 rpm

 

I see your issue: negative six gigabytes of RAM.

 

Sorry, just couldn't resist.

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I've noticed that mine aren't mostly with door-opening issues but rather TURNING issues when I'm moving too fast; the game lags and hitches when I just sporadically turn around or try to move too fast, even with zooming in.

 

This is probably exactly the same problem as opening a door because if you turn too fast we might not get occlusion-query results in time to know that areas are blocked off -- in effect we have to assume that objects are visible that might otherwise be correctly occluded and end up uploading a bunch of shaders earlier than we might have liked.

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