The inability to properly play Warframe - since October 2014

[Khunvyel]

16 hours ago, TheDarkness506 said:

I guess they won't drop XP support anytime soon since it is a large part of the playerbase.

But is it? According to steam stats of June 2016 only 1.7% of people use windows XP. About less than two years ago, I believe [DE]Glen said something like 1 in 20 uses windows XP (that's 5%) and 1 in 6 either uses a laptop or is still on a 32bit system (don't quote me on any of it, but it was one of the first devstreams featuring Glen). So in no way is this a "large part".

16 hours ago, TheDarkness506 said:

To fix this, you need Win7 x64 or more VRAM. That's it.

This is true for the OS side, but not true for the Vram side. It doesn't matter if I used a card with 512 MB Vram or 2048MB of Vram. Warframe kept crashing on Windows XP no matter what. And I'm absolutely positive that any higher amount of Vram than 2GB won't matter anyhow due to how memory allocation works during Windows XP. If I manage to get a hold of a 4GB card for a day or so, I'll throw it into my old rig to try, but I'm willing to bet money it won't change a thing.

We did establish that if a player has windows XP, they're screwed nowadays. We've also established that with a 32bit system that is not Windows XP (so Vista and 7 upwards) it takes a while until you're screwed. Hardware is not the issue here. I'd like to see someone using a 64bit version of Windows XP with tons of RAM but I doubt we'll see that test happen any time soon.

The main culprit is still how Windows XP distributes stuff into Vram and physical RAM, not to mention the hard cap of 2GB for user memory. Trying to increase that to 3GB with a startup parameter makes the computer bluescreen almost instantly through Warframe.
The other culprit is a mix of offloading memory and the failure to do so too. It sounds weird, but with 16GB of RAM, and extensive sessions hopping through all tilesets, one would think Warframe might reserve more memory to keep that stuff stored as long as there is RAM available, but it doesn't. Yes, sure, I know that textures are stored in Vram, but it's a lot faster to reload them from system RAM than from SSD / HDD.

As usual, the closing words to pretty much all of this as repeated are;

1. The minimum system requirements being Windows XP are no longer correct. Great parts of content are being blocked out simply because of the inability of Windows XP machines to cope. No amount of detail reduction, resolution shrink or memory footprint minimization manages to make that work.
2. Anything beyond Windows XP still running on 32bit is bound to have troubles during extended sessions, depending on hardware configurations.

Acknowledgement or correction of these statements from the developer side would be much appreciated. I still want to know about that windows XP test rig they have and what it's running on, and what the memory footprint is at a fresh system start. That is, if they're still having that rig.
As hard as it may sound, but their smartest choice would be to drop Windows XP support. Then they only need to get the memory unload and storage right and everything will be silky smooth again. Oh, that, and of course finding out the reason what makes performance drop ridiculously low the moment you have just one additional Warframe player in your team, just standing in your view. Maybe that was an XP problem too and was based on memory? Damned if I know.

I really do miss the days of pre-update 15, when none of these problems happened. I was really surprised with the amount of performance I could wiggle out of my old computer on Warframe.

PS: Technically, it's probably also an issue with DirectX 9.0c but hey, you know, technicalities. Although now I'M curious what would happen if I disable all the launcher goodies.

...I must be high on masochism.

Edited August 5, 2016 by Khunvyel