Downward Spiral In Game Performance

[Ss3trnks2]

After update 9 there we're definite performance issues being experienced by players. However when they went through and did all the hotfixes, I'm pretty sure they fixed the major performance bugs they had created.

[RaianStar]

I have noticed an improvement in performance however my friend has noticed the reverse, and his machine is better than mine.  I'd imagine that this is just teething problems that they are working on already.

 

The ancients really do damage performance though.  It's scary how much a glitching ancient will grind my machine down to a halt...

Edited July 21, 2013 by RaianStar

[DaemonKaizen]

Yup, it's much better these past few days following the hotfixes...

 

But, There are still lingering snags with the engine... Like the Massive Drop in performance in equally Massive Grineer Encounters. It's either that's an instancing issue (Controlling that many NPC's), or the amount of particles generated during those intense firefights.

 

FPS Drop: 15-20 frames @ Maximum Quality

 

For Better Comparison here are my PC Specs:

 

 

CPU: Intel i7 3770

MOBO: Asrock z77 Extreme6

RAM: 8gb Corsairs (No reason to go beyond 8gb for gaming)

VCARD: PALIT GTX670 2Gb VRAM

 

I suggest we all post our specs, it might give em a general idea of certain - configurations - that might be causing these dips.

 

-----

 

One other thing I noticed, is that The ENGINE seems to be having a hard time "Interpolating" movement.

 

Is that the warping around we see when we have high ping differences?

 

Yes, that.

 

It's a tad bit excessive considering other MODERN Peer to Peer based games (Warframe seems to be a HYBRID of sorts.) out there. It's like they're using an extremely low amount of tolerance for the interpolation for the movement. Making the game -very- sensitive to packet-loss, and delays.

 

I'm sure alot will argue that its not the engines fault and all... And that high ping players are the bane of w/e, the cause of the death of dinosaurs, etc... 

 

Sorry, but no... haha. It shouldn't be this bad. BUT it is understandable, why?

 

Because they couldn't control the "Player's" bandwidth output. Because, some of us out there are Downloading/Torrenting while playing this game, and HOSTING at the same time, in those instances there is absolutely NO WAY, to prevent the warping. (Or they just have terrible DSL Lines, haha.)

 

But, let's forget that worse case scenario and focus on the normal one. 2-4 Players should NOT be experiencing warping issues with a perfectly clean/consistent line regardless of the "latency" (aka Ping, for the laymen). There should only be a "slight" delay with the damage display, and there should be nearly no warping/teleportation for the movement animations. Because no data was lost in transmission.

 

To make it clear, 300ping is 300ms. Yes, Milliseconds... Thats as fast as you blink, Im serious... Unless you can react faster than a human can blink... then I'm afraid to ask what you are, haha. On a more serious note, The only time an interpolation fails, is at extreme excess like .... 1000 ping and ABOVE. that means its a delay of more than 1 Second (1000ms = 1 second) that is just way too obvious and the time difference too great to compensate. Because the location discrepancy is too great. (Which causes the warp/teleport/Flying in the air).

 

But at most, were mostly at 300ping and less... but the game reacts like we live in different planets, haha. Well, for most of us...

 

So, Unfortunately for some reason, we do get warping even at normal conditions. I'm not an engine programmer, but the sensitivity of the game engine, regarding the movement interpolation, atm is a bit much.

 

Perhaps, they should do an OPTIONAL Dedicated Host Server cluster, or a better HOST selection algorithm that can dynamically and unobtrusively switch HOSTING (in the background - to the one with the best average latency to ALL - in the group) between players without interruptions, I believe that would be a colossal task, but a task when successful will streamline a giant CHUNK of the problems plaguing Warframe.

 

(I'm aware of the HOST Migration, Atm although convenient, its too obtrusive and the loss of the items, frustrating.)

 

For some people this ISSUE might be leading them to believe that its a Graphical Performance problem, when its actually more on the game engines NETCODE.

 

@RaianStar

Can you post your PC Specs and your friends? Cuz, what you stated is quiet unusual... and may interest the devs...

Edited July 22, 2013 by DaemonKaizen

[Dessfar]

Hmm I wonder if it's related to the hardware I'm running.  They may be moving towards using different approaches for performance tweaks.

 

I'm running :

 

Intel i7 -  2.9 GHz

16GB Ram

Intel HD4000 Graphics

 

Before update 9, I was able to lower the game resolution and this would boost my framerate.. since the introduction of Fullscreen, Fullscreen Borderless, Windowed.

 

It now makes no difference.  I like how the gameplay area doesn't clip anymore though if it means a hard hit to my framerate and game performance.. then I'll take missing the outer edges of my gaming area any day for a playable game.

 

EDIT : I also acknowledge that in the VOID .. this is the only place I've noticed a performance increase.. and it's likely due to them removing half the shaders and removing excessive lights.

PLEASE GET A NEW GPU.  This game could run max on a GT 630 easily, and you're computer is such a beast in every other aspect.  Please take a look, it's only £50.

[Dessfar]

My specs:

FX-6350 4 GHZ

12gb ddr3 1600mhz ram

GTX 660 oc 2gb.

 

On max, the worst i've had is 40fps

[Lifeshield]

It feels as if network performance is worse.

 

I've honestly never played a four player co-op game where network performance is so bad.

Edited July 21, 2013 by Lifeshield

[Jax_Cavalera]

PLEASE GET A NEW GPU.  This game could run max on a GT 630 easily, and you're computer is such a beast in every other aspect.  Please take a look, it's only £50.

Sadly, as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts.. I'm running a computer that has soldered parts (yeah laptop makers tend to get quite greedy these days and hard-wire your hardware into the motherboard so the only way to upgrade is to buy a new laptop) Nasty but true and they don't exactly advertise this publicly... The only solution I have is to go for an E-GPU  and buy an external monitor and then run the game through that but that "solution" would cost me well over $1000 which is just insane for upgrading a GPU for 1 game that was working just fine before they started tampering with it.

 

To the players claiming network performance is worse, let me assure you that you are 100% correct.  I've not gone into too much depth about my research on this for Warframe yet due to the aim of trying to resolve the cause of my sudden drop in FPS.  However since I think I know what is causing this  (The forced high resolution with Borderless Fullscreen and lack of stretching of lower resolutions like they use to allow) I will add in my findings now.

 

 

I've been waiting 6+ days for a DE Developer to even take a peek at my ticket about this and all the information including screen shot proof has been supplied.

 

The game is currently running a mini network spike on a 5 minute loop.  It will spike regardless of if the player is in a menu or not and I've identified that this only happens with Warframe.exe, no other networked games experience this spike which begs the question.. what did they change as of update 9.1.2 to make it start behaving like this?

 

Also I'm wondering why they haven't even responded to acknowledge that yes we are looking into it, it's game-breaking for those of us who are on lower bandwidths (I'm on a 2Mbps bandwidth here in Australia (downspeed) up is like 0.3 or something crazy like that.  However I can play other games fine without issue but this game literally locks up for 5 or so seconds every time the network spike kicks in.  If I'm hosting I drop all clients which makes doing any tough missions impossible and has pretty much made the game unplayable for me now unless I solo things.

 

And for a game designed around Co-Op.. we all know how unplayable Solo can be and how lacking in fun it can be.

 

Well, that's the information that is happening, feel free to take a look and see if you notice even small blips every 5 minutes where the mouse cursor snags up.. grab a copy of Process Explorer and take a look at what's going on with your network traffic.. you'll see a spike from Warframe.exe every 5 minutes as well.

[CosyPigeon]

i72700k @3.4ghz

16gigs of 2333mhz ram

Nvidia 560 Ti (soon to be upgrading to a 770)

 

I run without AA, and with motion blur disabled, usually sit at 80 -120 frames, when S#&$ gets really bad (like mobile defense doom) it drops to about 30. 

[KaoKill123]

4 words: Full personal UI Customization

ask DE to give us this and we might actually NOT hate topid spammers.

[DaemonKaizen]

4 words: Full personal UI Customization

ask DE to give us this and we might actually NOT hate topid spammers.

 

? - Are you in the right topic? haha...

[Jax_Cavalera]

I can see how a customizable UI remotely ties to this from the point of.. if we could drag the UI around we would be able to make it fit right when stretching 4:3 resolutions to full screen on a wide screen display but aside from that, I'm thinking they got the wrong topic.

[KaoKill123]

? - Are you in the right topic? haha...

i think i am... am i not? :P

[VitekR]

Overall performance has increased for me however, there are now more and more significant ocucrences of "stutter" and the standard FPS drops occur in different places.

 

To me, it feels like its obviously related to the new tilesets and the overall increase in enemy numbers through the game.  I never got stutter before, only frame drops, but stutter now happens in places where before I would get minor to moderate frame rate dips.

 

I have an I7 2720QM

Radeon 6990M (about like a desktop 6870) 2gb

8gb ram

Samsung 840 pro SSD (one of the fastest drives on the market)

 

I should not be getting stutter, ever, on this machine with that hard drive and all that RAM.  This game has never really ran what i could call "good" but its been playable on high settings at 1600x900 (it runs OK for me at 1080p but on a 17 inch laptop screen the UI in this game, for some reason, is painfully small to look at so i drop the res a bit for readability).  The engine needs an optimization pass or two, and desperately needs to be threaded out to support more than two cores.  That is a huge undertaking though, and I suspect we wont see it happen and if it does, it will be in relation to the PS4 launch, due to the fact that the PS4 has a super slow CPU but 8 cores and the only way they will get the game to run well will be to thread it out alot (which, hopefully, will be applicable to the PC build of the game as well if the devs have any sense they will unify the engines).  

 

The hosting problem needs addressing too, its still a huge issue.  The game should not suddenly lose 40% of its performance when you are hosting. I blame it all on the fact this game engine is a bit of a mutated, downsy, inbred stepchild of the engine in Dark Sector which was never well coded on the PC.  Getting it hooked in to all the databases and backends for an MMO was probably a monumental effort, but I hope they keep iterating this thing cus it sure needs it.

 

Overall though, the game runs better for me than it did when i started playing.  I am usually brutally pessimistic but it seems to be headed in the right direction which is more than most F2P games ever do.

[Jax_Cavalera]

Well I've just heard official word from a friend of mine who's part of our clan.  He states that he put in a ticket regarding drop in gameplay performance and they responded telling him :

 

 

"A Dedicated graphics card is now mandatory to run the game as of the most recent updates due to the game needing to be suited for both PC and Playstation releases"

 

Sooo.. that's pretty 'cool' that they have turned their backs on players who can't obtain such a card for their machine!  I'm completely unhappy with DE at this point and yeah that's putting it mildly.  I've put in around 250ish dollars on this game and now I can't even run it.. Refund??  not likely.. Optional Workaround patch for those of us in my position... Unlikely

 

Features: Minimum attributes of your Video Card     Required You Have Pixel Shader version 3.0 5.0 Vertex Shader version 3.0 5.0 Dedicated Video RAM 256 MB 64 MB

 

 

Forgot to mention that you also require a dual core processor minimum...

 

 

• Minimum

CPU Minimum: Intel Core 2 Duo e6400 or AMD Athlon x64 4000+ You Have: Intel® Core i7-3520M CPU @ 2.90GHz Click here for the latest CPU drivers.     CPU Speed Minimum: Info You Have: 2.9 GHz       RAM Minimum: 2 GB You Have: 16 GB  

Edited July 22, 2013 by Jax_Cavalera