[PoE]Cetus not utilizing hardware

[Vragg_]

Hello,

I am not sure where to turn to, but I couldn't find much useful info on Discord or Reddit, so I am posting here as well.
In essence, I experience a lack of hardware utilization of in Cetus area. It works fine in Orbiter(ship) and fine in missions (sometimes, I experience the same issue after a while).
 

Description of the issue:
Low framerate in Cetus area with low hardware usage. Occassional stutter (probably when loading resources for LOD).

Steps to reproduce:
Enter Cetus area.

Stats in Orbiter:
Framerate: 250-350
GPU utilization: 98% (more stats)
CPU utilization: ~45% (more stats, 45C)
RAM usage: 580MB game, total system usage 7GB (16GB total RAM)

Stats in Cetus:
Framerate: 30-50
GPU utilization: 30-40% (more stats)
CPU utilization: ~45% (more stats, 45C)
RAM usage: 1330MB game, total system usage 8.1GB (16GB total RAM)

System spec:
Processor: Intel i7 4770K, OC'd, properly cooled
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1060, 6GB
RAM: 16GB DDR3, 1600MHz
Storage: M.2 250GB drive

System information:
Operating system: Windows 8.1 x64
GPU drivers: 387.92

Game graphics config:
Display mode: Borderless Fullscreen
Video Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Refresh Rate: 144Hz
Vertical Sync: Off
Max Framerate: No Limit (for this test, 120FPS otherwise)
Field of View: 78

Nvidia PhysX Effects: On
Runtime Tesselation: On
Local Reflections: On
Volumetric Lighting: On
High Dynamic Range: On
Adaptive Exposure: On
High Shader Quality: On
Dynamic Resolution: Disabled

Geometriy Detail: High
Particle System Quality: High
Shadow Quality: High
Texture Memory: High
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x
Trilinear Filtering: On
Anti-Aliasing: TAA 8x (High)
TAA Sharpen: 80
Depth of Field: Off
Motion Blur: Off
Bloom: Off

Color Correction: On
Dynamic Lighting: On
Character Shadows: On
Constant Weapon Trail: Off
Weapon Elemental FX: Off

Other info:
Game is optimized in launcher.
Integrity of game cache checked.
All settings on NVIDIA Control panel perfer maximum performance.
Tried with different settings for app - reverted to "default app settings", no effect.
Restarting game does not help.
The temperatures in system are all OK.
Changing graphics settings has negligible effect on performance !!!

Edited October 13, 2017 by Vragg_

[Estoela]

I want to add that i personally am experiencing the same issue. It looks like cetus is only probably utilizing 1 cpu core. I disabled multi-threading in the launcher and it has no effect on performance regardless if all the settings are on lowest or highest.

System Spec:

Oc'ed i7-2600

AMD R9 290X (also OC'ed)

Game's installed on a WD Red 3 TB HDD

And 18 GB's of DDR3 1600 Ram

Performance in the orbiter:

Single threaded on high graphics preset: 200-230 fps

Multi-threaded on the high preset 250-280 fps

Performance on Cetus at the spawn point:

Single threaded: Joined an almost full session and when i loaded in for a few seconds i had about 105 fps after that it dropped down to 60 as i started walking to the main marketplace and it was fluctuating between 50 and 73 fps.

Multi threaded: The exact same as single threaded only that at the beginning for those first few seconds i had 130 fps instead of 105.

 

Hope this helps

 

[PhantomGaming27249]

Cetus Appears to have GPU utilization issues.

Setting Everything on max minus motion blur

Orbiter Performance 180-220fps

Cetus 29-35fps

Gpu utilization jumps between 7-50%

System Specs

Ryzen 1600x

cas 16 3333mhz ram

R9 380 4gb (Oc)

 

[Drex83]

As bad as this is I hope it means they forgot to toggle something back on after tests that can easily be toggled back because I'm pretty depressed at how my fps is out here and it's usually fantastic

[YeAhx_]

If its really GPU utilization issue then something has to be done quick. It's not about low fps but more about high stuttering. Considering how smooth PoE runs, I don't know why Cetus has to be stuttering this much.

[Vragg_]

Just now, YeAhx_ said:

If its really GPU utilization issue then something has to be done quick. It's not about low fps but more about high stuttering. Considering how smooth PoE runs, I don't know why Cetus has to be stuttering this much.

I experience some stuttering when I enter the area that is coming from either the Orbiter or the Plains. That being said, it only happens for a little while and I can observe the RAM usage going up. I assume it's due to assets loading. Luckly, I have an M.2 drive (a fast SSD) and this is why it might not be the issue for me.

If you are using a HDD (an old fashioned one, with a disc), that might be the root of the issue.

[Eternal]

Guys, this is how the relay system has been for YEARS. Add in an area that is more GPU intensive and how the relay system stresses your CPU and you've hit a point where the game can only render so fast with that much going on. Look, the game executes most of its code onto the first rendering thread, right? So if the amount of players is causing that whole rendering pipeline to get clogged up it's going to slow EVERYTHING else down. Including that expensive new GPU you bought. Because at the end of the day, Warframe will always bottleneck itself because of 

1. Player count

2. Animations

3. AI count and/or 

4. Physics

They did some work on rendering threads with the release of PoE which really helps out in some scenarios, however these underlying issues are going to be a thing until they either do some REALLY serious work on the engine or they implement something like DX12 to help with driver overhead

This is not a bug, it's an inherent design flaw and unless someone at DE wants to completely rework the relay system and/or the engine it's going to stay that way

On 10/13/2017 at 5:19 AM, Vragg_ said:

Changing graphics settings has negligible effect on performance !!!

Yeah, ever heard of a GPU bottleneck? Except it's not the CPU bottle-necking the graphics card it's the software making the CPU bottleneck the graphics card
Take a look at this graph

Quote

You'll see how if all the games main workload is done on that single core it can only render out so many frames to your graphics card to display for you. It wouldn't matter if you had the best graphics card on earth, it wouldn't increase your fps in situations where the workload is bottle-necked down to one core because everything else in the system like your graphics card is waiting for your CPU to do its work before anything else can do what IT needs to do.

[Eternal]

Also, why do you even need high fps in Cetus? You don't do much there. Do you need a blistering fast 200fps minimum to buy fishing bait?

[Vragg_]

Quote

1. Player count

2. Animations

3. AI count and/or 

4. Physics

1. This could be the main reason - perhaps player models are too unique and too detailed? Too many unique faces/frames/cosmetics with too many vertices? From what I understand, it's possible to render higher amount of same geometry in one batch to improve performance.
2. Don't think that should effect it. You have maps and events with much higher count of playing animations and it doesn't hog the CPU.
3. What AI count? There are barely any dynamic objects, just baked animations etc.
4. Not much happening here either?

If it were impossible, how do the other MMOs handle that?

Quote

Yeah, ever heard of a GPU bottleneck? Except it's not the CPU bottle-necking the graphics card it's the software making the CPU bottleneck the graphics card
Take a look at this graph

It says on the graph it's only for illustrative purposes. If that were the case, ~50% would be overhead and the maximum framerate was somewher in the 70s.
I would also expect higher usage on a thread as well - not the case, all threads have low (<50 usage). I know Vulkan fixes some of the overhead issues, but I don't think that's the problem - many games have handled it without a problem for decades. For a test, I opened up 15 twitch streams to put more load on CPU - no difference.

Quote

Also, why do you even need high fps in Cetus? You don't do much there. Do you need a blistering fast 200fps minimum to buy fishing bait?

My eye can se bit more than 30FPS. Below ~70 becomes visually irritating.

Edited October 15, 2017 by Vragg_

[YeAhx_]

On 10/15/2017 at 3:04 AM, Vragg_ said:

I experience some stuttering when I enter the area that is coming from either the Orbiter or the Plains. That being said, it only happens for a little while and I can observe the RAM usage going up. I assume it's due to assets loading. Luckly, I have an M.2 drive (a fast SSD) and this is why it might not be the issue for me.

If you are using a HDD (an old fashioned one, with a disc), that might be the root of the issue.

I'm using a kingston SSD with enough extra space for no issue (even though they already come with built-in extra free space) and I'm still stuttering and lagging in cetus only. Assets loading is not much of an issue for me and I don't think it is RAM problem because Warframe has never been a RAM hungry game.