Low GPU Usage

[yobson]

I am having relatively low GPU usage when in-game causing low FPS. My GPU utilisation typically is sitting around 50-60% while playing but I have seen it top out at about 70%. The only exception to this seems to be when in my orbiter when it reaches full 100% utilisation and provides very high frame-rate. I am using a GTX 970 with an AMD Ryzen 5 1600. I have also checked the CPU usage while playing and none of the cores are maxed.

[striker890]

So what fps are you reaching where with what graphic settings? Also please post your complete specs. Mainboard , PSU and RAM play a major role in the performance, too.

[krc473]

12 minutes ago, yobson said:

I am having relatively low GPU usage when in-game causing low FPS.

Are you sure this is the reason?

I played a mission:

• Over 160 FPS for the duration.
• CPU: 40% utilisation.
• GPU: 50% utilisation.
• RAM: 1.7 GB

Everything is showing a fairly low use, but no FPS issues. What are your specs and settings?

[yobson]

On 2018-08-04 at 7:46 PM, krc473 said:

Are you sure this is the reason?

I played a mission:

• Over 160 FPS for the duration.
• CPU: 40% utilisation.
• GPU: 50% utilisation.
• RAM: 1.7 GB

Everything is showing a fairly low use, but no FPS issues. What are your specs and settings?

 

On 2018-08-04 at 7:37 PM, striker890 said:

So what fps are you reaching where with what graphic settings? Also please post your complete specs. Mainboard , PSU and RAM play a major role in the performance, too.

Well I'm assuming this is the issue considering if the utilisation was higher I would be getting higher FPS.

Here are my full specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i Liquid Cooler
PSU: Corsair CMX 600W Semi-Modular 80 Plus Bronze
Motherboard: ASUS B350-PLUS Prime
RAM: Corsair Vengance LPX DDR4 8GB 2400 Mhz

GPU: GTX 970

Settings are high preset with motion blur, DOF, constant weapon trail and blur reflections off.

My FPS in missions sits around 70-80 but can drop below 60 at times. It just doesn't make sense to me that the game isn't utilising more of my GPU considering none of my CPU cores are maxed out so it's not being bottle-necked by the CPU it simply isn't using the full power of the GPU.

[krc473]

14 minutes ago, yobson said:

Well I'm assuming this is the issue considering if the utilisation was higher I would be getting higher FPS.

Warframe has never been great for properly utilising the resources. WF does not carry out multi-threading particularly well. AMD CPU's tend to not perform well with this - they have more cores, so are faster when multi-threading and such works better. I was getting around your frame rate on a GTX 970, so it sounds fairly “normal for Warframe” to me. I have a 1080 now, so get about 2-2.5x the FPS. I believe it’s just an issue with their engine (could be wrong though).

 

On a side note: you do have 64 bit OS right?

[krc473]

22 minutes ago, yobson said:

Well I'm assuming this is the issue considering if the utilisation was higher I would be getting higher FPS.

Warframe has never been great for properly utilising the resources. WF does not carry out multi-threading particularly well. AMD CPU's tend to not perform well with this - they have more cores, so are faster when multi-threading and such works better. I was getting around your frame rate on a GTX 970, so it sounds fairly “normal for Warframe” to me. I have a 1080 now, so get about 2-2.5x the FPS. I believe it’s just an issue with their engine (could be wrong though).

 

On a side note: you do have 64 bit OS right?

[yobson]

7 hours ago, krc473 said:

On a side note: you do have 64 bit OS right?

yeah of course

Also on what you said about muli-threaded performance, I thought that if this were the case then at least one of the cores would be maxed out which is what would cause the low GPU utilisation or is this not always necessarily the case? 

Edited August 6, 2018 by yobson

[krc473]

3 hours ago, yobson said:

I thought that if this were the case then at least one of the cores would be maxed out which is what would cause the low GPU utilisation or is this not always necessarily the case? 

There are different types of multi-threading to account for. So, it is not necessarily the case. Have you had a look at your thread performance (rather than core)? 

 

It is possible the engine can only access a proportion of what is available. This could give a bottleneck.

[yobson]

1 hour ago, krc473 said:

There are different types of multi-threading to account for. So, it is not necessarily the case. Have you had a look at your thread performance (rather than core)? 

 

It is possible the engine can only access a proportion of what is available. This could give a bottleneck.

I meant thread, they were just listed as "cores" in the software I was using, HWMonitor.

[striker890]

1 hour ago, yobson said:

I meant thread, they were just listed as "cores" in the software I was using, HWMonitor.

Don't you worry. The Ryzen series has quite at the same single core performance as a Intel CPU of equal pricing. Your PSU and Mobo look fine. Had systems where they where the bottleneck...

Since I am also using a GTX 970 I did some testing with your settings. First of my specs: Ryzen 7 1800X, GTX970, 16GB G.Skill Trident Z 3200 mhz CL14, Crosshair VI Hero, beQuiet 650W. So alltogether our systems shouldn't perform that different in warframe.

I ran a survival mission (alert) for 10 minutes and I was host. At the beginning I had full GPU utilization (100%). I got around 180 - 185 fps at the mission start with one player already joining. After starting the actual mission (solving the cipher) and all players joining in + enemies spawning, the GPU also dropped to 50-60%. Sometimes it spiked as low as 38%. And I sat somewhere between 80-100 fps. Also I noticed that one CPU Thread sat at around 80% all the time, while the others are either ideling or have a workload of about 30%.

[yobson]

3 minutes ago, striker890 said:

Don't you worry. The Ryzen series has quite at the same single core performance as a Intel CPU of equal pricing. Your PSU and Mobo look fine. Had systems where they where the bottleneck...

Since I am also using a GTX 970 I did some testing with your settings. First of my specs: Ryzen 7 1800X, GTX970, 16GB G.Skill Trident Z 3200 mhz CL14, Crosshair VI Hero, beQuiet 650W. So alltogether our systems shouldn't perform that different in warframe.

I ran a survival mission (alert) for 10 minutes and I was host. At the beginning I had full GPU utilization (100%). I got around 180 - 185 fps at the mission start with one player already joining. After starting the actual mission (solving the cipher) and all players joining in + enemies spawning, the GPU also dropped to 50-60%. Sometimes it spiked as low as 38%. And I sat somewhere between 80-100 fps. Also I noticed that one CPU Thread sat at around 80% all the time, while the others are either ideling or have a workload of about 30%.

Alright thanks a lot. Guess it's just normal then. You guys have been very helpful, thank you.

[striker890]

2 minutes ago, yobson said:

Alright thanks a lot. Guess it's just normal then. You guys have been very helpful, thank you.

Looks like something is a little bit unoptimized on warframe... Singeplayer missions have higher GPU utilization, as well as the liset, that's sitting at 100% all the time. Though it's on the developers to look into this...

[softcranium]

Have the exact same problem, its on the devs to fix it... I have been looking for a solution for at least a year now. 😞

 

Edited September 10, 2018 by Cheflyer

[MrMysticalPotato]

On 2018-08-06 at 7:38 PM, striker890 said:

Don't you worry. The Ryzen series has quite at the same single core performance as a Intel CPU of equal pricing..

That is 100% completely false. I am not an intel fanboy, but I had to call you out on this. Intel single core performance beats any AMD by miles. You can google benchmarks if you don't believe me. I get that you have a Ryzen so you want to believe this, but it simply is not true.

[Cooldude1fifty]

I've been getting around 5-10% gpu usage and around 10-15% cpu usage on warframe for the last couple of days. Used to get a constant 60fps but I now get 10 if I'm lucky. The only exception is the ship. There I get 40% utilization and 60 fps. Worst part is there seems to be no fix. I've tried messing with nvidia control panel settings, setting it to a higher priority in task manager, changing the power management in settings, and I don't have gforce experience installed so I don't have to deal with it (though I have the latest drivers). I've updated everything to the newest driver-wise and still nothing works. 

[Arkhenbarn]

It seems to be very tricky, I experience something similar with an overkill config. For me, it's that the multi-threaded rendering is actually using only one thread and it results in a bottleneck on the rest of the system. I have made a topic about it too.

[kai661xbox]

My system is low end, i3 2120  8gb ran and a 750ti, it's almost a 50/50 split. I see no issue. It playes fine, has been the same for a year and a half. Un park your CPU and disable c-State, set GPU to adaptive.

[Nyrotax]

Try out 32bit mode it doubled my FPS. On the 64bit version my boostclock didnt work on my 1080 ti.

[Arkhenbarn]

1 minute ago, Nyrotax said:

Try out 32bit mode it doubled my FPS. On the 64bit version my boostclock didnt work on my 1080 ti.

I wouldn't recommend it ; as the support and the 32-bit mode will be completely dropped.

[ImActualGarbage]

Okay so I just read all this because I noticed some low GPU usage myself. So this thread is obviously really old but it seems like that this is just normal with warframe. I also have a Ryzen 5 1600 paired with a GTX 1060 6gb and the GPU usage during missions is never over 50% and in the orbiter it goes up to 100%. The weird thing is that this only happens in 64 bit mode. In 32 bit mode its at around 80-100% GPU usage. Sounds great but I am stil getting the same FPS results with the FPS still sometimes dropping under 60 (with GPU particles set to low) during some missions. Which is kinda sad since Warframe once had fantastic performance which you can see in some older benchmark videos.

Although Steve twittered that there will be performance changes with Fortuna.

Edited November 6, 2018 by ImActualGarbage

[White_Matter]

On 2018-10-07 at 2:41 PM, Arkhenbarn said:

It seems to be very tricky, I experience something similar with an overkill config. For me, it's that the multi-threaded rendering is actually using only one thread and it results in a bottleneck on the rest of the system. I have made a topic about it too.

This is the issue. Warframe is an old game that doesn't work well with multithreaded CPU's. My 7700K @ 4.8ghz OC bottlenecks when there are lots of stuff going on(4 man missions with lots of enemy spawns) because the load is mostly on 1 core 2 threads while the rest of them are basically idling around 10-30%

Thats why the GPU usage is low. IF you play solo or stay on your ship you'll realize that your GPU usage will spike up(unless you've capped your FPS).