Seems reasonable. My PC is 5 years old and I already keep seeing games come out that I literally cannot buy or play because I don't meet the minimum requirements, even though they have the same or worse graphics than games that are older.
I feel like a lot of people aren't aware that even in first world countries, most people lived paycheck to paycheck 10 years ago, and during the past 10 years, inflation got so bad that things are now often more expensive than during the era that was so bad it was called "The Great Depression", ain't nobody got money for a new PC while a cheeseburger costs 15 dollars
It genuinely pisses me off how quickly big studios make PC parts and rigs obsolete in the constant pursuit of high fidelity graphics that are barely upgrades to previous entries (MONSTER HUNTER)
Seriously you ever stop to think about how many PC parts are reduced to E-waste before their shelf life has expired because companies can't be arsed to do the bare minimum in optimization and testing?
I love Monster Hunter, but man my PC could barely do 60fps on 1080p with an RTX 3080 and R7 3700X. I had to work with some settings and manually lower them to medium or even low to get the target 60fps on most occasions, god forbid the wind picked up on the plains and got the sandstorm rolling or I just loaded up the Snow region.
I absolutely hate the fact that DLSS and Frame Generation have become a necesity to get a decent stable framerate for a minimal visual increase so that you could count the individual leaves on a tree or look at the multiple light rays a light source has even if you have Ray Tracing turned off. AI upscaling ruined gaming as a whole. What started off as something neat that you could use to squeeze out "better performance" at the cost of visual grain has become an excuse for publishers and dev studios to just ignore optimization for PC and spend more resources on the gorillion microtransactions games nowdays have.
I am sitting on a 3070 and a r5 2600x and I am in the same boat with monster hunter wilds.
I build a pretty expensive PC 6, or i guess, now 7 years back, if i didn't get the numbers wrong and basically only upgraded the graphics card over the years.
I knew from the get go, that I would be happy at 1080p and 60fps. The word "Native" for display resolution didn't really exist back then in 2018/19, at least not in the same quantity it does now.
Now you need dlss to even hit 60fps at 1080p on most games and it's so exhausting.
I just want to play my videogames, not have them look like sludged up shit and without my pc parts breaking down faster from heat stress.
I start up games, they run like shit, they look blury without any action going on and I can audibly hear my fans enter take-off mode and turn into jet engines. I need to spend like 20 minutes turning shit down to low and figuring out what even causes most of this mess and then end up with a game that looks like shit.
Then I start up warframe, it looks good, it moves good, the fps are good. I look back to the other game and I wonder "What the hell happend to you man, they never taught you how to run porperly?".
Monster hunter Wilds at release was honestly unaccaptable. I felt pretty disrespected as a costumer and I lost a lot of respect for Capcom. Again. Worlds already ran like shit at the time and you needed a pretty new machine back then as well. It was the reason I upgraded my PC back then actually, because it kept peaking my CPU and the game would stutter like hell. Now I have a new one that could run worlds but can't run wilds.
well luckily MHWilds kinda sucks for a lot more reasons for optimization. If they ever do an expansion it will be after they fix performance so hopefully it has the same kind of renaissance that Rise did with sunbreak.
It's not even the pursuit of high fidelity graphics, it's just that optimizing games costs time (and thus money) and people buy unoptimized messes anyway so the management, who is obviously always looking for way to maximixe profits, cuts the dev time to optimize. The only reason they keep getting away with it is because people still buy those games.
Wait people hate the first bit? WDYM, there's literally gazillion games in the backlog I've not even played after buying from sales, countless anime series to binge, books to read etc...
Honestly, this is why 95% of the games I buy are indie. There are a lot of underrepresented and underrated indie games that blow most AAA games out of the water in everything but graphics (and sometimes even there).
Me out here still playing Morrowind because every Bethesda game since has been a mechanical downgrade. Why do people feel the need to play the "new" game in a series when the new game is, at best, a minor upgrade, and usually mechanically less complex and satisfying to play?
Well, in Morrowind, you can hit a rat with a sword, and the secret dice will decide that, despite you clearly and visibly hitting that rat with a sword, you have not hit that rat and the rat is going to kill you now. This makes me think Oblivion and Skyrim have some mechanical upgrades.
I run Morrowind through OpenMw natively on Linux with Tamriel Rebuilt and i get 100+ fps with a soon 10 year old system nearly everywhere.
Realistic Graphics suck major ass imo. Classic WoW on 1080p still looks amazing. Skyrim looked like a grey mess on release. Hell, even the Dark Souls Remaster with barely any graphical changes blew me away when it released.
Omg same. It’s infuriating. And I’m not even that pinched for money, but there’s a difference between being able to afford living and being able to afford the 500$ parts I would need to upgrade my pc every 4 or 5 years. And that’s if you can even get them now with companies shifting focus to AI and all.
I really wish more game companies would focus on optimising their games so they can be played by more people.
I kinda think that may be a reason for why I don’t game as much as I used to before, or at least try new ones. Money is not a problem, I’ve been thankfully blessed there; but like I don’t want a 4 or 5 series card and drop 700+ bucks on it.
So I stick with old faithfuls like WoW, Warframe, some older C&C titles with mods, etc.
It really keeps the playerbase healthy too. Not everyone can drop 2k on a rig, but almost everyone can run Warframe on a potato and still have it look decent. That accessibility is huge for retention.
Totally agreed. Especially considering how ambitious some of the updates have been for Warframe. In some games, updates are the thing that makes the game unplayable for the people who used to be able to run the game with their potato PCs.
Meanwhile, other devs: "Here is our unoptimized mess, please buy a 4090 to run it at 30fps." Warframe runs on a literal toaster powered by rage and void magic.
I see so kany games where updates that are LITERALLY just a few skins take 17 gb, in a game thats already 100gb
Be for real, they just did a shit job at coding. Like im convinced yandere devs techniqueique of just making an "If x is true then y" list as his entire coding language isnt that far off from what a few professional developers do nowadays, just on a different scale
And the graphic and systems arent even that impressive.
Aside from the portals used in marvel rivals, most of the stuff you see in that game is neither visually nor technically impressive. The art direction is done well in such a way that you think "that game has stylized graphics, so in 10 years it will still look good because the game didnt rely on polygon count" yet the game runs like shit anyway.
I sort of understand when cyberpunk takes a better pc than world of warcraft because the game has mirroring water surface and all that shit, but there are games like infinity nikki which look worse than warframe and yet they also run worse. Whats going in the developer building that they push out such a product?
Which drives me nuts. UE5 has some amazing tools, documentation, and debuggers to find, fix, and make massive performance gains, but these developers just don't do it. Like it's all right there at their dang finger tips. Then people blame UE5 when it's lazy developers that's the problem or I should say asshole managers that's the problem as they won't let the developers put the time in to optimize.
It’s less about hating the cost and more that Steve/the engine team are obsessed with squeezing every drop of performance out of the Evolution Engine. Watching them geek out over lighting tech on devstreams explains a lot.
I feel like the reason behind this is studios taking advantage of increased average performance to save money on optimising games. Developers don't want their games to run like shit but the purse string holders don't care - see borderlands 4
We revere DOOM because it's such an elegantly coded and optimized game that it runs on ANYTHING at this point.
Any good game that respects optimization and doesn't go "Ah the PCs will get fast enough to run this" (Looking at you Crysis!) should receive proper plaudits like that.
Doom runs on everything because it's old, not because it's well-optimized. Not that it isn't well-optimized, mind you...buuuuut....
Just as a reality check, to run at recommended specs, DOOM's manual calls for a 486 PC with a Soundblaster Pro or similar soundcard. A PC of that spec in 1993 would have been around $2000 USD (or more!), which translates to roughly $4500 in today's money based on inflation. You could reasonably buy a pc with a 5090 in it for that, at least before the whole recent RAM shenanigans started.
Doom was literally the Crysis of its time. If you had a weaker computer, you had to scale down the view window and it would run at slow and choppy framerates...just like now how you can just render games at lower resolutions if your specs aren't up to par.
Crysis is in a weird spot wrt optimization because one of the reasons it is so taxing on systems was that it was made with a different future for PC performance than what we got. It was made with the idea that single processors would be getting more powerful rather than using multiple processors. If PC performance followed their expectations, then likely PCs down the road would likely have no issues with running the game
I'm gonna be annoying and correct you here, before people get the wrong idea.
The weapons (and Warframes for that matter) aren't detailed. At all...
They do look stunning. Amazing. But not because of the detail. But because of the art style. Similar to how Elden Ring, Little Nightmares, Ori and The Blind Forest and the like look amazing. The models they use aren't detailed or use that many polygons. They have a clear, defined art style that looks good.
This might be what you meant with detailed, but for others reading your comment, I wanted to add this, just to be sure.
I think your definition of "detailed" is overly narrow. A lot of the weapons in Warframe *are* very detailed, there are aspects to them that you'll rarely notice in gameplay, but are there just for flair or verisimilitude.
They aren't made up of a billion triangles or textured in 4K, sure, but things can be plenty detailed without that.
The varied shapes and aesthetic styles and accents really make Warframe’s Arsenal shine; you have Prime weapons that look like gilded ornaments, brutalist, bubbled Grineer weapons, sleek and metallic Corpus gear, and the chitinous shells and flesh of the infested.
They may not be 4k and detailed to hell and back, but I honestly never notice, the execution in their style and visual fidelity is so strong
Yeah, art style beats out polygon count and tiny details in both looks and longevity. But big studios and executives like to focus on those because those things can be increased by throwing money at them and crunching the workers. Having a good art style that holds up requires actual creatives putting in actual creative thought into the work and those people aren't always so receptive to being worked like slaves and to actually pick creative people to put in charge would require the executives to put in effort to find good people and actually develop an understanding of the process of making the product. They'd rather just cut a check and demand workers work a million hours, which requires no thought or effort on their part.
As someone with a high end PC I wish more companies took that approach lol. It's a lot less common than you seem to expect since the reference model is a shitty console. Ideally we could have a bunch of crisis like games with amazing low to high end optimization.
Honestly, I'm hoping that this whole hardware shortage/pricing forces game companies to optimize again because very few people will be able to play their games otherwise.
It's fucking nuts that I regret entire AAA game purchases less than microtransactions I've made in Warframe. There's no other game I can say that about.
...I can shamefully admit that I downloaded Warframe as a quick throwaway because I was so hyped for my 'Anthem' preorder. I have all of 14 hours on that game and thousands upon thousands here.
WF honestly has one of the best optimizations in the modern gaming scene. They even let you have the option to build your cache so all your missions load much faster even without an SSD. Can you imagine that? A modern game dev caring if you load the game faster or not!
Also, Warframe's size for content is almost borderline black magic: Around the ballpark of 50GB. FIFTY GB. LOL. The same reason D2 allegedly culls its content for install size purposes but still easily triples Warframe's size lol.
Yea I am honestly impressed every time I think about the install size of warframe... its got how much more content than the average COD and is like a third of the size?
Its not borderline black magic, the optimization team is actively summoning demons and sacrificing AAA studio devs to keep warframe running smooth and small
Guess the optimization team is L Corp or something with how many devs they sacrifice to creatures all to ensure Warframe is available on everything from potato to supercomputer.
Brainrot aside, it really is surprising how small they can make the game. Granted, a lot of content they also reuse assets, like the little resource icons being reused for the jets of corpus ships in vallis iirc, or the corpus jetpacks being just 4 opticors jammed together iirc, but even with the newer content that looks very distinct they still maintain a relative size, so yeah, it really borders on black magic at times.
DE is an ALEPH abnormality due to its reality bending properties and manipulation of digital interfaces. DE is peaceful unless you send employees to do the special “cheat” work
It's almost a yearly thing. I've seen multiple "Hey, you want us to reinstall the whole game + our big yearly update? It'll take up less space this time too" prompts over the years.
The data on your drive contains instructions on how a scene is constructed in different parts, bit by bit.
Think if a scene with three lights, and three spheres scattered throughout.
The computer has instructions to load the spheres, the ground, and the lights, then it calculates where the shadows go, how they interact with other materials, and which items block light in terms of where the player is standing and looking.
The operation of calculating all that can be contained in a shader.
So caching a shader is doing all that, and then, instead of recalculating all that information every time you load a level, it writes it to your drive the first time, and simply loads the premade information afterwards.
Pre-caching is running that for all the various levels, depending on what the game is expecting, before even launching the game, so slowe drives only need to pull one or two larger bits of information at a time, instead of starting and stopping the read every time the computer needs to do a new calculation.
It's a LOT more complex than that, and probably a bit wrong here and there, but it should get the point across.
When the launcher finishes loading it asks if you would like to trim the cache, AKA delete unused assets to free up space on your install drive. I assume this is what OP was referring to.
Not quite sure how it speeds up loading into missions, but any space freed up is space for other things ¯_(ツ)_/¯
On windows, in the launcher if you click on the settings cog in the top right you can change the API to DX12 and toggle the shader cache, which I'm assuming from their post infers that the game will build the shader cache before hand?
The D2 comparison hurts because it's true. Bungie deletes half the game (vaulting) to keep file sizes manageable, while DE just figures out how to compress 10 years of content into a smaller package without removing anything. It’s a flex.
At this point I've come to the conclusion that the reason they gave for vaulting was a flat out lie. However, considering what a mess it's made of onboarding new players into their game with the first 3 years of story left in a box, I can't imagine whatever reason they had being a good one either.
At that time, Bungie were 100% all in on FOMO marketing and drip feeding content as their method of keeping players invested. They really wanted to keep people shackled to their game, "don't leave us! you might miss the new content before it leaves forever!" mixed in with "no we can't release the entire update at once, we have to spread it out over months to ensure that players don't finish all the (miniscule amount of) content all at once, and then leave again"
Which is entirely at odds with them having any sort of permanent content in the game. Why would you want players going back to play old content when you can instead funnel them into the new stuff that's supposed to be their new job and hook them with three different layers of skinnerbox?
While I haven't played since somewhere between Shadowkeep and Beyond Light to know how they've changed since, if they have at all, but when I was playing that was their entire modus operandi for all content. Make sure the player can never hold onto any of the old stuff, so they're forced into doing all the new content that's drip fed to them and keep them in the hamster wheel, sustained with only the bare minimum scraps of food required.
On a very related note, there's a reason Destiny 2 has been struggling to bring back players for a while now, and you see so many people leaving it.
I don't think the technical reason was a lie, I think they just flat out don't have the ability to optimize the game more, whether that be because of incompetence, not enough people, or not enough time.
DE's culture is very different, and has more of a focus on optimization because its management actually cares. The now-CEO of DE is an absolute fiend for optimization and engine improvements, while the former-CEO of Bungie is an absolute fiend for optimizing his car collection.
I will add though, that I don't think the comparison is 100% fair. Destiny uses big, already-made maps for its locations, while Warframe is procedural generated.
Remember "The Great Ensmallening" updates? I’ve never seen another dev team put out a major patch notes that started with "We re-compressed textures so you actually GAIN hard drive space after this update." It truly is black magic.
That's not optimization, that's just HD2 dropping the HDD support on PC, the game has always been ~22gb on console, it was 120gb on PC just because it had x5 the game file so that HDD users could kept playing.
The cache optimization is a lifesaver. I used to make a sandwich while loading into Plains of Eidolon on my old HDD. Now it’s snappy even on older hardware. They really respect the player's time (and drive space).
The same reason D2 allegedly culls its content for install size purposes but still easily triples Warframe's size lol.
I remember being downvoted to hell by Destiny fans back then because I didn't think we should lose content we paid for due to the developers' poor optimization of their game lol.
The only thing I can think of that's more black magic for file size is Deep Rock Galactic somehow being less than 10 gigs on PC, last j checked. Sure the game ain't as big as Warframe, but for the stuff that's there it's surprising as hell that it's THAT small
Most games about a decade ago are the same. Looks amazing, plays amazing, file size is amazingly small. Back then it matters cos you had to fit a whole game on a disc. These days, AAA devs are complacent and do not optimize.
While I'm not trying to downplay the accomplishment, it IS very impressive, both are just an excellent example of how smart procedural generation can save TONS of hard drive space over baked in maps.
Steve has mentioned that they keep an old laptop in the office precisely for this reason, every build is uploaded to the old laptop to see if it runs and if it doesn't run at all, then they tweak it until it does. It doesn't have to run amazingly well it just has to run decently at low settings.
Bsck when Borderlands 2 was released I watched an interview about how their office was full of shitty old PCs and CRT televisions to make sure everyone could play. I remembeber my PC being way below the minimum specs and the game somehow still running anazing until I found a cluster rocket launher that crashed me, so naturally I continued to use it but looked away from the explosions after I shot it hahaha.
Judging by Gearbox's recent releases, that magic is long gone. For DE to not only have had that magic, but have kept it for so long makes it even more impressive. Keeping passionate, talented people like that happy long term can be difficult.
It helps that the CEO is a optimization nerd himself and is the one responsible for a lot of the optimization practices because it was his passion back when he was doing actual coding and file management for the game. Warframe is one of the few games that has reduced in size with an update purely because Steve found a better way to optimize the files.
I'm guessing having their own engine also plays a major part in it since they can trim it to fit just what the game needs instead of having to accept all the bloat that comes with the usual engines like Unreal.
i was able to play on an old work pc with integrated graphics and 4gb ram while my desktop was getting repairs. it was painful and i had to play on 800x600 resolution and every setting on the bare minimum and loading took 5-10 min but it still worked once i was actually in the mission
it was around the time the circuit was introduced and i needed to get some specific incarnons before they rotated out and wouldn't be back for months
Warframe and DE have treated me, my time, and my computer nicely. It's why I don't feel bad shelling out for platinum, the money is going to people that have been consistently working on making things better in an era of enshitification.
Back in 2014 I was running on an intel core celeron laptop that was basically already outdated at the time. All I could run was Minecraft, the Binding of Isaac, and, miraculously, Warframe
i appreciate it but this would be cooler if they actually optimized the newer areas better. to barely 70-90 fps on medium-high in hollvania on a 7900xtx is absurd. old peace too
Yea that's what I was thinking. Defense missions in Hollvania drop me to ~40FPS when I'm at 120+ in other/older areas. But I do appreciate the sentiment.
Ill give them credit, hitting 60 fps on ps4 pro is really awesome.
That being said... please for the love of god fix the perita rebelion in old gen, it gives me headaches when i play in a squad, there are too many particles and the sistem struggles, i wouldnt mind keeping the flower particles during the adventure, but removing them in the gamemode itself, i hope DE reads this and improves it after the holidays.
Even in PS5 Perita struggles. Farming in it for a while and going back to a normal mission at 60 fps always makes me have to adjust for a moment lol. There's also an annoying amount of screen tearing lately
warframe’s optimization is the reason I’ve clocked in almost 1k hours. I have a pretty shitty laptop that can barely run Minecraft with low graphics, but it can run this horde shooter with all these crazy explosions and so many enemys very smoothly(with low graphics). I hope Soulframe updates their optomisation soon :)
One of the very first times I played warframe was on a laptop on vacation and I remember trying to do some crazy movement with the touchpad and keyboard since I didnt have a mouse with me
Warframe is a testament to my theory that alot of modern titles COULD run on lower specs. Its not that its impossible to make them run smoother without good hardware, its literally just for a lack of trying
A story heard often, but Warframe has helped me through hard times. And it wouldn't be possible if Warframe wasn't playable to n almost anything. Love to DE optimization team
The fact that I can't get a stable 60 in Monster Hunter Wilds but can easily get 120+ in a game with an order of magnitude more on-screen activity running 12 years' worth of tech debt and held together with sheer will and LUA scripting speaks volumes about the team's care for optimizing their game.
This is a great mindset but unfortunately it's just not the case in any of the new content. The pre-Sanctum tilesets runs really well but ever since then the performance has really suffered. For comparison I can easily get 200-300 FPS (mostly maxed settings) on pretty much any mission, any planet.
If I go to 1999 for example the average drops down to around 100 fps +/- 20 with (common) drops all the way down to 50s in some cases. I remember not too long ago I did an ETA and one of the missions was defense. Nothing but simply looking in the direction of Temple was enough to tank my framerate to 40 (before the enemies even spawned). I don't think it's a stretch to say the game was running worse than CyberPunk2077 with RayTracing maxed out and considering I'm running an AMD GPU that's pretty fucking bad.
Performance keeps getting worse with each update tho.
If i want to have my 4080super not struggle to reach 60fps in 1999, perita or descendia i HAVE to turn dynamic light off, witch is basically having the game running on low settings at that point since DynLight is what makes or breaks every tileset that went thru a graphical update in the past few years.
Yeah, people keep glaze Warframe for the optimization(imho most of the time people use wrong example) while on high end PC the game struggle to have high fps, i have a 4070ti and i can't even hit 144fps, something that i was able to do even on COD MW3 with a SINGLE stick of RAM(16gb).
And same as you i had to turn of dynimic ligh, way too much of an impact for what it gives.
They know about the issue. They're on a break for the holidays, which I'd rather they take so they can come back relaxed and in a good place and fix the issue properly.
Got into wuwa a few months back until the optimization with the new updates became garbage. Came back to warframe on my 5yr old laptop and it still runs like a charm. Thank you optimization team
I think this is a growing issue in the industry with the introduction of upscaling tech such as DLSS and FSR. More and more mainstream companies invest less on optimization and develop games impossible to play without upscaling. I miss seeing real pixels.
I hold that everyone should play games for a year on a non-gaming laptop to learn to sympathise with those with lower end hardware. I played for years on one without even a dedicated graphics card. Two upgrades later and I now have a substantial PC, but I'll never forget what it was like to use that laptop.
I have a good computer I bought a few months ago but I couldn’t be happier about this game’s optimizations ! I can fully enjoy it at the maximum amount of frames my monitor supports and I could even upgrade to 1440p and still do it.
Optimization is not just good for budget computers, it’s good for everyone
Yeah, it's kinda gross how games just keep pushing technology without optimising even for smaller things like file size. Not even to mention all the useless shit like raytracing, which almost no games integrate effectively, or DLSS and frame gen being huge crutches that run the risk of turning a game ugly as sin
It is probably the game that has the most time played on my steam deck. Runs great. Some of the new zones stutter a little from time to time but it's one of the best looking games I've played on it that runs smooth(the others being MGS V and Dying Light).
To be honest being able to run on an overclocked potato probably helps keep a large player base as well, which keeps the community active, which keeps the whales coming...
A game which requires several thousand dollars wortg of hardware is doomed for failure one way or another. Optimization is nice but avoiding that level of hardware is also in the company's interest
These days I would say it's impressive how warframe is able to be this fluid despite all the things that is happening in game with the all the mobs, the various effects and the explosions etc
The game's optimization is top notch. That being said I'm saving up to upgrade playing on 1080p low with FSR to native 1440p high. I've tried it on my friends pc and the eye candy is real good
When I worked there briefly they had a room for automated QA (in addition to their in-house human QA staff) filled with older machines of different kinds of configurations running the game to make sure they could continue supporting older machines. Really cool stuff
I was able to play it on my 10 year old laptop with an integrated GPU at a relatively stable 30 fps. Having a beast of a computer now, I'm still grateful for the optimization they do. Tons of modern games run like crap on my high end system.
I would never have gotten into Warframe if it hadn't run shockingly well on the crappy laptop I had at the time. This guy is 100% responsible for the thousands of hours I have in this game, and I am absolutely certain that there are a lot of other players with very similar experiences to me.
Wifi lately has been utter shite. We're talking rotting Vermink droppings. Guess what. Warframe is one of, if not the only online 'multiplayer' game I have that actually runs smoothly (like I can run public lobbies yippee). And I'm on a PS4, not even a PC or PS5. My Sol I love this game.
The fact that I was able to run the game with i3 and GTX 430 (I think, it was somewhere in 400's) before is incredible. Although it was not very stable, loadings longer than the server could comprehend and kicked me 30% of times, it was comfortable to play. Open maps were a huge problem but still very playable (except Fortuna, I couldn't handle it being 5 fps).
I was playing Warframe with an overheated laptop in 2015 with integrated graphics and half a screen (left side of the laptop screen would flicker on and off constantly),
It ran great and I was still able to run the 8-man raids =,
First game I downloaded when I upgraded to a desktop was Warframe
Warframe is definitely the game I always keep coming back to because it truly is like 50 games in one and you've gotta try to be bored and has by far the better community than any other. DE has done things other studios couldn't replicate and probably never will ( looking at you Black Desert).
Similar to how Monster Hunter Rise runs on Switch, Steam Deck, and relatively low-end hardware, while Monster Hunter Wilds needs much more advanced hardware and isn't gentle on that.
Yet I feel like Rise, with its simpler and somewhat more stylized art style, is the prettier game in a lot of respects.
I also love that DE doesn't block you from playing the game on linux with its anticheat because linux uses less RAM than windows does these days and that's important for obvious reasons. It also means you can play it through stuff like winlator on your phone while we wait for the actual android port.
2 days ago I spent the whole day trying to resolve performance issues of Wuthering Waves, yes a mobile gacha game. A game that eats more than 110GB on PC, shit load of RAM/VRAM and I still didn't solve all the stuttering.
Every single time I face this kind of problem, I value Warframe for being so optimized and accessible. Also the fact the price is localized, there are plat discounts and the trades, is a true blessing for less fortunate people that want to game. It's my most played game ever and I love it so much ❤️
That’s why artstyle is improtant, just look at TF2 or jet set radio they look good even with 2025 standards due to good artstyle, it’s probably why warframe runs amazingly
What gets me is that Warframe could be high ressource demanding (in Ultra my 2060S is a bit overworking tbf), but this game can run on my work phone, an old iPhone SE, and I think that's really impressive
I'm still using a shitty "gaming pc" I bought almost a decade ago on Amazon. I5 2400 and a GT 710 and the game runs rather well on the lower settings. A few frame drops on Earth missions but I'm barely there so it doesn't really matter.
Of course, since the game went crossplay, I've been playing on my Xbox and only going on PC for trading.
Think I'm one of very few that feel performance has been going pretty badly in Warframe. Can't hit 144 hz anymore without some kind of upscaler. Never was an issue in the past to do so.
I think we should all aspire to be like this
to hate the cost of pc gaming and make it accessible to everyone
Seems reasonable. My PC is 5 years old and I already keep seeing games come out that I literally cannot buy or play because I don't meet the minimum requirements, even though they have the same or worse graphics than games that are older.
I feel like a lot of people aren't aware that even in first world countries, most people lived paycheck to paycheck 10 years ago, and during the past 10 years, inflation got so bad that things are now often more expensive than during the era that was so bad it was called "The Great Depression", ain't nobody got money for a new PC while a cheeseburger costs 15 dollars
It genuinely pisses me off how quickly big studios make PC parts and rigs obsolete in the constant pursuit of high fidelity graphics that are barely upgrades to previous entries (MONSTER HUNTER)
Seriously you ever stop to think about how many PC parts are reduced to E-waste before their shelf life has expired because companies can't be arsed to do the bare minimum in optimization and testing?
I love Monster Hunter, but man my PC could barely do 60fps on 1080p with an RTX 3080 and R7 3700X. I had to work with some settings and manually lower them to medium or even low to get the target 60fps on most occasions, god forbid the wind picked up on the plains and got the sandstorm rolling or I just loaded up the Snow region.
I absolutely hate the fact that DLSS and Frame Generation have become a necesity to get a decent stable framerate for a minimal visual increase so that you could count the individual leaves on a tree or look at the multiple light rays a light source has even if you have Ray Tracing turned off. AI upscaling ruined gaming as a whole. What started off as something neat that you could use to squeeze out "better performance" at the cost of visual grain has become an excuse for publishers and dev studios to just ignore optimization for PC and spend more resources on the gorillion microtransactions games nowdays have.
I am sitting on a 3070 and a r5 2600x and I am in the same boat with monster hunter wilds.
I build a pretty expensive PC 6, or i guess, now 7 years back, if i didn't get the numbers wrong and basically only upgraded the graphics card over the years.
I knew from the get go, that I would be happy at 1080p and 60fps. The word "Native" for display resolution didn't really exist back then in 2018/19, at least not in the same quantity it does now.
Now you need dlss to even hit 60fps at 1080p on most games and it's so exhausting.
I just want to play my videogames, not have them look like sludged up shit and without my pc parts breaking down faster from heat stress.
I start up games, they run like shit, they look blury without any action going on and I can audibly hear my fans enter take-off mode and turn into jet engines. I need to spend like 20 minutes turning shit down to low and figuring out what even causes most of this mess and then end up with a game that looks like shit.
Then I start up warframe, it looks good, it moves good, the fps are good. I look back to the other game and I wonder "What the hell happend to you man, they never taught you how to run porperly?".
Monster hunter Wilds at release was honestly unaccaptable. I felt pretty disrespected as a costumer and I lost a lot of respect for Capcom. Again. Worlds already ran like shit at the time and you needed a pretty new machine back then as well. It was the reason I upgraded my PC back then actually, because it kept peaking my CPU and the game would stutter like hell. Now I have a new one that could run worlds but can't run wilds.
well luckily MHWilds kinda sucks for a lot more reasons for optimization. If they ever do an expansion it will be after they fix performance so hopefully it has the same kind of renaissance that Rise did with sunbreak.
My steam review for Wilds pretty much sums it up
"This'll be a great game when its finished."
Yeah as it is, it's just half finished, like monster hunter games always are on initial release.
It's like reviewing a civilization game and being underwhelmed that it isn't as good as the previous one that has three or four full expansions.
It's not even the pursuit of high fidelity graphics, it's just that optimizing games costs time (and thus money) and people buy unoptimized messes anyway so the management, who is obviously always looking for way to maximixe profits, cuts the dev time to optimize. The only reason they keep getting away with it is because people still buy those games.
People hate how long time games take to produce, people hate expensive games, people hate unoptimized games.
You're just not getting an optimized, cheap and decently quickly produced game.
Wait people hate the first bit? WDYM, there's literally gazillion games in the backlog I've not even played after buying from sales, countless anime series to binge, books to read etc...
Honestly, this is why 95% of the games I buy are indie. There are a lot of underrepresented and underrated indie games that blow most AAA games out of the water in everything but graphics (and sometimes even there).
People, and especially AAA studios, have forgotten that good art direction trumps sheer graphics 99 times out of 100.
Me out here still playing Morrowind because every Bethesda game since has been a mechanical downgrade. Why do people feel the need to play the "new" game in a series when the new game is, at best, a minor upgrade, and usually mechanically less complex and satisfying to play?
Well, in Morrowind, you can hit a rat with a sword, and the secret dice will decide that, despite you clearly and visibly hitting that rat with a sword, you have not hit that rat and the rat is going to kill you now. This makes me think Oblivion and Skyrim have some mechanical upgrades.
I run Morrowind through OpenMw natively on Linux with Tamriel Rebuilt and i get 100+ fps with a soon 10 year old system nearly everywhere. Realistic Graphics suck major ass imo. Classic WoW on 1080p still looks amazing. Skyrim looked like a grey mess on release. Hell, even the Dark Souls Remaster with barely any graphical changes blew me away when it released.
I wish I could play Cyberpunk 2077, but it's one of the few games I like that will most likely melt my laptop 😄
Omg same. It’s infuriating. And I’m not even that pinched for money, but there’s a difference between being able to afford living and being able to afford the 500$ parts I would need to upgrade my pc every 4 or 5 years. And that’s if you can even get them now with companies shifting focus to AI and all.
I really wish more game companies would focus on optimising their games so they can be played by more people.
I kinda think that may be a reason for why I don’t game as much as I used to before, or at least try new ones. Money is not a problem, I’ve been thankfully blessed there; but like I don’t want a 4 or 5 series card and drop 700+ bucks on it.
So I stick with old faithfuls like WoW, Warframe, some older C&C titles with mods, etc.
It really keeps the playerbase healthy too. Not everyone can drop 2k on a rig, but almost everyone can run Warframe on a potato and still have it look decent. That accessibility is huge for retention.
Totally agreed. Especially considering how ambitious some of the updates have been for Warframe. In some games, updates are the thing that makes the game unplayable for the people who used to be able to run the game with their potato PCs.
There's a reason it can run just fine on iOS and even the Switch.
Meanwhile, other devs: "Here is our unoptimized mess, please buy a 4090 to run it at 30fps." Warframe runs on a literal toaster powered by rage and void magic.
"We built this in UE5 and didn't optimize anything. Go sacrifice your firstborn to get a new graphics card just so you can run our game on Medium."
I see so kany games where updates that are LITERALLY just a few skins take 17 gb, in a game thats already 100gb
Be for real, they just did a shit job at coding. Like im convinced yandere devs techniqueique of just making an "If x is true then y" list as his entire coding language isnt that far off from what a few professional developers do nowadays, just on a different scale
The scary thing is that it’s ALL devs
Even Nintendo can’t/wont do what they used to
TTYD was a rock solid 60 FPS on the GameCube
The Remake runs at 30
The GameCube had a 32 bit Power PC CPU running at 485 MHz
The switch has a 64 bit ARM running around ~1.0–1.02 GHz
GameCube has 24 mb of DDR (no I didn’t forget a number) RAM
The switch has 4 gigs of DDR4
No matter what upgrades were done there is NO excuse
And the graphic and systems arent even that impressive.
Aside from the portals used in marvel rivals, most of the stuff you see in that game is neither visually nor technically impressive. The art direction is done well in such a way that you think "that game has stylized graphics, so in 10 years it will still look good because the game didnt rely on polygon count" yet the game runs like shit anyway.
I sort of understand when cyberpunk takes a better pc than world of warcraft because the game has mirroring water surface and all that shit, but there are games like infinity nikki which look worse than warframe and yet they also run worse. Whats going in the developer building that they push out such a product?
Which drives me nuts. UE5 has some amazing tools, documentation, and debuggers to find, fix, and make massive performance gains, but these developers just don't do it. Like it's all right there at their dang finger tips. Then people blame UE5 when it's lazy developers that's the problem or I should say asshole managers that's the problem as they won't let the developers put the time in to optimize.
It’s less about hating the cost and more that Steve/the engine team are obsessed with squeezing every drop of performance out of the Evolution Engine. Watching them geek out over lighting tech on devstreams explains a lot.
I first played World of Warcraft on a laptop that I really have no idea how it handled it, but it did.
Celeron, 2gb ram, no dedicated GPU.
Brand new laptop with a Ryzen 5 something or other and a 4070 gpu, and the rerelease is stuttering and getting frame drops in raids.
Talking 15 years later on 15 year newer hardware, not running worse of course that would be insane, but, having issues AT ALL is also insane.
I feel like the reason behind this is studios taking advantage of increased average performance to save money on optimising games. Developers don't want their games to run like shit but the purse string holders don't care - see borderlands 4
We revere DOOM because it's such an elegantly coded and optimized game that it runs on ANYTHING at this point.
Any good game that respects optimization and doesn't go "Ah the PCs will get fast enough to run this" (Looking at you Crysis!) should receive proper plaudits like that.
Doom runs on everything because it's old, not because it's well-optimized. Not that it isn't well-optimized, mind you...buuuuut....
Just as a reality check, to run at recommended specs, DOOM's manual calls for a 486 PC with a Soundblaster Pro or similar soundcard. A PC of that spec in 1993 would have been around $2000 USD (or more!), which translates to roughly $4500 in today's money based on inflation. You could reasonably buy a pc with a 5090 in it for that, at least before the whole recent RAM shenanigans started.
Doom was literally the Crysis of its time. If you had a weaker computer, you had to scale down the view window and it would run at slow and choppy framerates...just like now how you can just render games at lower resolutions if your specs aren't up to par.
Crysis is in a weird spot wrt optimization because one of the reasons it is so taxing on systems was that it was made with a different future for PC performance than what we got. It was made with the idea that single processors would be getting more powerful rather than using multiple processors. If PC performance followed their expectations, then likely PCs down the road would likely have no issues with running the game
Unfortunately for those other AAA f2p games whales are their only interest and those people can afford that hardware.
In a world where AAA games force you to upgrade or get bent warframe remains stalwart in their optimization, truly the mvps
yea, its incredible how weapons are detailed despite not having that much polygons when compared to today AAA games
the only places where you need decent hardware to run at high settings is albrech lab and 1999
I'm gonna be annoying and correct you here, before people get the wrong idea.
The weapons (and Warframes for that matter) aren't detailed. At all...
They do look stunning. Amazing. But not because of the detail. But because of the art style. Similar to how Elden Ring, Little Nightmares, Ori and The Blind Forest and the like look amazing. The models they use aren't detailed or use that many polygons. They have a clear, defined art style that looks good.
This might be what you meant with detailed, but for others reading your comment, I wanted to add this, just to be sure.
I think your definition of "detailed" is overly narrow. A lot of the weapons in Warframe *are* very detailed, there are aspects to them that you'll rarely notice in gameplay, but are there just for flair or verisimilitude.
They aren't made up of a billion triangles or textured in 4K, sure, but things can be plenty detailed without that.
The varied shapes and aesthetic styles and accents really make Warframe’s Arsenal shine; you have Prime weapons that look like gilded ornaments, brutalist, bubbled Grineer weapons, sleek and metallic Corpus gear, and the chitinous shells and flesh of the infested.
They may not be 4k and detailed to hell and back, but I honestly never notice, the execution in their style and visual fidelity is so strong
Normal and Specular mapping go a long way to give low poly models details
The Ambassador is such a cool looking gun. So unfortunate thats all it is…
When the old adversary systems get updated in [idfk how many years] we’ll get a Tenet Ambassador, trust
TT~TT
Thank you for adding verisitimilitude to my vocabulary lol
Yeah, art style beats out polygon count and tiny details in both looks and longevity. But big studios and executives like to focus on those because those things can be increased by throwing money at them and crunching the workers. Having a good art style that holds up requires actual creatives putting in actual creative thought into the work and those people aren't always so receptive to being worked like slaves and to actually pick creative people to put in charge would require the executives to put in effort to find good people and actually develop an understanding of the process of making the product. They'd rather just cut a check and demand workers work a million hours, which requires no thought or effort on their part.
As someone with a high end PC I wish more companies took that approach lol. It's a lot less common than you seem to expect since the reference model is a shitty console. Ideally we could have a bunch of crisis like games with amazing low to high end optimization.
Honestly, I'm hoping that this whole hardware shortage/pricing forces game companies to optimize again because very few people will be able to play their games otherwise.
I just downloaded Soulframe and yeah, there are FPS drops but it's honestly wild how stable that game is as well
I spent the money I could have spent on an upgrade on plat and tennogen until I could afford to upgrade and keep buying plat and tennogen.
I also spent the money I WOULD have spent on AAA titles on plat instead.
I don't regret a single cent I've given to DE, Definitely regret a lot of money I gave to AAA devs.
It's fucking nuts that I regret entire AAA game purchases less than microtransactions I've made in Warframe. There's no other game I can say that about.
...I can shamefully admit that I downloaded Warframe as a quick throwaway because I was so hyped for my 'Anthem' preorder. I have all of 14 hours on that game and thousands upon thousands here.
Straight up divine intervention lmao
At least now we can say that Anthem's existence has served some purpose.
Mother of god you ain't fuckin wrong, DE actually respects one's time and money which is fabulous
I've bought AAA games for 40$ and still want my money back, meanwhile I'll buy a Warframe PA for $140 and never think twice after doing it
WF honestly has one of the best optimizations in the modern gaming scene. They even let you have the option to build your cache so all your missions load much faster even without an SSD. Can you imagine that? A modern game dev caring if you load the game faster or not!
Also, Warframe's size for content is almost borderline black magic: Around the ballpark of 50GB. FIFTY GB. LOL. The same reason D2 allegedly culls its content for install size purposes but still easily triples Warframe's size lol.
Yea I am honestly impressed every time I think about the install size of warframe... its got how much more content than the average COD and is like a third of the size?
Its not borderline black magic, the optimization team is actively summoning demons and sacrificing AAA studio devs to keep warframe running smooth and small
The only game where they release an update that adds content and the game ends up weighing less than before the update.
Guess the optimization team is L Corp or something with how many devs they sacrifice to creatures all to ensure Warframe is available on everything from potato to supercomputer.
Project moon reference?!?!?!
Brainrot aside, it really is surprising how small they can make the game. Granted, a lot of content they also reuse assets, like the little resource icons being reused for the jets of corpus ships in vallis iirc, or the corpus jetpacks being just 4 opticors jammed together iirc, but even with the newer content that looks very distinct they still maintain a relative size, so yeah, it really borders on black magic at times.
The game even runs on phones. I was playing arbitrations while watching my cat eat an hour ago.
DE is definitely cooking behind the scenes. Their making spaghetti with a side of peak.
DE is an ALEPH abnormality due to its reality bending properties and manipulation of digital interfaces. DE is peaceful unless you send employees to do the special “cheat” work
If you preform in "Prime Time" work during a time when DE is happy it will result in a free gift of Enkephalin.
https://i.redd.it/1tfv2vnoiz9g1.gif
it is black magic, imagine getting update with NEW CONTENT and install size goes from 60GB to 50GB lol
It's almost a yearly thing. I've seen multiple "Hey, you want us to reinstall the whole game + our big yearly update? It'll take up less space this time too" prompts over the years.
What do you mean build your cache?
i would also like to know
I'm not techy at all but I'm assuming it's like having a preloaded map ready to go basically.
The data on your drive contains instructions on how a scene is constructed in different parts, bit by bit.
Think if a scene with three lights, and three spheres scattered throughout.
The computer has instructions to load the spheres, the ground, and the lights, then it calculates where the shadows go, how they interact with other materials, and which items block light in terms of where the player is standing and looking.
The operation of calculating all that can be contained in a shader.
So caching a shader is doing all that, and then, instead of recalculating all that information every time you load a level, it writes it to your drive the first time, and simply loads the premade information afterwards.
Pre-caching is running that for all the various levels, depending on what the game is expecting, before even launching the game, so slowe drives only need to pull one or two larger bits of information at a time, instead of starting and stopping the read every time the computer needs to do a new calculation.
It's a LOT more complex than that, and probably a bit wrong here and there, but it should get the point across.
When the launcher finishes loading it asks if you would like to trim the cache, AKA delete unused assets to free up space on your install drive. I assume this is what OP was referring to.
Not quite sure how it speeds up loading into missions, but any space freed up is space for other things ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Cache helps with loading times through storing frequently utilized data, but it takes up more space.
On windows, in the launcher if you click on the settings cog in the top right you can change the API to DX12 and toggle the shader cache, which I'm assuming from their post infers that the game will build the shader cache before hand?
It said speed up mission load times if i remember, so id expect it isnt shader compilation but instead something to do with the assets
I didn't see anything related to mission load aside from the auto-trim the game performs each update. Aside from that, no clue what it could be then.
The D2 comparison hurts because it's true. Bungie deletes half the game (vaulting) to keep file sizes manageable, while DE just figures out how to compress 10 years of content into a smaller package without removing anything. It’s a flex.
At this point I've come to the conclusion that the reason they gave for vaulting was a flat out lie. However, considering what a mess it's made of onboarding new players into their game with the first 3 years of story left in a box, I can't imagine whatever reason they had being a good one either.
The reason is greed, pure and simple.
At that time, Bungie were 100% all in on FOMO marketing and drip feeding content as their method of keeping players invested. They really wanted to keep people shackled to their game, "don't leave us! you might miss the new content before it leaves forever!" mixed in with "no we can't release the entire update at once, we have to spread it out over months to ensure that players don't finish all the (miniscule amount of) content all at once, and then leave again"
Which is entirely at odds with them having any sort of permanent content in the game. Why would you want players going back to play old content when you can instead funnel them into the new stuff that's supposed to be their new job and hook them with three different layers of skinnerbox?
While I haven't played since somewhere between Shadowkeep and Beyond Light to know how they've changed since, if they have at all, but when I was playing that was their entire modus operandi for all content. Make sure the player can never hold onto any of the old stuff, so they're forced into doing all the new content that's drip fed to them and keep them in the hamster wheel, sustained with only the bare minimum scraps of food required.
On a very related note, there's a reason Destiny 2 has been struggling to bring back players for a while now, and you see so many people leaving it.
I don't think the technical reason was a lie, I think they just flat out don't have the ability to optimize the game more, whether that be because of incompetence, not enough people, or not enough time.
DE's culture is very different, and has more of a focus on optimization because its management actually cares. The now-CEO of DE is an absolute fiend for optimization and engine improvements, while the former-CEO of Bungie is an absolute fiend for optimizing his car collection.
I will add though, that I don't think the comparison is 100% fair. Destiny uses big, already-made maps for its locations, while Warframe is procedural generated.
Remember "The Great Ensmallening" updates? I’ve never seen another dev team put out a major patch notes that started with "We re-compressed textures so you actually GAIN hard drive space after this update." It truly is black magic.
Helldivers 2 went from 150+ GB to 22 GB. That was so beautiful to see in these dark times.
That's not optimization, that's just HD2 dropping the HDD support on PC, the game has always been ~22gb on console, it was 120gb on PC just because it had x5 the game file so that HDD users could kept playing.
The cache optimization is a lifesaver. I used to make a sandwich while loading into Plains of Eidolon on my old HDD. Now it’s snappy even on older hardware. They really respect the player's time (and drive space).
I remember being downvoted to hell by Destiny fans back then because I didn't think we should lose content we paid for due to the developers' poor optimization of their game lol.
The only thing I can think of that's more black magic for file size is Deep Rock Galactic somehow being less than 10 gigs on PC, last j checked. Sure the game ain't as big as Warframe, but for the stuff that's there it's surprising as hell that it's THAT small
Most games about a decade ago are the same. Looks amazing, plays amazing, file size is amazingly small. Back then it matters cos you had to fit a whole game on a disc. These days, AAA devs are complacent and do not optimize.
While I'm not trying to downplay the accomplishment, it IS very impressive, both are just an excellent example of how smart procedural generation can save TONS of hard drive space over baked in maps.
I was actually able to play warframe on a laptop that was way below specs at 30-24 fps somehow so id say thats a testament to the optimization.
Steve has mentioned that they keep an old laptop in the office precisely for this reason, every build is uploaded to the old laptop to see if it runs and if it doesn't run at all, then they tweak it until it does. It doesn't have to run amazingly well it just has to run decently at low settings.
Bsck when Borderlands 2 was released I watched an interview about how their office was full of shitty old PCs and CRT televisions to make sure everyone could play. I remembeber my PC being way below the minimum specs and the game somehow still running anazing until I found a cluster rocket launher that crashed me, so naturally I continued to use it but looked away from the explosions after I shot it hahaha.
Judging by Gearbox's recent releases, that magic is long gone. For DE to not only have had that magic, but have kept it for so long makes it even more impressive. Keeping passionate, talented people like that happy long term can be difficult.
It helps that the CEO is a optimization nerd himself and is the one responsible for a lot of the optimization practices because it was his passion back when he was doing actual coding and file management for the game. Warframe is one of the few games that has reduced in size with an update purely because Steve found a better way to optimize the files.
I'm guessing having their own engine also plays a major part in it since they can trim it to fit just what the game needs instead of having to accept all the bloat that comes with the usual engines like Unreal.
I’m actually impressed by this. Nice work!
i was able to play on an old work pc with integrated graphics and 4gb ram while my desktop was getting repairs. it was painful and i had to play on 800x600 resolution and every setting on the bare minimum and loading took 5-10 min but it still worked once i was actually in the mission
it was around the time the circuit was introduced and i needed to get some specific incarnons before they rotated out and wouldn't be back for months
Raise a respectful, kind community, get respectful, kind messages. its basic math or maybe psychology?
either way, one for W for DE's ever growing pile
Warframe and DE have treated me, my time, and my computer nicely. It's why I don't feel bad shelling out for platinum, the money is going to people that have been consistently working on making things better in an era of enshitification.
It's amazing there's a part of the team that actively does everything in their power to optimize the game...
While there's another separate part of the team slapping Vaubahn('s ass) saying, "this bad boy can fit so many flashbangs".
Then there's Steve in a corner being unsupervised with the lighting engine for new particle effects.
I would also like to point out that until recently it was JUST Dmitri, for over a decade it was this one amazing dude responsible for it
Back in 2014 I was running on an intel core celeron laptop that was basically already outdated at the time. All I could run was Minecraft, the Binding of Isaac, and, miraculously, Warframe
$1000 worth of RAM is almost enough for 4 gigs of DDR3, in this economy...
i appreciate it but this would be cooler if they actually optimized the newer areas better. to barely 70-90 fps on medium-high in hollvania on a 7900xtx is absurd. old peace too
Yea that's what I was thinking. Defense missions in Hollvania drop me to ~40FPS when I'm at 120+ in other/older areas. But I do appreciate the sentiment.
Yeah same it's actually nuts how it runs at a third of the speed. Something has got to be broken.
Ill give them credit, hitting 60 fps on ps4 pro is really awesome.
That being said... please for the love of god fix the perita rebelion in old gen, it gives me headaches when i play in a squad, there are too many particles and the sistem struggles, i wouldnt mind keeping the flower particles during the adventure, but removing them in the gamemode itself, i hope DE reads this and improves it after the holidays.
They will it's on the known issues list. Just out for the holidays for a well deserved break.
Yeah, i hope the come back at full force and fix it, DE hasnt let us down just yet😁
Even in PS5 Perita struggles. Farming in it for a while and going back to a normal mission at 60 fps always makes me have to adjust for a moment lol. There's also an annoying amount of screen tearing lately
Same for series X. It's great everywhere else but this tileset seems very demanding. Probably average between 30-40fps in there.
warframe’s optimization is the reason I’ve clocked in almost 1k hours. I have a pretty shitty laptop that can barely run Minecraft with low graphics, but it can run this horde shooter with all these crazy explosions and so many enemys very smoothly(with low graphics). I hope Soulframe updates their optomisation soon :)
For minecraft try sodium + some other mods. If you can buy server. That way your laptop don't need to generate world.
One of the very first times I played warframe was on a laptop on vacation and I remember trying to do some crazy movement with the touchpad and keyboard since I didnt have a mouse with me
Warframe is a testament to my theory that alot of modern titles COULD run on lower specs. Its not that its impossible to make them run smoother without good hardware, its literally just for a lack of trying
I don't think it's a theory at this point, I think that's just standard protocol
Absolute legend. We need more devs like in the industry.
A story heard often, but Warframe has helped me through hard times. And it wouldn't be possible if Warframe wasn't playable to n almost anything. Love to DE optimization team
The fact that I can't get a stable 60 in Monster Hunter Wilds but can easily get 120+ in a game with an order of magnitude more on-screen activity running 12 years' worth of tech debt and held together with sheer will and LUA scripting speaks volumes about the team's care for optimizing their game.
I have somewhat of a potato rig so very grateful I can run Warframe smoothly with little to no stain on my system thank you Dmitri <3
This is a great mindset but unfortunately it's just not the case in any of the new content. The pre-Sanctum tilesets runs really well but ever since then the performance has really suffered. For comparison I can easily get 200-300 FPS (mostly maxed settings) on pretty much any mission, any planet.
If I go to 1999 for example the average drops down to around 100 fps +/- 20 with (common) drops all the way down to 50s in some cases. I remember not too long ago I did an ETA and one of the missions was defense. Nothing but simply looking in the direction of Temple was enough to tank my framerate to 40 (before the enemies even spawned). I don't think it's a stretch to say the game was running worse than CyberPunk2077 with RayTracing maxed out and considering I'm running an AMD GPU that's pretty fucking bad.
Performance keeps getting worse with each update tho.
If i want to have my 4080super not struggle to reach 60fps in 1999, perita or descendia i HAVE to turn dynamic light off, witch is basically having the game running on low settings at that point since DynLight is what makes or breaks every tileset that went thru a graphical update in the past few years.
Yeah, people keep glaze Warframe for the optimization(imho most of the time people use wrong example) while on high end PC the game struggle to have high fps, i have a 4070ti and i can't even hit 144fps, something that i was able to do even on COD MW3 with a SINGLE stick of RAM(16gb).
And same as you i had to turn of dynimic ligh, way too much of an impact for what it gives.
They know about the issue. They're on a break for the holidays, which I'd rather they take so they can come back relaxed and in a good place and fix the issue properly.
Brother 1999 was released almost exactly 1 year ago, they already had a xmas break back then and nothing got fixed in that regard xD
When my laptop stopped working with most games and even youtube video playback, warframe always worked
I am extremely happy for this coming from a poor country :D
YES.
Also, the absolute smooth performance on Linux is a godsend!
Thank you DE🫡
I can confirm he's done a exceptional job. Until recently, i was running this game on a i3 without GPU. It ran like garbage, but ran.
It seriously amazes me how well this game is optimized when it honestly looks quite good.
Got into wuwa a few months back until the optimization with the new updates became garbage. Came back to warframe on my 5yr old laptop and it still runs like a charm. Thank you optimization team
I think this is a growing issue in the industry with the introduction of upscaling tech such as DLSS and FSR. More and more mainstream companies invest less on optimization and develop games impossible to play without upscaling. I miss seeing real pixels.
I hold that everyone should play games for a year on a non-gaming laptop to learn to sympathise with those with lower end hardware. I played for years on one without even a dedicated graphics card. Two upgrades later and I now have a substantial PC, but I'll never forget what it was like to use that laptop.
So he is the one I should french kiss?
I would buy that man a drink.
I have a good computer I bought a few months ago but I couldn’t be happier about this game’s optimizations ! I can fully enjoy it at the maximum amount of frames my monitor supports and I could even upgrade to 1440p and still do it.
Optimization is not just good for budget computers, it’s good for everyone
Tho i no longer have it I swear i could prob still play WF on my 1060 with decent settings! DE and Dice are Masters of game Engines
My GOAT I dont have my laptop rocking a 1050 anymore but I wouldnt be surprised if Warframe still runs it 1080/60 on low
I'm still using my 1050 ti with 4 GB of ram, (but for a desktop pc), I play fairly well with high settings on 1080p with fsr on quality
Yeah, it's kinda gross how games just keep pushing technology without optimising even for smaller things like file size. Not even to mention all the useless shit like raytracing, which almost no games integrate effectively, or DLSS and frame gen being huge crutches that run the risk of turning a game ugly as sin
It is probably the game that has the most time played on my steam deck. Runs great. Some of the new zones stutter a little from time to time but it's one of the best looking games I've played on it that runs smooth(the others being MGS V and Dying Light).
To be honest being able to run on an overclocked potato probably helps keep a large player base as well, which keeps the community active, which keeps the whales coming...
Absolutely! One of the few games i can still play on my ddr3 950m laptop!
Genuinely thank you DE
I f*cking love you Dmitri
I can run the full, windows version of Warframe, in f*cking Winlator! Does it work well, hell no. But it works!
A game which requires several thousand dollars wortg of hardware is doomed for failure one way or another. Optimization is nice but avoiding that level of hardware is also in the company's interest
real for that man, my laptop still plays like shit but playable nonetheless
These days I would say it's impressive how warframe is able to be this fluid despite all the things that is happening in game with the all the mobs, the various effects and the explosions etc
The game's optimization is top notch. That being said I'm saving up to upgrade playing on 1080p low with FSR to native 1440p high. I've tried it on my friends pc and the eye candy is real good
Still waiting for an update on FSR. I don’t need it I just wanna play Warframe on max settings at 1440p 360Hz.
When I worked there briefly they had a room for automated QA (in addition to their in-house human QA staff) filled with older machines of different kinds of configurations running the game to make sure they could continue supporting older machines. Really cool stuff
Dmitri a real one I hated not being able to play Warframe back in 2013
Don't even need to have grown up poor to relate. My parents just prioritized other things and a slick gaming PC would have made no sense
If this had any less pixels, it would be a radio.
Kudos to the Optimisation team for both this, and cutting the storage amount each update.
1999 still chugs sometimes on my 4070 super.
Yet 1999 tilesets still run like shit no matter what.
y'all reckon Warframe can run on a Ryzen 3 2200u and vega 3 mobile with 4gb ram? pls say yes
I'm on a lenovo m73 with a haswel era i5 and an rx550.
Soulframe is where my computer goes to die.
My $300 work laptop appreciates this greatly.
Now you need $1000 of RAM to run Windows 11 (forget games).
Back in 2018, I used to play warframe in 800x600 lowest graphics on a PC that could barely even run Minecraft, so yea the games pretty well optimised.
I was able to play it on my 10 year old laptop with an integrated GPU at a relatively stable 30 fps. Having a beast of a computer now, I'm still grateful for the optimization they do. Tons of modern games run like crap on my high end system.
Part of the reason I love the game.
The game also runs insanely well on mobile while still looking great. If this isn’t the best graphics on mobile then idk what is
I would never have gotten into Warframe if it hadn't run shockingly well on the crappy laptop I had at the time. This guy is 100% responsible for the thousands of hours I have in this game, and I am absolutely certain that there are a lot of other players with very similar experiences to me.
I'm playing on a 7+ year old laptop that frequently makes noises.
Dmitri is so incredibly based
Fun fact, I still play warframe with athlon 200ge, so yeah kudos to DE (steam proton, so no windows weird sheanigan that probably helps alot BTS)
Dimitri and the rest of the team are Absolute Gs
Wifi lately has been utter shite. We're talking rotting Vermink droppings. Guess what. Warframe is one of, if not the only online 'multiplayer' game I have that actually runs smoothly (like I can run public lobbies yippee). And I'm on a PS4, not even a PC or PS5. My Sol I love this game.
The fact that I was able to run the game with i3 and GTX 430 (I think, it was somewhere in 400's) before is incredible. Although it was not very stable, loadings longer than the server could comprehend and kicked me 30% of times, it was comfortable to play. Open maps were a huge problem but still very playable (except Fortuna, I couldn't handle it being 5 fps).
I was running warframe on a 2018 rog laptop until last summer and it made desperate poverty a fuck lot less atrocious than it could have been
I run Warframe on steamdeck and its so good, the game is crazy well optimized, only kiva fortress has issues 🥃🗿
I was playing Warframe with an overheated laptop in 2015 with integrated graphics and half a screen (left side of the laptop screen would flicker on and off constantly),
It ran great and I was still able to run the 8-man raids =,
First game I downloaded when I upgraded to a desktop was Warframe
But 1000 ram is 4GB now!
I can play Warframe on my shitty laptop and i thank them for that. I'm too poor to upgrade currently and the ram price increase really worries me
Warframe is definitely the game I always keep coming back to because it truly is like 50 games in one and you've gotta try to be bored and has by far the better community than any other. DE has done things other studios couldn't replicate and probably never will ( looking at you Black Desert).
Genuinely surprised how well Warframe runs on my computer after all these years and updates to the visuals.
Similar to how Monster Hunter Rise runs on Switch, Steam Deck, and relatively low-end hardware, while Monster Hunter Wilds needs much more advanced hardware and isn't gentle on that.
Yet I feel like Rise, with its simpler and somewhat more stylized art style, is the prettier game in a lot of respects.
one of the reasons why i continue playing this game. i still play it on my ~2015 laptop that was already on the lower end when i bought it.
I also love that DE doesn't block you from playing the game on linux with its anticheat because linux uses less RAM than windows does these days and that's important for obvious reasons. It also means you can play it through stuff like winlator on your phone while we wait for the actual android port.
I had to upgrade my rig when they dropped Duviri because my CPU didn't support the new instructions they added.
2 days ago I spent the whole day trying to resolve performance issues of Wuthering Waves, yes a mobile gacha game. A game that eats more than 110GB on PC, shit load of RAM/VRAM and I still didn't solve all the stuttering.
Every single time I face this kind of problem, I value Warframe for being so optimized and accessible. Also the fact the price is localized, there are plat discounts and the trades, is a true blessing for less fortunate people that want to game. It's my most played game ever and I love it so much ❤️
Honestly I love this guy, I'm still using my Xbox One and even tho it struggles sometimes, It runs pretty well compared to E33 for example
That’s why artstyle is improtant, just look at TF2 or jet set radio they look good even with 2025 standards due to good artstyle, it’s probably why warframe runs amazingly
I'm an old quake player. Fell in love with Warframe after about 3,5 seconds. The engine feels SOOO GOOD, no other game comes even close.
I play WF on a 12 year old toaster (almost as old as WF itself) so thanks DE for how god-like this game is optimized
Forever grateful that my 11yo computer with a GTX 970 is still kicking on my 4k screen 😭
My 10 year old laptop can still run the game in 1080p. Thanks, Dmitri!
Also, if you play Soulframe, my steam Deck can handle it at 30-80 FPS depending on how big an area is loaded on max graphics at 1280x800.
Well, the ram to play warframe might be $1000 soon, the way things are going
Speaking of optimization, does anyone have the link for the post from the user who was using an Intel Celeron?
A decade later and the game is still less than 40gb in size
What gets me is that Warframe could be high ressource demanding (in Ultra my 2060S is a bit overworking tbf), but this game can run on my work phone, an old iPhone SE, and I think that's really impressive
It is so awesome that I can even play it on my iPhone on the train
And it still looks absolutely gorgeous on every platform! Truly the mvps
DE sold their souls to the man in the wall cause the optimization is nothing short of Void magic
I'm still using a shitty "gaming pc" I bought almost a decade ago on Amazon. I5 2400 and a GT 710 and the game runs rather well on the lower settings. A few frame drops on Earth missions but I'm barely there so it doesn't really matter.
Of course, since the game went crossplay, I've been playing on my Xbox and only going on PC for trading.
When they first brought Warframe to consoles it was the only game I had on my xbox one for months.
Think I'm one of very few that feel performance has been going pretty badly in Warframe. Can't hit 144 hz anymore without some kind of upscaler. Never was an issue in the past to do so.
I'm forever impressed by the passion and engineering that goes into this game. It's truly remarkable
AND he’s got my favorite band on his shirt!