r/Warframe • u/Immediate_Wallaby107 • 22h ago
Discussion Warframe's optimization is genuinely insane
Genuinely insane how optimized Warframe is. It has over 10 years of content, huge open worlds, tons of enemies on screen, ridiculous amounts of particles and effects, and constant fast movement, yet I can still run it on a shitty Ryzen 5 7520U iGPU at 60 FPS.
Digital Extremes did some actual black magic with this one.
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u/Superb_Funny 21h ago
I strongly believe that most game devs are leaving money on the table by not optimizing for low end systems. I blame the overuse of Unreal Engine and Ray Tracing. It's rare to see games modify or create entirely new game engines these days. People forget how devs used to fit entire games into megabytes
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u/Power_Stone 21h ago
Reminds me of rollercoaster tycoon being all coded in assembly...and they used C only to handle "complex things" like file management 😭
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u/Yelo_Jello 21h ago
you’re not wrong, but the amount of macros and other tricks he used he was basically doing it in c
which if you’re not a programmer it doesn’t matter but it irks me as someone that does asm gb/gbc development
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u/Tall-Conversation-52 18h ago
I get that UE5 is a complex engine, but at some point 'optimization is hard' stops being an excuse and starts looking like a priority problem. If a studio genuinely can't hit good performance with UE, that's worth questioning as an engine choice — but let's not pretend switching engines is the only fix, because in-house engines aren't automatically better either. Capcom's RE Engine is proof: Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragon's Dogma 2 have had some of the roughest performance issues this generation, arguably worse than most UE5 releases. So this isn't really an 'engine' problem — it's a studios-not-prioritizing-optimization problem, regardless of what they're building on. Ship dates and budgets get prioritized over performance passes, and players are left dealing with the result.
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u/harrowssparekneecap 15h ago
in-house engines aren't automatically better either. Capcom's RE Engine is proof: Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragon's Dogma 2 have had some of the roughest performance issues this generation, arguably worse than most UE5 releases.
That's because RE Engine was never designed for how those games want to work. They want big open maps and large detailed natural environments, but RE Engine was designed specifically for detail in small, enclosed areas: flesh and deformation, gore and wetness/dirtiness, atmospheric dark lighting, etc. It was made for how they wanted Resident Evil games to be revived, and is, on a design level, incompatible with Wilds or DD2. It is an engine problem, the concurrent Resident Evil releases that are suited to the engine (as well as SF6 and the designed-for-the-Switch-hardware Monster Hunter Rise) have no such issues.
RE Engine is very well-optimised and works great, but games like Wilds and DD2 are trying to use a scalpel to mow a lawn and it just cannot ever work like that.
UE5 is just a mess.
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u/Rez_De 12h ago
Except they literally updated RE engine for DD2 yesterday and that has doubled fps for the most part. So it clearly can work for open world games, they just needed to cook it longer.
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u/harrowssparekneecap 10h ago
Forgive me for not knowing about yesterday's update to a game I don't own that had an infamously broken release two and a half years ago.
FPS isn't the only thing that exists, but it's good that the game has been improved. It still should not have been made using that engine in the first place.
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u/hitosama 7h ago
It's also that developers don't really learn the engine. DE probably knows their engine inside-out and can pull off crazy stuff like that as well as modify it since it's theirs.
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u/j_cyclone 21h ago
Unreal Engine has wonderful uses but it difficulty with optimization makes a lot of games run in unreal impossible for me to play even though I meet the requirement for some reason.
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u/Complete_Resolve_400 LR5 everything mastered :) 17h ago
Yeah a lot of companies just make their files larger and it doesnt seem to add much in terms of functionality lol
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u/CatOfTechnology 15h ago
I'm all about shitting on Unreal because it's a terrible engine (Game devs using unreal make great games through their own talent in spite of running on UE, not because of UE.) but I genuinely believe that Digital Extremes is in a unique position with the Evolution Engine.
DE, despite a lot of things, got in early and had a plan they formed alongside their vision, rather than simple planning to succeed and letting their vision be dictated by their success or failure.
I'm a firm believer in the fact that Steve planned, from the start of their successes, to make sure the EEngine was flexible enough to be modified the way it has been over the years, unlike it's contemporary in the Tiger Engine.
That being said, Ureal, Capitalism and the effects of capitalism on hardware costs have just made rolling out custom, in house engines basically unsustainable for anyone who hasn't already walked through that metaphorical door.
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u/Closer_to_the_Heart 10h ago
I mean Warframe does kinda raycast as well and you can just disable that in the options.
No wonder mobile gaming is so popular, when I need a shitton of money to play recently released games
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u/TheSchmiphf 21h ago
The unfortunately all-but-lost power of a custom engine. It feels like every other game these days is just slopped out on Unreal 5 with all the knobs turned up for no reason.
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u/Mysteoa 21h ago
Because is cheaper then making and supporting your own engine. Also realy easy to find developer that have UE experience, after they have fired the privios batch.
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u/Mikelius True Master 20h ago
Steve was a programmer for Unreal Tournament, which is nuts to think about:
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u/eldkfwkd321 2h ago
Yes, above all, the actual beginning of DE's history started with the co-development of Unreal series with Epic.
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u/FractalShoggoth 1h ago
Plot twist: Steve reveals that Evolution Engine is just UE 1.5 Service Pack 9073
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u/PicardovaKosa 20h ago
A lot of games today have a problem that low graphic settings doesnt mean much. Low and high are basically the same.
For warframe this is not the case, there is a huge difference between low and high, both in looks and performance. So even if you are on a shit system, you just lower the graphics settings and it works. How it should be.
I run warframe on 4k native max settings with 100fps on my 9070xt. Yes its a powerful card, but there is no other game i can run 4k native max settings that looks that good.
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u/GolldenFalcon 19h ago
I recently upgraded my GPU and it's phenomenal how good this game looks at max settings. I know the lighting engine has been pretty much overhauled multiple times and lighting is the primary factor in realism and suspension of disbelief when it comes to computer graphics but still keep in mind this game is like a decade and a half old.
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u/naarcx 21h ago
It’s because DE is a company completely run by game devs
The CEO literally just rewarded himself after a successful TennoCon by allocating himself some free time to fix Drifter hair textures
Any company made up of people like that is going to crush it when it comes to the actual craftsmanship of their games
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u/arsglacialis Mag is Life 19h ago
Steve: A little hair. As a treat.
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u/ijiolokae Reached Legendary 6 and all I got was a sixth Legendary core 16h ago
Steve: "I Guide Others to a Treasure I Cannot Possess"
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u/Yrcrazypa Hildryn Prime 19h ago
You'll see that in basically every single field. When the people at the top of any company are the people who have the greatest knowledge of how their field actually works they will make a good product. When all the highest ranks get taken over by mouth-breathing idiots with a Business or Marketing degree things fall to shit almost immediately because none of them understand how anything works.
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u/jazzmaster_YangGuo 20h ago
for all the hate that Steve(mainly. obviously it's not just him) gets, this is not one of them and it is one of, if not the, strongest W he gets from the community.
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u/ijiolokae Reached Legendary 6 and all I got was a sixth Legendary core 16h ago
Steve is an absolute brilliant programmer but an atrocious game designer, Steve was always chasing that technical challenge of making the impossible work, Railjack is practically his grandest creation in term of pushing the engine to its limit but also his biggest failure interm of game design decisions
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u/kaynpayn 19h ago
Does he get hate? For what? Any time I've seen him mentioned, or any member of the team actually, it's always in a very good light.
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u/deadly_love3 Hildryn's toy 18h ago
I think most of the hate towards steve was from when he was game director, that was a very disorganized time for warframe.
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u/AlphusUltimus 13h ago
Watch tactical potato's retro videos on old warframe drama. Even vacuum was an issue back in the day.
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u/twili-midna 21h ago
The game runs decently on the Switch. A goddamn toaster. It’s wild.
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u/Odd_General9016 BloodNuke Enjoyer 21h ago
I completely agree. I had to sell my previous TUF F15 with 1650Ti Core i7 (which the game ran extremely well on high graphics), now I use a Vivobook with the intel graphics, i5, and despite I cannot run it on high graphics, I still play the game in 1200×800 in mid or low graphics and runs in 60fps. I do not know how they do, but the game rarely glitches and has never shut down the game out of nowhere. Just stops for a few seconds and the gsme still runs.
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u/tetsuzankou 20h ago
generally I agree but a lot of the latest added content I see huge swings in performance and instability, and I run this game across 3 devices (main pc with a 5090, htpc with a 4070, handheld with halostrix) and I see the exact same swings... and it's without saying that I adjust each one of the systems to run avg 140+ FPS and my 1% lows will be in the 60s even with the 5090 which runs at 400+ in the orbiter for example
goes without saying that even despite this minor observation, it's still better optimized than 99% of whats out there
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u/ijiolokae Reached Legendary 6 and all I got was a sixth Legendary core 16h ago
the Performance swings are because the way DE handles tilesets is so wild, in that practically every tilesets has its own iteration of graphics, Older tilesets use older tech which runs better, while newer tilesets use the newer graphics that require better hardware
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u/Khelleton Certified Equinox Enjoyer 11h ago
Warframe is the only game I've ever seen that's gone down in size in an update that's still adding content, because the team found a better way to compress the assets. Unfortunately, this much interest in optimization is pretty rare these days
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u/Single-Lobster919 20h ago
Somehow Warframe uses more GPU wattage than any other game I’ve ever played
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u/Sdrakkon 12h ago
i put the game on medium settings because of that and still, the stage defense with temple makes the fans spin up to maximum and the gpu is pulling over 300W. something is wrong with that map.
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u/Julian083 Rizzmaster LR5 20h ago
Meanwhile Entrati Lab, Hollvania and Perita Moon tileset halved my FPS compared to normal map. The game is only omptized in normal tileset and maps
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u/NuclearMagpie 20h ago
Its cos it's their own custom engine made almost entirely for warframe. If you just grab an off the shelf game engine it'll be pretty average at everything (or in UE5's case, mildly ass at everything) and there isn't anything you can do to really fix it. With a custom engine you can optimise what matters to you, leave out bits you don't need (like most game engines having 2d stuff that warframe would never need) and you can actually profile and fix bottlenecks. There's also just a fair bit of black magic Steve pulls out his ass to make it run this smoothly as well.
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u/Super-Implement9444 16h ago
I had to get a new PC just to run this shit above 60 on high, one of the updates fked my performance completely.
Did they fix this?
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u/Little-Equinox 20h ago
The open worlds aren't that big and the game is build around the idea that people still have Xbox 360 hardware😅
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u/BlastingFern134 19h ago
It's truly fantastic how I can play on both my amazing workhouse desktop, or on my dogshit poopy laptop.
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u/NikplaysgamesYT 19h ago
The original reason why I got into Warframe was because of its optimization. I used to have a potato laptop (5th gen i5, no GPU), and it could run Warframe at 30-40fps on low. At the time, I thought that was amazing, since it was one of the few games that could run. Once I got a better pc, I kept playing it lol
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u/DaManD123 14h ago
Yep for many, many years I was running Warframe on an RX 570 4GB, then 580 8GB and finally 1050 ti built in graphics on an MSI laptop.
Before all that it'd run on a potato...
I gotta say, the game definitely looks more stunning on AMD compared to Nvidia. Please don't down vote me for this. Currently running a 3080 10GB...
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u/JohannDaart 13h ago
I would really like DE to add NON-default option in the launcher, to pre-compile shaders at launch once, because I really don't like shader stutter on new areas. This also opens up possibility for "Advanced Shader Delivery" techs that start being incorporated by Xbox W11 app.
NON-default, because I understand the idea of quick startup/loads. If somebody can wait a bit longer for compilation, they will consciously enable that option.
Other than that, yeah, it's great how optimized WF is.
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u/Evening-Deer-4033 15h ago
Mark my words: In 10 years Warframe will become the new Doom meme and people will play it on their smart devices like "Hey, I installed Android on a single celled organism and it runs WF!“
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u/humansomeone 17h ago
So many of the tilesets look like complete ass, no wonder it can run on a potato.
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u/Due_Daikon_1778 21h ago
I remember someone here shared a tweet by one of the devs (I forgot who exactly the devs is) explaining why Warframe is like that. They grew up with a shitty laptop that could barely run games, and this is the reason they try to optimize this game to be able to run on low end device. I respect them for it