Digital Extremes' Warframe 1999 Demo Benchmarked: 14 GPUs Tested
Developer Digital Extremes describes the title's next major update, coming this Winter, as "the Future of Warframe." That's quite a statement given that the update diverges in both tone and themes from the rest of the game. Warframe is not a game that shies away from exploring experimental ideas, though, and Warframe 1999 is bringing elements to the game that players have been asking for since 2013, like, say, faces for the Warframes:
Explaining how we go from science-horror space battles in the far-flung future to nostalgia-filled 1990s throw-back would require explaining basically the entire story of Warframe, and we don't have that kind of time. The short version is that it involves alternate timeline wackiness—a concept that is already central to the story of the online third-person shooter. Warframe 1999 promises to shed some light on the origins of the titular warframes, and players can't wait to get their hands on it.
That's why it's a big deal that Digital Extremes finally released a short demo for the new add-on. The demo, like the expansion itself, requires players to have completed most of the game's story, and it presents a snippet of gameplay with little in the way of story context, leaving experienced players salivating for more.
Despite the divergence in setting, the actual systems in the demo itself are 100% core Warframe on-foot gameplay. Players take on the role of Arthur, an Englishman who shares both his looks and his move-set with one of the starter warframes, Excalibur. As Arthur, players head into an "exterminate" mission that takes place on a unique new map which seems like it could form the basis of a new open world area. Arthur wields an AK-52 rifle and Vesper 77 silenced pistol, as well as his Protokol longsword and, of course, his Excalibur warframe powers.
The demo is very brief, and the map is fixed, so give it a shot if you have the opportunity, but there's not much reason to re-play it. That is, if you're a regular Warframe player. If you're a hardware nerd like me, it turns out that Warframe 1999's demo actually makes a fantastic place to benchmark the game. You see, Warframe's missions are normally instanced and procedurally generated, which makes it hard to have repeatable benchmark runs. The enemies in the 1999 demo are still spawned procedurally, which causes some run-to-run variance, but you can work around that by simply generating a lot of data.
That's exactly what we did: we played the entire ten-minute Warframe 1999 demo 45 separate times, tracking frametimes across every single run, to produce the chart above. Each GPU got three runs, and these results are the averages of all three. The game was running in full-screen 4K UHD with resolution upscaling set to "Quality," meaning DLSS for GeForce cards and FSR2.2 for everyone else; either way, this yields a render resolution of 2560×1440. In-game settings were set to the "High" preset.
Warframe has been well-known to favor AMD graphics for some time, and the chart here bears that out somewhat, as the Radeon RX 7700 XT pulls up alongside the GeForce RTX 3080. Of course, the mighty GeForce RTX 4080 dominates the chart thanks to its brute power, but everything here turns in a fundamentally playable performance with the possible exception of the Arc A580 and GeForce RTX 3060. Actually, the Arc cards do poorly here overall; we're not sure if this is down to a lack of driver optimizations or simply that Warframe is a bad match for Alchemist.
Digital Extremes uses its own in-house engine technology known as "Evolution" for both Warframe as well as its upcoming game Soulframe, and while Evolution is well-optimized in general, it is strictly a last-gen game engine. It doesn't support virtualized geometry or textures, it doesn't have any ray-tracing features, and the game's lighting and shadowing are decidedly old-school. Still, it can look quite nice when used properly, and the environment in the Warframe 1999 demo is absolutely gorgeous.
Completing the demo one time earns players an exclusive skin for longsword weapons, seen above. It's not clear if the demo will continue to be available once Warframe 1999 comes out. We sure hope so, because it is easily the best way to benchmark the game. Digital Extremes hasn't said when Warframe 1999 will actually come out, but it's slated for some time this Winter. The game is completely free on virtually every platform, including the Nintendo Switch, so if you haven't tried the best space ninja game ever yet, download it and give it a shot.
