TL;DR: PROTON_LOG=1 drastically improves performance in Warframe.
I’ve been dealing with persistent stuttering and general slowdown in Warframe, particularly when assets were loading in upon startup and especially during loading screens. Generally, once I would get into actual gameplay things would be smooth (according to both myself and Mangohud,) but going from a hub to an open world area would completely tank performance or even outright halt rendering for 30 to 40 seconds in the worst-case scenario.
I decided to start poking into what was happening and immediately found out that PROTON_LOG=1 completely solves all of these problems. The longest loading time (30 seconds or so) is now 5 seconds. Missions load almost instantaneously.
The generated log is extremely verbose at around 1MB a minute. I don’t see anything obviously wrong, but then again the game is working as it should.
Why is this? Wouldn’t not generating the log be faster?
sounds to me like a timing issue. By using the proton log you might slow down to the point the timing issue doesn’t give you problems anymore. Try disabling vsync and enabling a fps limit (warframe has both settings itself).
Another possible cause could be filesystem going to a powersaving mode during normal gameplay and by writing logs you keep the disk in high performance.