Thanks for the idea posila, running factorio as root does indeed work around the problem. Even in bigger worlds I get steady 60 fps while running as root. Does still not explain the problem (since its limited to factorio only, all other games performance is as expected, even as non root), but at ...

Downgrading the nvidia driver to 367.35 made no difference.
Additionally tested the standalone (non-steam) version, which has the same issue.

New
nvidia-settings -q all -t | uniq

Attributes queryable via Main.Arch:0.0:
OperatingSystem: 0
NvidiaDriverVersion: 367.35
NvControlVersion: 1.29 ...

Thanks for taking the time to look into this.

The issue has been around since factorio 0.12.10 (at least thats the last version i remember messing around with), while the driver was only updated 10 days ago.

I could try to get an apitrace ( https://github.com/apitrace/apitrace ) if that would help ...

nvidia-settings -q all -t:
Attributes queryable via Main.Arch:0.0:
OperatingSystem: 0
NvidiaDriverVersion: 370.23
NvControlVersion: 1.29
GLXServerVersion: 1.4
GLXClientVersion: 1.4
OpenGLVersion: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 370.23
XRandRVersion: 1.5
XF86VidModeVersion: 2.2
XvVersion: 2.2
TwinView: 1 ...

The issue has been going on for a while, with 0.12 already beeing affected.

Following are screenshots from 3 different versions currently available to me, with all mods cleared, in a default world with default spawn parameters:

Factorio 0.13.20
http://i.imgur.com/nNCPW3d.jpg
Factorio 0.14.2 ...

Hi There,

I'm running factorio on Linux, but see very poor graphics performance. Even in small worlds, the framerate hovers below 30 fps, while the system just idles.
According to the debug information, a lot of time is spent in the Gui Render step.

http://i.imgur.com/qble0lq.jpg

For this ...