Wanted to share this, if it helps anyone else.
Using force-opengl=true in config.ini has been helpful for me. It uses between a gig and 3 gigs less memory in factorio.exe (in a few tests so far) and seems to force the graphics card to prefer to use more on-board memory (according to gpu-z) as opposed to system memory. Factorio.exe uses substantially less memory whether my texture settings are high or normal.
I can play in enormous multiplayer bases a bit more easily. Overall, my FPS drops maybe 10-15% (it's a guaranteed drop, for me) in single player comparisons, but it seems to be more consistent at staying around the same FPS as well as UPS in multiplayer. I wish I had one of those multiplayer megabases saved which used up all of my available memory and caused noticeable stuttering (probably from swapping to disk), to test here. Reducing memory usage in those cases (before forcing opengl) by reducing textures to low or very low was my only solution, because factorio.exe memory usage dropped as a result. That didn't make much sense, but that's what happened and allowed me to play.
Even when I have system memory to spare, the large multiplayer bases run more efficiently. I don't know if it's because of more efficient system memory or vram usage, but it gives me a little bit better chance of playing in multiplayer megabases since the same map has a MUCH harder time running in multiplayer than when I save and load it up in single player. In a single player save of the exact same multiplayer map, I'd rather use the normal settings to have the FPS improvement, but I mostly play multiplayer these days, so I'm sticking with force-opengl until I see how .17 runs.
This seems to be an overall memory usage improvement in a real-world scenario, because a determinism-only benchmark shows that it runs no better. I don't know enough, so I can only speculate that the memory controller on my old system is freed up by more efficient graphics memory usage instead of going cpu>controller>system memory>controller>graphics as frequently for the graphics side of things. If you have plenty of headroom in all of your hardware, then you won't have problems to begin with.
Anyone else have a similar experience on an older or less-powerful computer?
OpenGL reduces memory usage
Anything that prevents you from playing the game properly. Do you have issues playing for the game, downloading it or successfully running it on your computer? Let us know here.
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