General Factorio Performance

[exi123]

Hello Factorio-Forum,

i love to play this game, but always when i play i'm running into the same issue: The game performance drops to a rate which feels to slow to play further. Before you say that this is normal because its limited by the power of my cpu etc, thats not the case. I'm currently playing on not widely exposed map, using some mods and built a lot of stuff. The fps and ups are at 42 -30/50-55 on average which feels very laggy. The Clue: My cpu "sleeps" @ 15%-20%, my Ram is 25% full and my gpu "sleeps" aswell in Singleplayer. If i open the Savegame on a headless its pretty the same. The server runs @ 10%, far away from being overloaded. So whats the case this game running that slow? Am i missing a setting to give the game the full power of my Pc? Is the game engine that limited and slow in the, i would say, midgame?

Greeting and Thx for answering...

[posila]

That's normal because it is limited by power of your CPU etc.
Unfortunately, game update is not currently parallelized and runs on single core. So that 15%-20% CPU usage is probably one core under 100% load and rest of the CPU cores almost sleeping.

[exi123]

Thanks for answering posila,

i thought first that this makes sense, up to 12,5% with eight cores, the rest is system stuff an more running in the backround. I monitored it a bit and see: none of the cores is running @ 100%...
Looks that Factorio runs on four cores using 25% on average... so there must be an other limit...

[Neemys]

a single core process, can go from one core to another to reduce heat on one core. As windows' graph are not updated as fast as the process switch, you only see average load on each core.

If you change CPU affinity for the factorio process to only one core, this core will surely be a 100%. I do not recommend to keep the process on one core for playing though even if that will gain you a tiny bit more performance (maybe not noticeable), your cpu lifetime will surely drop as you will create more heat over part of the cpu.