Factorio Forums

During loading the game from the .exe, Factorio has the potential to permanently destroy a graphics card.

This happens if there are either:

• a.) A large number of mods that add a lot of graphics or instances of objects/sprites.
• b.) A single mod that uses code to generate a huge variation of an object/sprite.

As a result, factorio can be stuck in the first loading screen without any possibility to stop it, causing it to overload the graphics card with data that can irrepairably damage and kill it. Factorio lacks a safeguard to stop loading the game if there is less memory than what the loading process is looking to fill.

The b.) option happened to me with Factorio and the mod Rampant (https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Veden/Rampant)

Veden wrote:

numgun wrote:I noticed the "new enemies" option requires an increase of RAM from 2GB to 8GB.
I only have 6GB of RAM, but I tried to turn on it anyway just to test it and it totally froze my computer while trying to load the mod on start up.

I'm just confused and want to know, what makes it take so much memory?

How many tiers and variations did you set?

The reason is that factorio doesn't support variable attributes on the units other than a percent increase/decrease of weapon types which amounts to damage.

So to get around that, I pre-generate the enemies using a seed value. Each unit, unit nest, worm, weapon, and weapon effects all require memory space.

With lower tiers and variations you can tailor the cost to your system.

Instead of stopping due to a lack of available memory, Factorio pushed on and forcibly drove my graphics card to a breaking point. My NVIDIA Geforce GTX 260 is now dead. Factorio actually destroyed my hardware.

Please add a safeguard to the first loading screen to prevent Factorio from continuing to load up sprites, data and objects if the computer's memory runs out. Make it stop before it can damage hardware.

Please, don't let my GTX 260 die in vain.

Shouldn't the driver provide safe guards against such things?

how old is your GTX 260? the caps on it are probably shot anyway.
i seriously doubt Factorio caused the destruction of your card.

>Lets boot up factorio with this experimental mod setup by an incompetent and irresponsible modder that I had no way to anticipate.
>Oh fuck Factorio is stuck loading, is totally unresponsive and still keeps forcibly trying to load the game anyway.
>Factorio keeps pushing so hard that the screen starts flashing black and wierd artifacts appear on the screen.
>The whole computer experiences a total meltdown and ends with a Blue Screen of Death.
>Any attempt to run any applications that use the graphics card cause a BSOD shortly after a few minutes of play.
>The PC was in good health up until this point with everything running smoothly.
>Blind idiots on the forum are like "lol its not factorios fault at all" without taking the effort to read the thread before posting.

That was the exact event that killed my graphics card, don't try to defend Factorio as some sort of perfect application with no faults.

IT DID the kill.

This is absurd. The damage you describe can only be caused by overheating, which is absolutely normal if you try to stress your card over the limits it is supposed to be able to handle. If you run an ancient 260, with stock cooling, then drop a huge computational load on it, and just let it chew on it, instead of killing the app, or shutting down your pc, its obviously your fault, and not the appliccation.

You remind me of all the "professional" overclockers who run Prime95 unattended with stock cooling to "stresstest" their cpu, and then complain that the cpu and/or the mobo is dead. Same with 3Dmark running for hours, it surely will cook your gpu. If you run a mod, which is so demanding of hardware, and you are aware of it, at the same time running anccient hardware, then you should have moinitored the temps and load on your gpu. It's your responsibility to watch over your pc and its capabilities. Why on earth should the devs limit the game in ressource utilisation because of it?

EDIT

Ok, the card is not a decade old. It's actually "only" 9 years old. How you would exspect the capacitors and mosfets to handle such workloads, I don't know.

i'm sorry for your loss, but Rampant has 47452 downloads. i haven't heard of any other failures.
my 360 got read ring of death playing Bioshock, but i didn't blame the game.

how often do you blow out the dust of your Graphics card?

It sounds like the graphics card was just waiting to die,
We have over 10,000 active players and no significant number of reports that the game is killing any graphics cards

Dawn of War had a video card hardware related issue many years ago. The army painter screen was incredibly simple (just one 3d model on screen) and could be easily cached in the GPU. The end result is that the GPU would crank away at its cache at 100% speed, giving hundreds or thousands of FPS. VIdeo cards were extremely aggressively overclocked at the time and even a 5% increase in heat could break their limits. The army painter screen gave that extra push and made games crash.

They fixed the issue by capping FPS in the army painter.

I'm not sure if the same issue applies here. The age of CUDA means that newer video cards can realistically crank away at a ton of cached data, so modern GPU cores have to work at full capacity without overheating. Older overclocked edition cards (around DoW era) will still be sensitive though because they expect to have NOPs in their duty cycle.

Unfortunately a video card's memory system is not a box. You can't keep cramming in data until the chip's internal pressure gets so high that it explodes.

numgun wrote:Factorio lacks a safeguard to stop loading the game if there is less memory than what the loading process is looking to fill.

Such safeguards should be implemented on operating system/hardware level, to protect hardware also from malicious software. It is not a responsibility of user software to implement it.

According to my knowledge well-designed OS/hardware has such limits (for example shutdown of system if threshold temperature is reached).

So either your hardware was broken or your OS was buggy.


====


And most likely is that your graphic card was broken already, at it is by accident that it become visible during using Factorio.

@Klonan:
There have been a few reports over the years of games causing overheating by having unlocked framerates in menus. I.e. by allowing unlimited FPS in menus while the game itself was locked to $screen_refresh_rate. Which could then cause overheating on poorly cooled systems when users stayed in menus too long.

However overheating is still a system error, and not a program error. A properly built system should not physically be able to overheat and have sufficient cooling at all times, and "modern" hardware has saveguards against overheating (i know, i've been in a really hot place in summer and seen my 5yr old laptop force-shutdown from blender rendering :P). And the whole talk of "pushing too much data into ram" is bs ofc. And "artifacts on screen" are a sure sign of overheating/broken card btw.

I feel frustrated by the replies, no one seems to actually read or listen.
I clearly state things, but people choose to ignore them.

The card was in full health before this event. All programs functioned perfectly. This is not some sneaky issue that slowly crept up.

There is no overheating issue either, it is frankly quite cold where I live and the ventilation is effective. The temperatures checked with GPU-Z program were normal (50-60c').

Most importantly, the startup loading screen OFFERS NO WAY TO STOP IT. I was expecting either for Factorio to shut itself down, for windows to stop it or for the GPU to back off, NONE happened and I could NOT have done anything to stop it.

I essentially walked into an unintentional trap created by an incompetent modder, had Factorio do fuck-all to prevent modder abuse when doing the startup sequence and then have the computer paralyzed with no way to know at the time that neither this was going to damage my hardware nor how I could have stopped it.

IF YOU DID NOT READ THE ABOVE, YOUR REPLY IS WORTHLESS.

You should consolidate a lawyer.

Either for your false accusation or to make a law suit against Wube or the modder.

This forum can't help you

Also screaming in public advert a silent agreement with Wube.

You have absolutely no reason to think that Factorio did kill your graphics card and not just a random error at the same time. You can't even tell if Factorio did kill your graphics card, or if an error in your graphics card stopped Factorio from properly loading.

numgun wrote:The card was in full health before this event. All programs functioned perfectly. This is not some sneaky issue that slowly crept up.

It's not uncommon that grapics cards just die, that just happens sometimes. Not every failure has to "slowly creep up".

numgun wrote:Most importantly, the startup loading screen OFFERS NO WAY TO STOP IT.

I know of no game right now that has a "stop loading" button. You would always have to kill the process, or maybe click the X if it's in windowed mode.

numgun wrote:[...], causing it to overload the graphics card with data that can irrepairably damage and kill it. Factorio lacks a safeguard to stop loading the game if there is less memory than what the loading process is looking to fill.

That's not how graphics cards work, or computers in general. They either have enough space to store everything, or they don't. Theres no "pressing more data into the card than it can fit", it would just return an error message or something like that. The only question is how Factorio interprets this error message. Not enough VRAM is a common problem for Factorio, so I don't think that the game ignores this errors. This is an indication that the problem came from the graphics card and not from Factorio. In real life you can just push more and more clothes into a cardboard box - at least until it breaks. In computers you just get an error message if you try to store more than possible.

Let me repeat one thing: Not enough VRAM is a common problem for Factorio. There would be much more cases of exploded graphics card if your assumption is true. Instead the game just doesn't start / crashes while loading a map.

numgun wrote:I feel frustrated by the replies, no one seems to actually read or listen.
I clearly state things, but people choose to ignore them.

We don't ignore your declarations, we just don't think they are the reason for the problems. It's sad that your 260 is now broken, but years of my own experience in hardware and general consensus in that regards tell me that it's highly improbable that Factorio killed your graphics card. But then again, it's good that you have written about your problem here. There's still a very small chance that Factorio did indeed kill your hardware. The devs can now note this keep it in mind if there's ever another problem like this, they can take a closer look into it.

numgun wrote:I feel frustrated by the replies, no one seems to actually read or listen.
I clearly state things, but people choose to ignore them.

The card was in full health before this event. All programs functioned perfectly. This is not some sneaky issue that slowly crept up.

There is no overheating issue either, it is frankly quite cold where I live and the ventilation is effective. The temperatures checked with GPU-Z program were normal (50-60c').

An absurd statement. You can hardly evaluate the health of the card, but, as stated previously, the gtx is a 9 year old card. According to the datasheet, https://www.geforce.com/hardware/deskto ... ifications, and assuming you had the weakest, reference version, it still was rated for 200W power draw. A 9year old card with a 65nm techprocess, rated for 200W under any sort of load? That's just asking for trouble. It was going to die any moment now, and you can hardly blame factorio for that. Also, you have not even provided the specific card you own, and you never even bothered to check what speccifically failed.

This might be new to you, but again - you can not "kill" a gpu with software. You just can't. The only way how cards die under load, is either when it overheats for too large periods, or when the silicon finally gives up after years of running power through itself. In both cases, you can hardly pin the failure to factorio.

If a metaphor helps, you just drove a 50 year old car, on which you are not able to perform maintenance over a speedbump, and it finally fell apart. You can hardly blame the speedbump for that. It's just natural.

Most importantly, the startup loading screen OFFERS NO WAY TO STOP IT. I was expecting either for Factorio to shut itself down, for windows to stop it or for the GPU to back off, NONE happened and I could NOT have done anything to stop it.

An absurd statement. Do you want factorio to somehow monitor cpu/gpu usage, and decide, when to shut down? Where on earth have you seen software that does this? Name me 1(one) example.

I essentially walked into an unintentional trap created by an incompetent modder, had Factorio do fuck-all to prevent modder abuse when doing the startup sequence and then have the computer paralyzed with no way to know at the time that neither this was going to damage my hardware nor how I could have stopped it.

Again, false accusations followed by absurd demands. I can easily setup the same scenario you had, and my pc will not die. Wanna know why? My components are not dying of age. If you know that you have very old components, which are about to fail, it's only your responsibility to pull the plug, when you feel that the load is too big to handle. Alt f4, taskmanager, shutting down, literally pulling the plug - all ways to prevent a piece of software from executing. And again, factorio was not doing any damage to your hardware. Everything worked as expected.

IF YOU DID NOT READ THE ABOVE, YOUR REPLY IS WORTHLESS.

Now this is just offensive.

just consider yourself lucky. my 670 FTW lasted a little over 4 years. that 260 didn't owe you a damn thing.

Sounds like your card could not handle maximum memory performance over a sustained period. That was an accident waiting to happen. The game merely triggered a flaw that -already- existed in your system. If a graphics driver allows an application that uses the driver and does not bypass it to call the graphics card directly (which, to my knowledge Factorio does not do - it uses OpenGL or DirectX right?) then you need to call out the graphics card manufacturer, not the software that uses said driver.

Comparison: If you rev your engine for a sustained period in your car and then blame a roadworker when the engine dies... that's not very effective either.

numgun wrote:I feel frustrated by the replies, no one seems to actually read or listen.
I clearly state things, but people choose to ignore them.

You seem to have a general problem where you assume that everyone that doesn't fully agree with you is just too stupid/ignorant to understand what you asy (this was the same in the "hollow" thread). When infact people simply disagree with a statement you made because it is false. If you claimed that the sky is green becaues you wear tinted glasses then people telling you that it is not are not "ignoring" what you say.
Similarly your statement of "too much data damaged my graphics card" is simply false. Because that is not how computers work. Similar to how your phone doesn't break when you try to store "too many" pictures. It will simply tell you that you can't store anymore.

It is unfortunate your graphics card got broken, but bad luck is all that it is, I am sorry. If the GPU didn't die in Factorio, it would die a week later when playing Youtube video, or your computer would not boot up all of the sudden.

Nowadays, computers are well protected from accidental damage from buggy user software. For example buggy application crashes alone, leaving other applications and OS undamaged. Of course it is probably possible for malicious software to overwrite firmware or BIOS of a given piece of HW using that HW vendor's API, but that won't happen by accident.

As for pushing too much data to GPU forcefully. We ask graphics API to allocate resources and driver either gives it to us, or it doesn't in which case we show some sort of error and end execution. There is no force involved.

I am sorry for the loss of your hardware and I can understand that you are frustrated by what happened.

That said, you have a very flawed understanding of how computer hardware and software works.

Atleast put an option to reliably terminate the startup loading screen.

That thing can often take its sweet time booting up all the sprites and data (especially more so with mods), so having an ability to cancel the startup anytime in general would be a welcome addition.

Always offer the user to cancel out of any lenghty computing operation, thats UI/UX design 101.