Factorio Forums

As my factory has grown, my FPS and UPS have dropped significantly. Strangely, if I use the map view to zoom in on certain high traffic areas, the FPS drops even further but the UPS goes up to almost 60.

I remember some time ago the factory didn't have UPS problems quite this bad, but when I loaded an older version of the factory with an older version of factorio, the UPS was still quite low. That makes me wonder if some windows update hurt performance. However, I don't have any culprits in mind.

Attached are a couple screenshots:

https://imgur.com/a/KxQnm26

I've been trying to optimize the factory in various ways, such as reducing the number of pipes or assemblers needed to produce the same objects, but none of it seems to improve the UPS.

Any suggestions on how to make it go faster? I can also upload the factory itself if that will help.

Post the log, see my signature.

check if any part of your desktop/laptop is warm to the touch when playing if so get a small fan and place it blowing on the warm spot
i have a laptop that originally got 15 fps and 26 ups on a factory while it was the only thing open
but now i get 60 fps and ups on a larger factory and have youtube playing in the background

Looking at the screenshots in the first post, part of the issue is that your cpu is struggling to simulate everything at 60 updates per second. (Ultimately that is something that will eventually happen if players keep expanding their factories).

The second screenshot shows the the graphics card is struggling to keep up in map view. I notice you have have the roboport visualization turned on. That makes me think the map view fps drops are viewtopic.php?f=182&t=60659 . Note that 3840x2160 is probably pushing the fill-rate of a mobile gpu. Turning down graphics quality and or resolution might help. (Depending on laptop design, every frame might need to be copied to the cpu's framebuffer,before being displayed onscreen. That could put more demands on the cpu's memory accesses, so a lower framerate might actually help the cpu cope with more updates per second).

Note that as Stafftank said there is a possibility that the cpu is struggling with heat dissipation, so improving cooling might help.

Thank you both for the suggestions. I do find that the laptop eventually gets quite toasty. Is there a good way to find out if that means it's throttling? The performance doesn't degrade as it gets hotter. My guess is that suggests there isn't throttling going on, but I don't know for sure.

One thing I've noticed is that when factorio loses focus and a browser or something like that is on top of the factorio display, performance actually goes up, sometimes almost to 60ups. Is there some way to take advantage of that in terms of factorio settings? I tried various lower quality settings, such as no decorations or no smoke, but those settings didn't make any difference.

AngledLuffa wrote:One thing I've noticed is that when factorio loses focus and a browser or something like that is on top of the factorio display, performance actually goes up, sometimes almost to 60ups. Is there some way to take advantage of that in terms of factorio settings? I tried various lower quality settings, such as no decorations or no smoke, but those settings didn't make any difference.

You could try lowering sprite quality to normal. I'm not sure it will help. I suspect part of the issue might be that the laptop's screen is connected to the cpu's onboard graphics output, which means that every frame the graphics card needs to send about 24 MB of data to main memory, which is putting more strain on the cpu. If factorio's window isn't on top, then (some of) that can skipped, hence frame rates go up. Reducing the resolution might help, particularly if you can get the screen to do the scaling. (If the nvidia quattro is doing the scaling, then you are probably still pushing that 24Mb to main memory every frame).

This explanation seems very likely. Changing the resolution to 1920x1080 immediately fixed the UPS issues. It also explains why the UPS would go back to 60 when I would zoom in on an area which caused the FPS to drop to 20 or so.

Can you think of any way to get around this aside from changing the resolution?

Further exploring this idea, I think that when running Factorio on my laptop display (Lenovo P51), it is using the Intel HD Graphics 630 integrated graphics. This means it is absolutely using the system memory to display Factorio. I guess this is running into the memory bandwidth limitations that had been mentioned once upon a time. Certainly the CPU isn't even maxed out when the UPS starts to drop below 60.

Try using minimum sprite atlas size. If the GPU can't fit a whole sprite atlas into cache when doing batch processing, it may be having to go to memory far more often then is necessary.

Well according to the log posted earlier, Factorio thinks it is running on the Nvidia Quattro, which has plenty of Vram.

That's an interesting point. I had thought it was the Intel chip for the laptop display.

Anyway, it seems they are making the rendering more efficient with 0.17, so perhaps I just need to wait for that upgrade.