Factorio Forums

Hello,

my factorio game starts having some real performance issues when the base gets larger. However the game hardly uses my CPU(set 6 threads for my 6 cores, yet only about 15-20% usage, so more like 1 or 2 cores), my GPU is idling and ive got plenty of unused RAM. Is this a general problem that might be fixed in future releases, is this a specific issue for me (and thereby potentially solvable by me) or is it something entirely else?

My Specs are:
Phenom 2 X6 1055T OC to 3.5GHz
AMD/ATI Radeon 5850 1GB sligthly OCed
8GB Ram
Win 7
Factorio Version 0.11.18

My current savegame has slowed down to way below 20fps, making it nearly unplayable. As a size indicator, it produces about 1 rocket defense every 1 hour when enough ressources can be supplied (though in reality its more like every 2-3 hours).

Any help or suggestions would be very welcome, thanks in advance.

While factorio can use more than one thread, the majority of the work is done in only one thread.
So your usage is probably one core at 100%, and just a few percent on one or two other cores.

Do you mind posting the FPS/UPS numbers you are getting? Low UPS is generally processor bottlenecking which I suspect, and FPS is tied to UPS in some fashion.(Can't update the screen more often than you update the entities)

Your x6 has a single core rating of 1113 on https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... 55T&id=390
Something like a Q9550, which is before intel went to the 'i' series processors and came out in 2008 gets 1202 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... Hz&id=1049

I wish the game could use more cores as well. But for now, the ultimate processor for most games(as very few can use more than 2-3 cores effectively) is something like the i5 4690k with a single core rating of 2252. Basically double what you and me get https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... Hz&id=2284

I'd love to be able to upgrade my machine, but it's hard to justify the cost most of the time. My old machine is plenty fast for almost everything else that I play. I have no idea if you built that machine yourself, or what your other uses for it are, but if you are building a new machine in the future that's just for gaming(lots of cores are great for video editing, compression, etc) remember that single core performance is still important. I'd love to say that games will use multiple cores(effectively!) soon, but I don't personally believe it.

I'm too lazy to find the forum threads, but I do know that the dev team feels that performance will get much better in the future, while remaining mostly single threaded. The single thread optimizations they want to do will have a bigger bang for their hours, than multi-threading will. Maybe once they run out of single thread improvements that are reasonably easy, then they will try a multi-threaded update. Here's hoping.

Have fun chugging along, and know you are not alone in the slow lane

Jeah i built the machine myself since multi coring really benefits certain SDKs im using so i chose the X6 over Intel systems at the time. I still remember the discussion about Phenom2 X6 vs I5 2500 for games.... sadly the expectation that more games (esp. sim's like factorio) support mulit cores better has really not come to fruition

My FPS / UPS is roughly 14 / 42. Is that UPS number bad/the problem?

And i dont really want to upgrade the system or built a new one at the moment considering literally anything i do on it and nearly everything i play on it runs fine. Was really hoping that such a graphic lacking game would support multicore more

Are there some settings/ingame tips to adhere to, to keep the FPS/UPS up? (avoid belts or avoid bots, or switch off enemies or something like that?). Basically, is it known what the most performance hungry systems ingame are?

Your UPS isn't too bad (42) but FPS (14) certainly seems weirdly low. I don't drop so low even with my integrated Intel GPU. How is performance in other games? Perhaps there is some issue with your GPU/drivers.

hoho wrote:Your UPS isn't too bad (42) but FPS (14) certainly seems weirdly low. I don't drop so low even with my integrated Intel GPU. How is performance in other games? Perhaps there is some issue with your GPU/drivers.

I can play other games just fine (Elder Scrolls Online, Skyrim, Prison Architect etc) so i thought that drivers are fine. My GPU basically idles with Factorio, it uses a lot of GPU memory but the usage is less than 20%.

Any ideas how to improve the FPS part?

Factorio intentionally reduces FPS to 1/3 of UPS in an attempt to save resources. The only way to fix it is improve UPS.

DaveMcW wrote:Factorio intentionally reduces FPS to 1/3 of UPS in an attempt to save resources. The only way to fix it is improve UPS.

Jeah i observed that relationship aswell.

Any easy tips on how to improve UPS? Either by factory design or by certain settings?

Try using more trains and less belts, it should help if you use a lot of belts

The fewer entites you use the better. Try using trains to move your stuff, if that doesn't help, maybe go take a look at your builds and optmize them a bit. Even shrinking them can help.

With 0.11.15 and before there was a small bug that made belts placed by robots not deactivate. In case your savegame is affected I suppose replacing them would free some CPU, but it's a lot of manual work.

dee- wrote:With 0.11.15 and before there was a small bug that made belts placed by robots not deactivate. In case your savegame is affected I suppose replacing them would free some CPU, but it's a lot of manual work.

I only have been playing since 1.17 so this hopefully is not the issue (i have placed a lot of belts by bots...) but thanks for the idea.

JimiQ wrote:Try using more trains and less belts, it should help if you use a lot of belts

SHiRKiT wrote:The fewer entites you use the better. Try using trains to move your stuff, if that doesn't help, maybe go take a look at your builds and optmize them a bit. Even shrinking them can help.

Belts are the issue? But they make the game so much fun

I have a look, but this is my 2nd play through and i have just finished my base with a 10 bluebelt wide main belt in the middle, dont really want to remove all of that (figuring out how to split for different products and such was all the fun), i use trains mainly to get ore's in, would it be worth it to replace belts in the ore outposts with robots collecting from the miners? Currently i have belt systems there that bring all the ore to the corresponding train stations.

Thanks for all the input.

jgntrugytub wrote:... would it be worth it to replace belts in the ore outposts with robots collecting from the miners? Currently i have belt systems there that bring all the ore to the corresponding train stations.

Thanks for all the input.

Robots could help for short distances. Belts, especially blue ones are not well optimized yet, but AFAIK devs "promised" to get them better in version 0.12 (even with a fix for the "slow corner issue")

Good thing that i only use red and blue belts in this playthrough....damnit. Here is to hoping for A12.

Edit: As a more pointed question, are 1.8 Million Entities (32k active) a lot for factorio? (ive got no number to compare it to for assessment) And what does active mean? And what are 4.5Million Connections?

jgntrugytub wrote:As a more pointed question, are 1.8 Million Entities (32k active) a lot for factorio? (ive got no number to compare it to for assessment) And what does active mean? And what are 4.5Million Connections?

The numbers you have are actually very low compared to some other maps you can find people have uploaded to this forum. I have seen maps with 60mil Entities(500K active) and 15mil connecters and i am sure there is bigger maps out there.

I don't think you should worry about the numbers because they might only be loosely connected to performace.

Belts performance is the real issue.

Tested it on more than 2.6k fast belts, 288 furnaces, 430 inserters.
I stopped this smeltery by removing one belt from each of ores input, and waited for belts to be cleared, made performance measurement.
After, I launched the smeltery, waited until that you can see on the screenshot.

The result is frustrating, additional 5 ms to Entity update for every tick on good PC.
Instead of 39 UPS, I have 32 just because of this not small, but not big smeltery.