What kind of PC do I need?

[DRBLN]

I have intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 @ 3.2 GHZ.

Unfortunately, the game starts to lag if I build a very big base.
Please advise what CPU do I need to avoid the lags?

[FishSandwich]

Big bases cause lag, it's a limitation of the Factorio client. There are optimizations coming in 0.12, you should wait for that instead of wasting money.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-82 - check out the information near the bottom, under "The Optimisations"

[DRBLN]

Thank you for the info.

However, I'd like to build a very big base.
Please advise if intel core i7 is enough to avoid the lags?

[FishSandwich]

Faster processor will make a small difference, the problem is in Factorio.

[kovarex]

Well, fast processor with good memory latency makes some difference actually.

But the difference in 0.12 will be quite large, I will talk about it in fff today.

[Martc]

But, there are still some ways how you can improve performance:
- disable smoke effects
- try to use trains/drones instead of long transport belts
- don't build transport belts next to each other, leave one tile gap between them, especially long ones. (if I understand FF 82 correctly)

[keyboardhack]

- disable smoke effects

Sadly disabling it has no effect yet.

Almost 10% of the update time is spent on "Smoke", a graphical effect that has no practical purpose, other than to look good.

Yeah, that does sound like a bit of a waste of processing power when compared to the fact that the other 90% has a practical purpose.

Yeah, that's why I play with the smoke turned off

That has no effect on it. That just stops the smoke from rendering. It still exists and it still ticks down its life time and "floats" around.

there is no big difference between a phenom II x2 and a i7 - 4820 (source: i recently changed and didn't see much difference)

[kovarex]

Yes, disabling smoke just disables the visualisation, but it still has to be simulated, luckily, in 0.12 the game will be approximately 3 times faster, more here: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-84

[aka13]

i7 4770k running at 4 Ghz here, there is no difference even if I set the amount of threads to 8. Ingame limitations, duh.

[kovarex]

i7 4770k running at 4 Ghz here, there is no difference even if I set the amount of threads to 8. Ingame limitations, duh.

Yes, because the main update thread is not fully parallelised. It might come later, but now we concentrated on optimising the core simulation on one thread first.

[starholme]

Just some general observations about good 'gaming' processors:
More cores is not always better - Most games (including factorio) have a limited level of multithreading, and are only able to take advantage of a few cores. Very few can utilize more than 2 effectively, so hedge your bets on the future and aim for a quad core if you can.
Clock speed is only comparable between the same processor generation. Unless you already know a lot about each architecture/die shrink/generation, the clock speed is almost useless. Instead, to judge between processors have a look at benchmarks. A reasonable one I like because it's very simple to compare can be found at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php. For each processor, they have an average and a single thread score. See https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... Hz&id=1896 for an example.

So really, for a gaming computer you want the best single thread performance you can afford, and the number of cores that your game supports + 1(The extra core can handle the OS).
At least a dual core, preferably a quad core.
At least 4gb of ram, preferably 8gb.
Some sort of dedicated GPU. Integrated ones will struggle with most newer games, although they are getting better every year.
An SSD if you can afford it. The difference is very noticeable during general usage, loading and saving are near instant even with the worst SSD's.

There are lots of other situations outside of gaming where these general rules don't apply. Lots of applications related to video or image editing will use every core they can get. 8gb of ram is questionably enough for a developer workstation. SSD's are crazy expensive if you want to store terabytes of data.

[Peter34]

I have intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 @ 3.2 GHZ.

Unfortunately, the game starts to lag if I build a very big base.
Please advise what CPU do I need to avoid the lags?

How big is a big base?

[aka13]

Doesnt matter how good of a cpu you have, after the savefile reaches 50-70mb you will get FPS lag. No other way around it.

[ssilk]

How big is a big base?

It depends on your computer (mainly CPU- + RAM-speed) and how slow it can get until it annoys you.

My biggest base till now had an uncovered map of about 12,000 quadrat-tiles and a throughput of 200,000 raw-ressource items (copper, iron, coal, stone) per minute, transported with > 80 trains. For example: The refinery-part included 50 refineries and one water pipe (3 pumps) was not enough to supply the need for water. Tranport by train from one side to the other tooks 5 minutes, which tooks in real time 3-4 times slower (15 ticks / sec). It was only playable with testing mod, using the teleport.

[SHiRKiT]

Well I noticed a huge difference from a 2.4 ghz to a 3.2 then to a 4.3 ghz. If have the money, you should go for it. I prefer AMD processors.

[Peter34]

Well I noticed a huge difference from a 2.4 ghz to a 3.2 then to a 4.3 ghz. If have the money, you should go for it. I prefer AMD processors.

You can't just compare processor speed like that. I bought a 3.0 GHz computer in 2005, and then a 3.1 GHz computer in 2012, but the new one was much more than 3% faster than the previous.

[orzelek]

Since Factorio is currently single threaded mostly I'd look here:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

It's a synthetic benchmark so no guarantees - but it's the single core performance that matters.
(And ofc 12 will be a big leap for performance after all the optimizations)

[SHiRKiT]

Well I noticed a huge difference from a 2.4 ghz to a 3.2 then to a 4.3 ghz. If have the money, you should go for it. I prefer AMD processors.

You can't just compare processor speed like that. I bought a 3.0 GHz computer in 2005, and then a 3.1 GHz computer in 2012, but the new one was much more than 3% faster than the previous.

Well, the same processor overclocked from 2.4 to 3.2 was a huge difference (i7 3630QM), and then moving to an AMD FX 8320.

[quinor]

How have you overclocked laptop processor ShiRKiT?

[Rseding91]

Doesnt matter how good of a cpu you have, after the savefile reaches 50-70mb you will get FPS lag. No other way around it.

My save file is roughly 70 MB. It runs at a solid 60/60 FPS/UPS - it all depends how you build your base and if you're using performance intensive (poorly written in most cases) mods.