Factorio Forums

hey guys and girls of the factorio community. i was just wondering how good your computers are that you are useing to run your factorio without lag. ( around 50 fps ). im running factorio of a school laptop we are given here in Australia with ONLY 3Gb of ram wit a really bad processor and graphics card . im playing with an acceptable amount of lag but what do people would be the bare minimum to play this without lag?

well my computer is strong i have never experienced lag ever in this game (only a few minor glitches with script updates, and those are quick easy to fix)

my setup:
Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 Motherboard
AMD FX-8350 8 Core processor
4x 8gb 2300 Hz Kingston HypeX (32gb)
Nvidia Geforce GTX 660 2Gb DD5
Samsung 48" Smart LED Full HD TV Widescreen

quite a good setup (it should be, cost me €1.300,-)

well that just makes me jealous. im playing of a laptop that the government gave us for free that i hacked and broke all the things to speed it up and make it work as well as possible ( as well as make me admin on my own laptop ) and i can play a lot of the things. but being 17 and working as a Mcslave i just dont have the income for that much as i would like.

aussiegaylord wrote:well that just makes me jealous. im playing of a laptop that the government gave us for free that i hacked and broke all the things to speed it up and make it work as well as possible ( as well as make me admin on my own laptop ) and i can play a lot of the things. but being 17 and working as a Mcslave i just dont have the income for that much as i would like.

hehehe that sucks. gotta love working fulltime (im done with school) and having all the time of the world
oooh, and it might be good to know i also have water cooling in my pc as it kinda gets warm quickly (especially the video cart )


i intend to upgrade it at the end of this year to:

the processor: this will be upgraded to a intel neon type processor (has 16 cores)
RAM: will probably go to 64 gb (if motherboard can handle it, otherwise i get a new motherboard )
videocart: this will go to the highest of the nvidia geforce line (hoping 4gb or 5gb video cart will be available )

expected costs: around €4.000 (the processor alone is more expensive then my entire machine now (€2.150,-)

well now you just rubbing it in . lol. no im trying to save up for a decent gaming laptop. 8gb ram, processor to be able to handle up to 32 ( as i will slowly but shorley be upgrading it ) a mad ass motherboard, haven't decided which one yet, but yeah. my half brother makes major website pages and does computer repairs for a living so he can get me a good laptop for cheaper than retail price but still gonna be looking at about 2k to 2.5k Australian dollars. which is a lot for a 17 year old Mcslave earning $13 an hour but when i do manage it i will have a better system by far than this crappy school laptop and i will finaly be able to play minecraft with 300 mods and factorio on full HD settings

Dysoch wrote: i intend to upgrade it at the end of this year to:

the processor: this will be upgraded to a intel neon type processor (has 16 cores)
RAM: will probably go to 64 gb (if motherboard can handle it, otherwise i get a new motherboard )
videocart: this will go to the highest of the nvidia geforce line (hoping 4gb or 5gb video cart will be available )

expected costs: around €4.000 (the processor alone is more expensive then my entire machine now (€2.150,-)

I call a heaping pile of BS right there.

Slight problem - AMD make the worlds only 16-core x86 processor currently available in the AMD Opteron (and only costs ~€540)

The Intel Xeon Processor, which is as close as your description, has 8 cores (16 threads) - and is also shockingly shite with all cores running max 2.4GHz or turbo 2.6GHz on ONLY 2! - and also only ~€750

Now, the issue comes is that the above Xeon currently only has Server MoBo's available - first I've found is ~€1845 - but even if there's a workstation one you'd have to add on another ~€750 to get 2 processors for effective use.

And 64GB RAM for said MoBo is ~€580

As for top of the line NVIDIA GeForce, well that's the either the 6GB Titan coming in at ~€1100, or the 3GB 780ti coming in at ~€575

sooo, adding that up quickly comes to ~€3200-3750 depending on which GFx you'd go for (the 780ti would be better imo, 6GB just overkill without power to back it up)

thus, again, heaping pile of BS.

I put together mine around 2005. Last update was the GPU

Gigabyte 965P-DS3
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300
Corsair PC2-6400 2x1Gb
Radeon HD 4850
Windows XP

Now that you ask it does get laggy when I try drag poles. So I mostly click them in place.

rk84 wrote:Now that you ask it does get laggy when I try drag poles. So I mostly click them in place.

I knew it caused slowdown in some cases, but I was never able to reproduce it, do you have save/scenario where it happens?

kovarex wrote:

rk84 wrote:Now that you ask it does get laggy when I try drag poles. So I mostly click them in place.

I knew it caused slowdown in some cases, but I was never able to reproduce it, do you have save/scenario where it happens?

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=7&t=2169
There is one save. When I start the game it seems to do it in ok pace, but gets slower and reloading save does not help.

More cores is nice for multi-tasking but for gaming (even multi-threaded games since there is always one 'main' thread), you really want Single Thread Performance in a CPU.

My rig (built spring last year):
Intel I7 3770K OCed (stable) @ 4.2Ghz
ASRock Z77 Extreme4
EVGA Nvidia 660Ti w/3GB GDDR5
16Gb Mushkin DDR3 @ 2800
SanDisk Ultra Plus 128GB Solid State Drive

rk84 wrote:

kovarex wrote:

rk84 wrote:Now that you ask it does get laggy when I try drag poles. So I mostly click them in place.

I knew it caused slowdown in some cases, but I was never able to reproduce it, do you have save/scenario where it happens?

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=7&t=2169
There is one save. When I start the game it seems to do it in ok pace, but gets slower and reloading save does not help.

I solved the issue already for 0.9, and checked that it works without lag even in my debug version.

Psycho0124 wrote:More cores is nice for multi-tasking but for gaming (even multi-threaded games since there is always one 'main' thread)

It all realy depends on multithreading implementation. For instance:

If you simply spread game processing to multile threads so that main thread processes user inputs (which is done by default), second thread is processing graphics, third thread is processing audio, fourth thread is processin ingame mechanics you are still verry limited by the available performance for single thread as the thread with most work will be the one slowing down the whole application/game.

But if you use dynamic load spliting which alows to dnamically split the load to multiple threads (no thread is specialized for single type of work) you can get much more performance out becouse using such system all of the used threads would be fairly equally utilized.
The problem with such systems is that they are quite complex and therefore require quite a lot of coding to make them. And that is the main reason why such systems are not so popular.

6y old q6600 CPU, 6G ram and 560GTX. Everything at max and I'm yet to see any lag.

greaterix wrote:I call a heaping pile of BS right there.

You do that based on bad quality data.

greaterix wrote:Slight problem - AMD make the worlds only 16-core x86 processor currently available in the AMD Opteron (and only costs ~€540)

The Intel Xeon Processor, which is as close as your description, has 8 cores (16 threads) - and is also shockingly shite with all cores running max 2.4GHz or turbo 2.6GHz on ONLY 2! - and also only ~€750

Check out SpecFP_rate scores (http://www.spec.org/) to see how well AMD compares against Intel. Unfortunately for us they have lagged behind both in terms of per-core and per-GHz by a mile for years both in servers and even more so in gaming. There is a reason why Intel hasn't felt the need to put out half-decent upgrade for several years. There simply is close to zero threat from AMD.



Also, Intel has had 10 core/20 "virtual" core CPUs for several years: http://ark.intel.com/products/family/59 ... ily/server

Though for gaming your average I5 is more than enough.

SilverWarior wrote:The problem with such (softwares) is that they are quite complex and therefore require quite a lot of coding to make them. And that is the main reason why such systems are not so popular.

Exactly. Development costs are still too high on software with dynamic load splitting, games especially with their inherent synchronization nightmares. They're still rare. With current multithreaded software (task-based multithreading), there's always going to be one thread that demands more performance than the rest and becomes the bottleneck.
I'm not much of a coder honestly. I do build high-end gaming rigs for folks as a side-job/hobby though. From a system builders perspective, higher clock speeds with fewer cores is still the best formula for a great gaming rig for current and upcoming games. I do hope dynamic multithreaded software becomes common one day, and I'll certainly build toward that when it does. It'll give AMDs Bulldozer architecture a much-needed boost too. For now though, single-thread performance + a modest number of cores is still ideal.

Satellite P775-10K
Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit (pre-installed, Toshiba-HDD recovery)
Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM Processor
HD: 750 GB
8,192 (4,096 + 4,096) MB
DDR3 RAM (1,333 MHz)
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 540M with CUDA™ Technology and NVIDIA® Optimus™ Technology

Full Specifications

What do you think?

Psycho0124 wrote:

SilverWarior wrote:The problem with such (softwares) is that they are quite complex and therefore require quite a lot of coding to make them. And that is the main reason why such systems are not so popular.

Exactly. Development costs are still too high on software with dynamic load splitting, games especially with their inherent synchronization nightmares. They're still rare. With current multithreaded software (task-based multithreading), there's always going to be one thread that demands more performance than the rest and becomes the bottleneck.
I'm not much of a coder honestly. I do build high-end gaming rigs for folks as a side-job/hobby though. From a system builders perspective, higher clock speeds with fewer cores is still the best formula for a great gaming rig for current and upcoming games. I do hope dynamic multithreaded software becomes common one day, and I'll certainly build toward that when it does. It'll give AMDs Bulldozer architecture a much-needed boost too. For now though, single-thread performance + a modest number of cores is still ideal.

The only place where we use the "full" multithreading is the phase where the engine gathers information of what should be rendered.
For stuff other that that, we have just the update/render thread. The render thread can't be multithreaded (limitation of the allegro).
The update thread (that can be the only bottleneck for huge factories) might get full multithreading someday, but it is truly a hard task, mainly because the game still needs to be deterministic, we have a plan how to do it, but we still prefer to find ways to optimise the core algorithms so the game eats less resources as long as possible before starting with the multithreading.

kovarex wrote:The render thread can't be multithreaded (limitation of the allegro).

Actually that is not entirely true. You could seperate your ingame scene into multiple scenes (ground tiles, entities, UI background, UI text and icons, etc.) storing each one in its own Allegro Bitmap and then finally render theese to Screen Bitmap. But from what I have quickly gathered from the internet this forces you to use Memory Bitmaps working with which is slower than with Screen Bitmap.

EDIT: If I read corectly in Allegro 5 you can have multiple Vide Bitmaps (these are stored in graphcal memory and not in RAM so working with them is fastest). This means that you are not forced to use Memory Bitmaps when using multithreading.

SilverWarior wrote:

kovarex wrote:The render thread can't be multithreaded (limitation of the allegro).

Actually that is not entirely true. You could seperate your ingame scene into multiple scenes (ground tiles, entities, UI background, UI text and icons, etc.) storing each one in its own Allegro Bitmap and then finally render theese to Screen Bitmap. But from what I have quickly gathered from the internet this forces you to use Memory Bitmaps working with which is slower than with Screen Bitmap.

EDIT: If I read corectly in Allegro 5 you can have multiple Vide Bitmaps (these are stored in graphcal memory and not in RAM so working with them is fastest). This means that you are not forced to use Memory Bitmaps when using multithreading.

All video bitmap manipulations need to be done in the main thread in allegro, at least this is how I understand it.

kovarex wrote:

SilverWarior wrote:

kovarex wrote:The render thread can't be multithreaded (limitation of the allegro).

Actually that is not entirely true. You could seperate your ingame scene into multiple scenes (ground tiles, entities, UI background, UI text and icons, etc.) storing each one in its own Allegro Bitmap and then finally render theese to Screen Bitmap. But from what I have quickly gathered from the internet this forces you to use Memory Bitmaps working with which is slower than with Screen Bitmap.

EDIT: If I read corectly in Allegro 5 you can have multiple Vide Bitmaps (these are stored in graphcal memory and not in RAM so working with them is fastest). This means that you are not forced to use Memory Bitmaps when using multithreading.

All video bitmap manipulations need to be done in the main thread in allegro, at least this is how I understand it.

In addition I'm almost certain that internally calling OpenGL stuff is single-threaded on driver level anyway. You could feed the GPU driver with commands from multiple threads but it'll still gather them up and send to GPU in one.