Factorio Forums

Interested in the game thanks to seeing a few Let's Plays, but I'm wary of if my computer would be able to handle a late game setup.

The demo runs fine, constant 60 FPS, but the demo doesn't really allow for you to build a sprawling factory.
I've seen some posts from people running the game on similar machines, but the most recent I found is from 2015, and it doesn't mention late game at all.

My specs: Core i3 3130M @ 2.6GHz
4 Gig Ram
Integrated Intel HD4000 graphics.

So if anyone is running it on an HD4000 with similar ram/cpu could you share what your late game framerates look like that'd be wonderful.
My concern is mainly if the game still appears to run at full steam ahead. Sacrificing rendering frames in order for the factory things to run at required speed and whatnot is fine, and so long as the framerate stays above, say, 20-25 FPS I'll be fine.

And as far as my Misc questions, they're mainly about getting the game on GOG.

Some devs out there are kind of flaky about GOG support. How have these guys fared?
Are the GOG updates available in a relatively timely manner? (I know part of that is on GOG, since they like to compile their own installers and whatnot.)
Do they make use of the beta channels in Galaxy for the unstable updates, or are only the stable updates made available?

Of minor importance is the achievement system. Does the game itself have a a list of which achievements have been completed, or does it rely on the steam/galaxy overlay to remember what has been earned? If it relies on the overlay, does it make use of Galaxy's achievement tracking, or is it Steam only ATM?

The late game should run fine, assuming you have enough VRAM to run the game at all.

GOG is definitely flaky for cutting-edge releases. You also can't get a free Steam key if you're into that sort of thing. I recommend buying on factorio.com

The game has its own achievement system, which optionally syncs to Steam. I don't know anything about Galaxy support.

My concern is mainly if the game still appears to run at full steam ahead.

I doubt that your CPU will run a usual lategame map in full speed, I would expect it to run obviously slower but still playable.

Also note that it can take anywhere from 100 to 200+ hours to reach what most people would consider a megabse. That means you have a few weeks or maybe even a month before you get that far . The game is incredibly well optimized, with more optimizations to come (the dev team is incredible, I would suggest reading their weekly Friday Facts on their website which gives a look into new content, future optimizations, and other stuff if you aren't already). Also note that you can start the game over or play multiple games at the same time, so some people never put that much time into one base.

Thanks for the responses.

The comment about my CPU made me check something, and I noticed that the CPU minimum requirements are different on GOG than on the Steam page and on Factorio.com.

Someone on the team should probably contact GOG about that, since the difference is half the CPU speed, which would make quite a drastic difference in performance.
Is there somewhere I can post or email this to that would get the devs attention sooner or anything?

Someone will probably notice it on here, the devs are quite attentive on the forum, but if you want to make sure someone sees it you could post it in bug reports (not sure if a mod will remove it there though) or email support@factorio.com.

Regarding the original question. I think your cpu will be fine for playing the game until the official end game objective of launching a rocket. After that some (many ? ) players go on to build the largest/biggest base they can and launch many rockets. Depending on how big you build you will start to experience the fps/ups (game Update per second) with a smaller base than players with a faster cpu. (It's not a game performance problem pes se. Just that the cpu can only do so much work in 16.66 ms. Larger bases means that eventually it takes 20ms to simulate a tick and your game updates (and fps) drops to 50 per second).

4GB should also be fine, although you might want to close any other programs that tend to use a lot of memory (I'm looking at chrome atm. It seems to be using about 6-8 GB of ram for me atm).

Your integrated graphics should also be fine, but you might want to turn sprite resolution down to normal, especially if you have a big screen. I've played on a MacMini that uses intel integrated graphics, and when there are lots of things on screen at once (eg a lot of stuff on belts or lots of tree), then sometimes the frame rates drops below 60. But the game should remain playable.

For multiplayer, players tend to build bigger bases faster than in single player (more players to do the building/setup mining etc so this isn't surprising). And eventually the base gets large enough that the players with the slowest cpus experience performance problems. If you play multiplayer you will experience performance problems before players with faster cpus. The typical "solution" is to just reduce the game speed for everyone.

Zavian wrote:~snip~
4GB should also be fine, although you might want to close any other programs that tend to use a lot of memory (I'm looking at chrome atm. It seems to be using about 6-8 GB of ram for me atm).
~snip~

6-8GB???? WTF is chrome doing to use that much!??! On my rig it's only taking: 120MBish across all of it's processes at this moment.

I've had what looks like individual Chrome tabs using over 2GB each. (As I write this I have one chrome process using over 2.2GB, and another at 900MB, and another at 400MB). I'm guessing that chrome, or the javascript on some web pages is leaking memory, that isn't reclaimed until pages are closed/killed. But this is getting off-topic from this forum.

Zavian wrote:I've had what looks like individual Chrome tabs using over 2GB each. (As I write this I have one chrome process using over 2.2GB, and another at 900MB, and another at 400MB). I'm guessing that chrome, or the javascript on some web pages is leaking memory, that isn't reclaimed until pages are closed/killed. But this is getting off-topic from this forum.

That's... simply ridiculous. Does it use that much on the initial load? If not, then it's almost certainly a memory leak. And what website(s)? I know this is getting off topic (sorry), but I'm curious.

Initial load isn't too bad, but over time memory use does seem to increase. The tabs which seem to have a problem include Youtube and wiki.factio.com, so I'm not sure what the actual root cause is. Whilst this computer is Win 10, chrome on my linux box sometimes also goes crazy and gobbles all available ram, until the OOM killer kills it.

Zavian wrote:Initial load isn't too bad, but over time memory use does seem to increase. The tabs which seem to have a problem include Youtube and wiki.factio.com, so I'm not sure what the actual root cause is. Whilst this computer is Win 10, chrome on my linux box sometimes also goes crazy and gobbles all available ram, until the OOM killer kills it.

Hmm. Maybe I'll do some testing this weekend.

Maybe we could refocus on Factorio performance, instead of Chrome memory usage ?

Koub wrote:Maybe we could refocus on Factorio performance, instead of Chrome memory usage ?

Sorry, my curiosity got the better of me .

I run it on a laptop with almost the same specs. Yes, end game starts to slow down but it's still very playable. In my current game I've launched a little over 200 rockets and I'm just now starting to get annoyed at the sluggishness of it. I may have to upgrade the laptop if I want to continue on this specific game.

Until a few weeks ago I was playing on a laptop with an i5 3210M with integrated HD4000 GPU, which I'm guessing should be pretty similar.
I had 4GB originally, but upgraded to 12GB quite a while ago. Still, this upgrade didn't really affect Factorio too much.

Performance is perfectly reasonable if you don't use high-res sprites and turn light render quality to 0.05 or so. I could get reasonably-large bases run at ~50 UPS.

Unless you plan on immediately loading a pre-built megabase you can definitely get hundreds of hours of enjoyable gameplay before you'll outgrow it and will need to upgrade. Even so, if you play Factorio casually and don't plan on doing megabases you may never need to upgrade for Factorio (0.16 supposedly will bring even more performance improvements).

If you have specific save-games you want me to test to see how well it runs on my laptop I could try that.

Thanks for the additional replies from people with similar systems.

After the initial replies I decided to go ahead and take the plunge as it were.
GOG has a very generous 14 day no Q's asked refund policy on In Dev titles, so I decided is that the worst that would happen is I take advantage of it.

Then my tooth decided to stage a revolution or something in my mouth. Its very difficult to play thinking games when your mouth is in constant pain... stupid dentist apt can't come quick enough.

Again, Thanks for all the replies. If I can keep my head on straight long enough to actually start getting some kind of base set up I may stop back in and let everyone know how it runs as far as UPS goes. right now its solid 60 for both FPS and UPS.