[2.0.14][macOS] Massive performance regression versus 1.1.110 when zoomed in

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, I wonder how your system is going to fare with Vulcanus'

Demolisher worms, which seem to emit a lot of smoke-like (?) particles during combat.

To the point that even my (Linux) desktop with a dedicated GPU sees large slowdowns in those moments ! (It's not too bad, since these are

rare, and in a way IMHO that makes them even more impressive !

)

[posila]

One of the great things about Factorio was how well optimized it was, but that seems to have taken a huge hit in this new version. I wish more playtesting had been done before release.

Well, I think it is still well optimized, it's just optimized for different kind of hardware than you have and is doing more things than 1.1 did. It bothers me and frustrates me, that you make it sound like we don't care about rendering performance. You have no idea how many feature requests from our artists I have straight up rejected, and how much effort we have put into trying to make what we want to make while keeping unreasonably low HW requirements. You have no idea how high Space Age HW requirements could have been, if we didn't care about them. You just come, use the highest graphics settings on a machine with high desity display and mediocre GPU and then say the game is poorly optimized. Because "it's 2D game, so it doesn't have right to require GPU". I don't think you have any idea what are challenges of making 2D games, not what are challenges of making 2D game about large scale factories. Yes, the game is not computationally intensive on GPU, it basically just blends layers of sprites on top of each other. But it blends shit ton of them, which is shit ton of memory being moved around, and dedicated GPUs have very wide memory bandwidth. Integrated GPUs not so much.

I hope this issue is fixed before too long though as it may cause other planets to be unplayably slow.

Frankly, I am not in rush. There are plenty of graphics settings you can turn off to make other planets less GPU intensive.

in general, it turns out that the game does not meet the stated minimum hardware requirements))) interestingly, turning off the smoke doesn't help me.

The game launches and runs on the stated minimum hardware, so obviously it does meet it
I understand you have suboptimal experience playing the game, and it must be frustrating that nobody seems to pay attention to it. Unfortunatelly, at the moment I don't know what is causing the issue on your mac, if it happens even when Render in native resolution is disabled (you have to restart the game for the setting to take effect). I currently don't know what to ask you that would help me figure it out, and I believe it is different problem than what ergzay is experiencing, or different problem what people with external display are observing (as long as you also don't use external display)

[ergzay]

One of the great things about Factorio was how well optimized it was, but that seems to have taken a huge hit in this new version. I wish more playtesting had been done before release.

Well, I think it is still well optimized, it's just optimized for different kind of hardware than you have and is doing more things than 1.1 did. It bothers me and frustrates me, that you make it sound like we don't care about rendering performance. You have no idea how many feature requests from our artists I have straight up rejected, and how much effort we have put into trying to make what we want to make while keeping unreasonably low HW requirements. You have no idea how high Space Age HW requirements could have been, if we didn't care about them. You just come, use the highest graphics settings on a machine with high desity display and mediocre GPU and then say the game is poorly optimized. Because "it's 2D game, so it doesn't have right to require GPU". I don't think you have any idea what are challenges of making 2D games, not what are challenges of making 2D game about large scale factories. Yes, the game is not computationally intensive on GPU, it basically just blends layers of sprites on top of each other. But it blends shit ton of them, which is shit ton of memory being moved around, and dedicated GPUs have very wide memory bandwidth. Integrated GPUs not so much.

I hope this issue is fixed before too long though as it may cause other planets to be unplayably slow.

Frankly, I am not in rush. There are plenty of graphics settings you can turn off to make other planets less GPU intensive.

I think you took my post as being a more severe critique than it was. Also I'm glad you rejected tons of things the artists requested. The best engineering (and game design) comes from working within restraints and using them to their maximum.

Though I disagree with calling the requirements "unreasonably low". M1 is a very powerful chip and was made only a couple years ago. At the time it was released it blew away all but the most power hungry AMD and Intel processors. It should be noted that the M1 is not the "Minimum" system requirements. It's the Steam "Recommended" system requirements.

Also I did not say or imply "it's 2D game, so it doesn't have right to require GPU". I said nothing like that. I was not thinking that either.

I'll add my general perspective that gives context to my statement. As a low level (of the stack) software engineer myself its become a pet peeve of mine that all software just seems to run worse and worse over time despite from the user perspective nothing has changed. So this has become a thing of mine that I never want to make software run worse when it is doing the same thing it did before. If features are added they should only tax the system more when those features are used. In this case nothing from the expansion or new version is being used nor are any new effects at play, yet the performance is significantly worse. That's the context for my statement and why it frustrated me, because it hit a pet peeve of mine.

If anything, by taking advantage of newer hardware and software techniques and by cleaning out a lot of old cruft with the new version by deprecating backward compatability, the software when doing the same old thing should be able to do it even faster in the new version rather than slower.

[BlueTemplar]

It's not actively worked on at the moment. It is difficult issue, I don't know what we are gonna do about it yet.

At least for the moment, I've found a workaround is to disable smoke which seems to make the issue basically disappear, so that may be related. I'm worried about when I reach the other planets though as I assume this has something to do with how shaders are implemented in the new version and I've heard the other planets use a lot more shaders. One of the great things about Factorio was how well optimized it was, but that seems to have taken a huge hit in this new version. I wish more playtesting had been done before release.

I hope this issue is fixed before too long though as it may cause other planets to be unplayably slow.

Yeah, I guess it was this post and mine that triggered it, but we shouldn't get confused about how Space Age's system requirements are understandably much higher than non-Space Age Factorio 2.0 system requirements...
(But 2.0's might still be higher than 1.1's, for instance those extra rail angles probably came with an extra VRAM cost ?)

Actually, I guess, space-age's requirements in particular, rather than elevated-rails and especially not quality
(good thing those can be separated, and not just for gameplay reasons, for performance reasons too !),
though I guess quality and especially elevated-rails's performance cost is still not zero ?
(Assuming a similar-sized factory, and I don't necessarily mean by a Science per Minute metric.)