Factorio Forums

I was noticing FPS problems after pulling back a few zoom levels on Gleba. I twiddled with the graphics option and determined that the animated water is tanking my FPS. At farthest zoom it drops to 22 (down from 60). The tooltip says to disable for low-end graphics cards, but I wouldn't characterize an RTX 3070 as low-end.

I'm running on a:
With animated water off, farthest out zoom: With animated water on, farthest out zoom:

Can you post a save file that shows the issue? Also the log file. I find it suspicious you’re getting such bad FPS on that GPU when my 3060 seems to have no issues.

I find it suspicious, too. This morning I load in and turn animated water back on and it's fine. The only[1] difference now is that the game was running for 5 minutes as opposed to several hours. Later today I'll probably play quite a bit and I'll see if it happens again.

[1] Same user programs anyway; Win10 didn't reboot over the night.

After about 1.5 hours, I observed it at 30 FPS. I figured that might be good enough even though I'm not quite down into the low 20s yet. Same deal, turn off animated water and it is back to 60. Another variable to add to this was that most of my time was zoomed in at the "base" on Gleba (solid 60 fps). I zoomed out and saw it was right above 50, and then when I ran NE (where may save is at) is when it dropped to 30 fps and remained. It could be time or just the more I move around on Gleba (I didn't experiment further).

Save and log attached.

Can you post a screenshot with "show-gpu-time-usage" debug option (F4) when your FPS are consistently low? Before and after you disable animated water.

I've also seen this issue, animated water really kills the rendering performance, but only on Gleba. The jellynut swamps have a lot of entities on top of the water (many decoratives and also many many swamp cane entities) and I wonder if that might be the underlying reason? Nauvis water animates just fine without tanking FPS but it also doesn't have hundreds of entities drawn on top of it.

Genhis wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 02, 2024 9:17 pm

Can you post a screenshot with "show-gpu-time-usage" debug option (F4) when your FPS are consistently low? Before and after you disable animated water.

Genhis: I'll see if it recreates a third time and will post if it does. Once again, loading up the save where it was 30 FPS is again at 60 FPS. Whether I need to let time pass or run around to page in other textures/entities, dunno.

arye321: Was that 15 FPS after some time period?

29 FPS, ANIMATED ON 60 FPS, ANIMATED OFF

doktorstick wrote: ↑

Sun Nov 03, 2024 9:08 pm

Genhis: I'll see if it recreates a third time and will post if it does. Once again, loading up the save where it was 30 FPS is again at 60 FPS. Whether I need to let time pass or run around to page in other textures/entities, dunno.

arye321: Was that 15 FPS after some time period?

No, as soon as I turn Animated Water on the fps drops

Works fine on my GTX 1050 Ti. I can see you have 165 Hz monitor. Do you use G-sync? Does turning off "Wait for V-sync" in graphics settings change anything?
Do you have something configured in nVidia Control panel - forced multisampling, anisotropic filtering, or DLSS or something like that?

arye321 wrote: ↑

Sun Nov 03, 2024 3:35 am

Can you post your factorio log, please, arye321? Also maximum zoom out in map editor is too far, the engine is not ment to handle rendering such large area, so I don't consider such case to be a bug.

For me, as I noted, if I just load in and start playing on Gleba, it isn't a problem. Only after play time (primarly on Gleba, shift to the ship or other surfaces, back to Gleba, etc. etc.) does the FPS start lagging. How long did you play on Gleba on your 1060?

posila wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 04, 2024 11:17 am

I can see you have 165 Hz monitor. Do you use G-sync? Does turning off "Wait for V-sync" in graphics settings change anything?

It's a Freesync monitor and I've not done anything to encourage or discourage its use. The test will have to be later.

Do you have something configured in nVidia Control panel - forced multisampling, anisotropic filtering, or DLSS or something like that?

None for Factorio. Global settings is as how the driver ships with one exception: "prefer maximum power" for power management.

Also maximum zoom out in map editor is too far, the engine is not ment to handle rendering such large area, so I don't consider such case to be a bug.

EDIT: Ahh, I missed that you were replying to ary* in Editor. FWIW, I'm not in the Editor and I saw 22 FPS at max.

It occurs before maximum zoom. When I posted the 22 FPS, I noticed it because I was at "normal playing" medium zoom and it wasn't smooth; you could feel the FPS loss. The maximum zoom is to show how egregious it gets.

doktorstick wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 04, 2024 12:18 pm

How long did you play on Gleba on your 1060?

Just 5 seconds. I read just the first post and looked at the log and screenshots, sorry.

Here are two screenshots with animated water on and animated water off. If you look at HWMonitor, there is a lot of data going between the CPU and GPU (4x as much as with animated water off). Is it possible that animated water is on a texture in system memory rather than GPU memory?

posila wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 04, 2024 11:17 am

Can you post your factorio log, please, arye321? Also maximum zoom out in map editor is too far, the engine is not ment to handle rendering such large area, so I don't consider such case to be a bug.

added log + Regular zoom screenshots

I'm seeing the same issue and turning off animated water completely solved it, thanks. I'm on older gear thats usually bottlenecked by cpu but that setting made my gpu go nuts.

Win10 64
Intel i5-3570K
GeForce GTX 970
Display: 3840x2160 32 bit 64Hz

Vsync on/off makes no difference.

Same issue on Mac (60->30). Disabling Show Animated Water fixes it.

On a 3050ti had the same issue, only fixed when animated water was turned off.