Nvidia OpenGL Driver error on startup

[tetryon]

Sometimes, but not always, I get an error (see screenshot) when starting Factorio.

I have updated drivers. While I understand that Factorio uses a lot of gfx mem, are there any tools that can help figure out why I can launch it sometimes, but not others - ie ways of finding out where my gfx memory is being used? Sometimes, (but again not always) closing my browser helps.

[daniel34]

How much memory does your GPU have and can you post a log file?

Graphical problems - READ BEFORE POSTING
For solution 2, try setting force-opengl in the config.ini (in %appdata%\Factorio\config) to false.

GPU-Z (https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/) can tell you how much of your graphics memory is currently used, but I don't know of any application that can tell which process is responsible for the memory usage.

[tetryon]

Thanks for the reply and info.

Looks like I have 320 MB.

Usage goes from 182MB to 226MB when I try to launch Factorio.

When I switch to force-opengl=false, I get a different error. I've added a screenshot for that, and error logs for when both configs crash.

[daniel34]

The sprite error also indicates lack of graphics memory, which doesn't surprise me as Factorio has a minimal requirement of 512 MB video ram. If you're using mods they also use some extra graphics memory.

You can try setting graphics-quality to low (or very-low) and video-memory-usage to medium or low in the config.ini if the problem occurs too often.

Other than that, the only solution is to replace your 9 year old GeForce 8800 GTS

[tetryon]

The sprite error also indicates lack of graphics memory, which doesn't surprise me as Factorio has a minimal requirement of 512 MB video ram. If you're using mods they also use some extra graphics memory.

You can try setting graphics-quality to low (or very-low) and video-memory-usage to medium or low in the config.ini if the problem occurs too often.

Other than that, the only solution is to replace your 9 year old GeForce 8800 GTS

Replace a 9 year old graphics card?! And I was so sure it wasn't a day over 7.

So thank you for those options - I managed to drop the video-memory-usage to low, and that did the trick. I think the mods probably impacted the memory.

Cheers, ~tetryon