System: Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Graphics: NVidia GeForce GTX970
I am experiencing the same problem. When I zoom in on the map, that moment when it should go into radar view, the game freezes up and becomes unresponsive for entire minutes, preventing my computer from doing anything else so it can take around two minutes just to close the game, or maybe five minutes until the game comes back and starts responding to my commands at all.
I don't recall experiencing any issue like this while playing Factorio before, and I've been playing on 16.36 for a while now, using the radar zoom function repeatedly without trouble. It happened after I installed the Vision Radar mod, but not immediately after; the mod only adds a radar with large active area, no other changes to radar functionality, and I had already placed them in my game and zoomed in on their vision area without problem.
My video memory usage was already set to high, I haven't tried changing the setting yet. Recently I had been wrestling with trying to get Factorio to let me play music on YouTube in the background--it was fighting over system resources more than usual and causing either YouTube or Factorio (or both) to experience lag spikes if both were running at the same time. I switched Factorio to windowed mode and that allowed me to play music seemingly without any performance impact, until several play hours later when I experienced the sudden huge lag spike. After waiting 5 minutes for my computer to come back, I saved the game and quit. I closed Google Chrome and checked to make sure no other resource intensive processes were running, then restarted Factorio and the game ran fine until zooming in on the map. I checked Resource Monitor in the task manager and found that Factorio is using about 60% of available physical memory, while Chrome was using another 12-15% and the rest combined another 10-12%, so memory usage was going up to 85% and higher. Without Chrome running and Factorio idling on the menu, physical memory usage will be over 70%.
I switched back to fullscreen mode and Resource Monitor read the same value on memory. I tried zooming in on the map and there was still a huge lag spike, however my computer became responsive after only around 30 seconds and remained laggy for the next minute or so. I just played for a few more hours while avoiding zooming in on the map and everything else worked fine.
I am using several mods, however they are mostly small mods, not many graphical changes or additions to the game, and none of them seemed to cause any problems until suddenly this happened at a time when I hadn't installed any mods in the last several play hours. But I'll list them here, in order of installation from last to first (in order of dates/times listed on folders):
stuff
Split...