[somewhere between 0.17.1x and 0.17.21] Have graphics defaults changed?!

[noob_hoarder]

I have been on the experimental branch for a few weeks, and while i felt my sub-par machine struggling, it has completely keeled over yesterday. Took me 45+ minutes to almost start the game (was at 94%) before i gave up and ended process; loading the textures was about 25m, according to the log... After that, i tried to set

Code: Select all

graphics-quality=very-low

(and other similar stuff, like turning on the sprite atlas cache) in the config, since i expected it to be at medium ("normal") but the log had said

Graphics settings preset: very-high
[...]
Graphics quality: high

... but my tweaks were without much improvement. Eventually, i did manage to summon the patience to get into the GUI and access the Options, where i saw what the "full color depth" tooltip actually said and unticked that as fast as i could. Now my load times are back to about 2 minutes, but why did i need to go through all this debugging? Who thought the default was fine on "full", when that requires 3 GB of VRAM? * -.-

Later Edit: *Guess i've cooled off in the mean time. This bit was unhelpful and i guess i was just venting my left-over frustration.

[posila]

Can you post your factorio-current.log? I am interested to see what kind of HW the game detected. Defaults are determined by HW the game runs on.
Also nothing changed between 0.17.1x and 0.17.21 in this regard.

Since 0.17.0, graphics-quality low and very-low has been removed (it is still valid option in config.ini, so the 0.16 configs are able to load, but it will just reset to default after loading), Instead of low or very-low Sprite resolution, use normal sprite resolution and low quality texture compression.

"Full color depth" has very minor effect on amount of VRAM (depending in screen resolution - on FullHD screen it would save ~15 MB), its main purpose is to reduce bandwith when rendering to help out low-end and integrated GPUs.

In 0.17, new texture compression algorithms were added and texture compression is enabled by default on all HW configurations, greatly reducing VRAM usage (vanilla uses ~1.5 GB VRAM on max settings, with high-quality texture compression, wheras it would use close to ~4GB with texture compression completely disabled [which can't be configured - shadows will be always compressed regardless of config])

[noob_hoarder]

Oh, i thought some config settings defaults might have been pushed as part of one of the recent patches... Because i couldn't think of any other reason why the load time changed since the week-end.

But i do seem to have the game run on the integrated GPU, i only see "Available displays: 1" and "DISPLAY1 - Intel(R) HD Graphics Family" in the log, the Radeon card seems to be either off or ignored :shrug: . -- Edit: Although, this seems to have been the case for my system since at least 10 months ago.

Oh and besides FCD i also turned off shadows, maybe that helped too.

I could also attach some of the logs i saved from when i worked on this issue, the current one is from a new session that i started up only for a few screenshots.

[noob_hoarder]

Huh, looking over all of these again, i noticed something unexpected: the "3 GB of VRAM" now seems to be in the tooltip about "sprite resolution: high" and not about "full color depth"... Not really sure if i misremembered these when i posted here or if you maybe changed the tooltips.

Also, as a way to avoid a similar scenario happening to anyone in the future, i added a suggestion about loading the sprites in the background. Thought i could add the link here if anyone stumbles across the same issue, or if despite extreme improbability somehow gets to read about it.