[0.17.74] Long pause on Loading Sprites

[strozom]

I've been playing Factorio on the same computer for over a year, and started playing 0.17x about a week ago and never noticed any slowness in loading the game. The progress bar would always tick along, and it took maybe 30 seconds to get to the main menu.

About 2 days ago, it suddenly started pausing at the "50% Loading Sprites" marker for a really long time. And then the progress bar inches along really slowly. If I'm reading the log file correctly, it is taking over 4 minutes to load the game. I know it was definitely nowhere near that slow until just 2 days ago.

I've seen some similar reports of people being stuck on Loading Sprites, but did not find any relevant solutions. I would not expect to have to change any of my game settings, since I haven't changed them, and the game has always worked fine.

I am not sure when I was updated to 0.17.74 - it may have been the day the problems started (I was definitely using other 0.17.x versions before then).

Is there anything I can do to get back to fast game loading? It is extremely painful, especially knowing that it wasn't always this way.

factorio-current.log

Log

(4.36 KiB) Downloaded 42 times

[strozom]

For what its worth, I just tried these steps, and it did improve the load time. New log attached.

Sprite Resolution: Normal (was High)
Video Memory: All (was High)
cache-sprite-atlas=true

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... g/dcjxrf2/

But I'm not really sold on that as the permanent solution, since I ran with High resolution for so long without a problem.

factorio-current.log

(4.17 KiB) Downloaded 36 times

[Rseding91]

Based off what you describe I would suggest changing graphics quality from "High" to "Normal". With each new update we change around graphics and there tends to be more and more things needed to be loaded. We might have just hit the tipping point for your graphics card where it can't handle it anymore in high resolution.

[posila]

About 2 days ago, it suddenly started pausing at the "50% Loading Sprites" marker for a really long time. And then the progress bar inches along really slowly. If I'm reading the log file correctly, it is taking over 4 minutes to load the game. I know it was definitely nowhere near that slow until just 2 days ago.

Have you tried to restart your computer?

[strozom]

Have you tried to restart your computer?

Wow, that did it! I reverted my config file back to its original state (Resolution & Video memory HIGH, no cache sprites) after a reboot and it loaded FAST like I remember. From the log file, it looks like it was about 13 seconds. So you can understand why I was confused by the 4+ minute load times.

Is there a good explanation for why restarting fixed the problem? Is that a known issue with something factorio does?

factorio-current.log

(3.98 KiB) Downloaded 48 times

[orzelek]

Have you tried to restart your computer?

Wow, that did it! I reverted my config file back to its original state (Resolution & Video memory HIGH, no cache sprites) after a reboot and it loaded FAST like I remember. From the log file, it looks like it was about 13 seconds. So you can understand why I was confused by the 4+ minute load times.

Is there a good explanation for why restarting fixed the problem? Is that a known issue with something factorio does?

factorio-current.log

There might be many reasons for it but it's not something that game does. Easiest ones to mention would be other apps eating up memory/GPU memory and fragmentation of memory. Both of those might reduce actual amount of free memory and make OS use swap file or make GPU use RAM in addition to onboard memory which slows stuff down a lot.

Looking at your log I'd suspect GPU mem might be more problematic since 2GB is not a lot for high res stuff. You can grab GPU-Z and check GPU memory usage in there (dedicated aka on GPU itself and dynamic - used from main memory).

Edit: as an example game with IR and Krastorio and Alien Biomes uses up about 2.2GB of GPU memory. And without mods it's around 1.4GB.