Friday Facts #371 - Apple Silicon

[taygetea]

Now compare these Macs with PC!

It compares pretty favorably, given the M1's strong single-core performance (though I imagine the latest gen AMD/Intel parts would do quite well, albeit with greater power consumption):

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Lenovo ThinkPad T15 Gen 2, i7-1165G7, Arch Linux (KDE Plasma): Map benchmarked at 124.538 UPS

Ryzen 5900X, Windows 11 x64: Map benchmarked at 150 UPS

2021 MacBook Pro 16", M1 Pro, macOS Ventura: Map benchmarked at 160.57 UPS

I got these results using the flame_Sla 10k map. Both laptops were plugged in during testing.

Kind of odd that my M1 Pro ended up getting results closer to the normal M1 or x86_64 results (per the blog post), considering the primary difference between the M1 Pro and M1 Max is the GPU.

You're right about latest gen; I'm running an I9-13900K and got 201 UPS, slightly higher than the highest result for M1 Max. Interesting how close it is! https://factoriobox.1au.us/result/fef92 ... 1148ac0f6b

[fusionfan]

As a very, very long time mac user - thank you for this.

You could consider adding the 100% speedrun WR map (whatever it is at the time of testing) to your benchmark pool. Available and quite the nice test.

[Ida-Marie]

I'm since summer a user of Mac; a MacBook Air M1 with 8GiB of RAM, and I'll happily try out if I can play Factorio better on the M1 now. I'm honestly very grateful for the port which I've asked for earlier, and to see the dev team deliver such quality updates and improvements to the game.

Now I hope that the game not only performs better - and have a much smaller energy footprint, but also let me build bigger factories before hitting the RAM limit. When it does, it is still playable, however it become a lot slower and creates a huge wear on the internal SSD. I know that the most viable fix to this is to get a MacBook with more RAM. Although that will be a bit in the future, I'll have a small hope that some memory improvement updates will upgrade the max size I can build before that. ^^

Thank you again for this great update, you will have a continued dedicated player of this great game for very long

[posila]

Now I hope that the game not only performs better - and have a much smaller energy footprint, but also let me build bigger factories before hitting the RAM limit. When it does, it is still playable, however it become a lot slower and creates a huge wear on the internal SSD. I know that the most viable fix to this is to get a MacBook with more RAM. Although that will be a bit in the future, I'll have a small hope that some memory improvement updates will upgrade the max size I can build before that.

My suggestion is to set sprite resolution to normal and texture compression to low quality, to free up some memory occupied by graphics. I don't think there will be many optimizations that would lower memory usage

[brunzenstein]

As a very, very long time mac user - thank you for this.

You could consider adding the 100% speedrun WR map (whatever it is at the time of testing) to your benchmark pool. Available and quite the nice test.

That’s indeed a very good idea

[fusionfan]

As a very, very long time mac user - thank you for this.

You could consider adding the 100% speedrun WR map (whatever it is at the time of testing) to your benchmark pool. Available and quite the nice test.

That’s indeed a very good idea

Just to note, Wargerr's 100% design is on the benchmark page, but I think the latest one by Nefrums is more demanding. It does about 50 FPS / UPS on my M1 pro.

[GoldfieldGeek]

Stupid question maybe (Mac newb), can you have multiple standalone installations on mac?
There is a dmg file, which lets you install factorio the usual way, but is the a zip version for mac?

You could just duplicate the factorio application and launch both copies of the app, however they will conflict over ports and network usage.
Why would you want a .zip file? The .dmg is the same thing, only with a few extra features.

[jodokus31]

Stupid question maybe (Mac newb), can you have multiple standalone installations on mac?
There is a dmg file, which lets you install factorio the usual way, but is the a zip version for mac?

You could just duplicate the factorio application and launch both copies of the app, however they will conflict over ports and network usage.
Why would you want a .zip file? The .dmg is the same thing, only with a few extra features.

Thanks, I'm about to learn the Mac basics... Not really a big fan yet, because they often do the exact opposite of what I've been used too

[Panzerknacker]

Was waiting for this for a while, kinda knew it was coming. So about 30% performance increase, nice but to be very honest I expected more. Since the game is extremely CPU dependent, especially with bigger maps, running the game through Rosetta 2 x86 emulator I would expect to have a rather extreme performance (and energy) penalty on the game.

Or is there some crazy magic going on with Rosetta 2, like utilizing the chip's built-in neural engine?

[aclysma]

Or is there some crazy magic going on with Rosetta 2, like utilizing the chip's built-in neural engine?

Apple silicon implements x64 memory semantics in hardware, and rosetta takes advantage of this to avoid one of the most expensive penalties for x64->arm translation.

It's really an interesting platform for factorio. The cache sizes are huge, the SoC memory is very fast, and the hardware architecture handles branch-heavy, single-threaded code really well. Very happy this came together!

[Xorimuth]

Rosetta 2 x86 emulator

Rosetta 2 isn't an emulator, it does translation on application startup instead. So as long as the translation is sensible (which it usually is), there is very little runtime overhead. And as mentioned above, Apple Silicon implements in hardware some x86 things, which it uses for things that would normally be very computationally expensive to perform on ARM vs x86.

[aclysma]

Rosetta 2 isn't an emulator, it does translation on application startup instead.

Rosetta 2 will do online translation when the code can't be known ahead of time (like anything that JITs javascript or other languages/bytecode to native x64.)

[castle]

I am incredibly grateful for this port and the work the Factorio devs have put into it! However, the escape key stopped being recognized in-game with this build. I was able to change my control configuration to get around it, but wanted to post because it looks like I’m not the only player having this issue.

I am using an M1 MacBook Pro.

[MK500S]

Thank you so much for this port to Apple Silicon! I love factorio, but it always was a heat/power monster. Not it's SO much better on my 14" M1 Max with 32GB RAM. It runs much cooler and with less power usage. Feels like a much bigger improvement than the numbers suggest.

Anyway this is just great! An unexpected Christmas present

[kreys89]

Hello there,
if porting Factorio to AppStore as iPad application is not a big deal already having working ARM version, it would be cool.

Probably it could be a free version, same as on desktop with tutorial missions (or some of them?). Then buying a full game as a in-app payment, or maybe some discounted version for desktop user?

As someone mentionted previously, no idea how many new users it would attract, but for already existing users espiecally wanting to utilize another machine for lan games it would be an option.

There are already existing some of the desktop game ports being a ipad only games, like Darkest Dungeon, however they are more like 5$, not 30$.

[olimerkido2]

Factorio is Apple Silicon native now and I've always thought as it is a 2D game it would work great on iPad, especially now even the iPad Air has an M1 chip and soon every iPad will have something faster than M1, it would bring the game to hundreds of millions more people.

[flwi]

I didn't play factorio for a while and just found out that you created an arm version for macs.

Thanks a lot for that! Made my day!

[GrizzlyBear88]

I think $30 on App store would only be bought by those who already know (and like) Factorio and want to play it on the iPad or whatever.

Personally, if I ran across a game on the app store advertising $30, I'd laugh and keep going. Most every game I've seen in the app store has always seemed like junk, so I'd just consider that as another rip off. But that's just me. I can't speak for everyone's opinion.

I strongly believe we should break the mindset of "the app for mobile must be cheap". Nowdays to develop an app for mobile there is as much work as any other application (ok, not ALL of them, but the work-result balance is equal in my opinion). What I mean is. A GREAT game for mobile (like Factorio or Divinity Original Sins) needs as much work as for console or computer. So... when I see a 30$ game I immediately think "finally a good game for iPad! Let's have a look" (example, indeed, is Divinity Original Sins, that I bought for my M1 iPad even if I already had it on PC).

I think $30 on App store would only be bought by those who already know (and like) Factorio and want to play it on the iPad or whatever.

Well, millions of users then. If you combine with the ones that have an iPad I still believe can have sense to develop it. Especially now after the porting on ARM.

My only concern is, indeed, the mod support. If it's a technical limitation that would indeed limit a lot (especially in cross-platform multiplayer).

[FuryoftheStars]

"the app for mobile must be cheap".

That's not really what I was saying/referring to.

My only concern is, indeed, the mod support. If it's a technical limitation that would indeed limit a lot (especially in cross-platform multiplayer).

Indeed. As we've seen from the Switch, the limited memory has already had some affects.

[sakuro]

Because macOS for Apple Silicon runs on only Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura at the moment, https://www.factorio.com/support/faq#q-os-support should be updated to include such versions.