[Hrusa][2.0.7] Low FPS when looking at ghost entities

[AmyGold]

Everytime there is a blueprint in the view i loose half my FPS but when I'm not looking at a blueprint I regain all of it. When i zoom on the player i go down to 20-25 FPS but when i zoom out i come back to 60.
I tried changing VSync options, flip representation model, texture streaming or disabling every graphic option but nothing seems to change. I don't know much about the developpement of this game but it seems to have something to do with the glitch effect on the blueprint entities.
The more there's entities the more it go down. Even from the map camera i loose FPS. The flip line on gpu-time-usage seems to be very high in this scenario.

I hope I gave you all the info you needed, I will follow the topic so if you need anything just tell me.

[Rseding91]

Can you please post the log file?

[ivan_349876]

I'm experiencing the same issue. Something similar happens with electric mining drills as well - low FPS when zoomed in, high FPS when zoomed out, and the effect compounds with blueprints of drills. The issue is not present on an order version of the game. My computer isn't the beefiest, but I know it can handle the game just fine.
Log is attached.

[Rseding91]

I suspect the issue is the GPU you have, or more I guess lack of have. I'm surprised that the integrated GPU on that CPU is able to run the game at all

Maybe Hrusa can find more ways to optimize the shader but I suspect you might be stuck with the GPU you have.

For reference: the log shows you have a intel HD 2500 which is about 93 times slower than the nvidia gtx 4060 I purchased earlier this year.

[ivan_349876]

It runs the game (pre-Space Age, at least) surprisingly well, usually at a stable 60FPS. The low resolution helps a lot.
Should I make a separate thread for the electric mining drill FPS issue, which wasn't present pre-2.0?

[ergzay]

I suspect the issue is the GPU you have, or more I guess lack of have. I'm surprised that the integrated GPU on that CPU is able to run the game at all

Maybe Hrusa can find more ways to optimize the shader but I suspect you might be stuck with the GPU you have.

For reference: the log shows you have a intel HD 2500 which is about 93 times slower than the nvidia gtx 4060 I purchased earlier this year.

A single type of thing absolutely destroying the fps for little gain absolutely seems like a bug to me. Ghosts entities in 1.1.110 did not have any notable performance issues.

[ergzay]

Even on my computer which was capable of running a small megabase at 60 fps using a relatively strong M1 processor, when viewing a screen full of electric miner ghosts on a basically completely empty map (just starting out) my fps drops down to 40 after this update. This is a crazy performance hit to do something as limited as this.

[BlueTemplar]

[...]
For reference: the log shows you have a intel HD 2500 which is about 93 times slower than the nvidia gtx 4060 I purchased earlier this year.

This is not surprising at all considering that GPU hardware can easily range from brand new high end dedicated GPU with hundreds of Watts at it disposal and old low end integrated GPU in a slim form factor (heat dissipation !) powered by a battery, where the GPU itself only has a few Watts to work with.

It would be especially a shame if a 2D game like Factorio couldn't be run on low end hardware.
(Yeah, sure, you'll hit the megabase stage before even the end game, but still.)
(BTW, how well does this work on the Nintendo Switch ?)

[Rseding91]

For reference Factorio being 2D has no bearing on the GPU demands it has. It has always required a decent graphics card with a decent amount of VRAM.

[BlueTemplar]

That's relative I guess ?

In my experience, Factorio 0.17-1.1 ran quite well on even low end hardware (with integrated graphics and 4 Go of shared (V)RAM) until mid-game, whereas many other games (typically 3D ones) would be struggling to the point of being unplayable even in the early game.
(Didn't try with 2.0 yet.)

[ergzay]

That's relative I guess ?

In my experience, Factorio 0.17-1.1 ran quite well on even low end hardware (with integrated graphics and 4 Go of shared (V)RAM) until mid-game, whereas many other games (typically 3D ones) would be struggling to the point of being unplayable even in the early game.
(Didn't try with 2.0 yet.)

Agreed. The GPU and CPU requirements of Factorio have always been quite modest in modern hardware terms. I'm hoping that they didn't completely throw that away in the expansion. I'm worried about the other planets now requiring a ton of shaders when they didn't before.

[BlueTemplar]

The expansion having somewhat higher system requirements seems fine. (Same thing was happening with total conversion mods after all.)
2.0 without the expansion still having dramatically higher system requirements would be less fine.

[AmyGold]

Hello everyone sorry i wasn't able to answer before. I know that my computer has some huge limiting factor due to it being a laptop from around 2010, but the 1.1.x had ghosts entities as just a transparent version of normal entities while the 2.0.x has this glitch effect added on and I think the problem comes from me having only 1GB of VRAM.

Maybe having an option to make ghost entities transparent only could allow people with less good computers/low end laptops able to enjoy the newer version of the game. I would really appreciate an option to enable or disable shaders but I don't know hard it would be to implement in the newer versions of the game.

[xargo-sama]

I will be looking into a fix this week. I've fished out my toaster laptop to verify.

The glitch effect is relatively cheap, but I suspect it splits batches of real vs ghost entities which increases the drawing workload more than the calculation of the effect itself.

I will probably resort to having some kind of toggle to go back to lame ghosts which should batch properly.

[Oleg_7777776]

I will be looking into a fix this week. I've fished out my toaster laptop to verify.

The glitch effect is relatively cheap, but I suspect it splits batches of real vs ghost entities which increases the drawing workload more than the calculation of the effect itself.

I will probably resort to having some kind of toggle to go back to lame ghosts which should batch properly.

Please also look at this topic, also similar drops on drills and stoves up to 30/60. viewtopic.php?f=49&t=116299

[xargo-sama]

Please also look at this topic, also similar drops on drills and stoves up to 30/60. viewtopic.php?f=49&t=116299

That one is fairly unrelated to this issue, besides "lower frames somewhere in the game".

[ergzay]

I will be looking into a fix this week. I've fished out my toaster laptop to verify.

The glitch effect is relatively cheap, but I suspect it splits batches of real vs ghost entities which increases the drawing workload more than the calculation of the effect itself.

I will probably resort to having some kind of toggle to go back to lame ghosts which should batch properly.

That doesn't really explain why even new computers, like my Macbook M1 from 2020, also experience rather extreme performance drops in the same situation. This shouldn't be an issue limited to older computers. The GPU on this is pretty decent. My suspicion is that the effect is using some poorly supported GPU technology that gets emulated on the M1 because the M1 doesn't implement a few elements of the spec and falls back to software emulation, like for example geometry shaders. Perhaps that's what's happening here as well.

[ergzay]

Heck, I'm seeing massive game performance regression even without the ghosts. I have a very small base (just got to green science) and I'm already losing fps sometimes. On 1.1.110 I built a small megabase (1k spm) and was running constantly at 60 fps. With this small base on 2.0 I'm already dropping to 48 fps. The problem gets worse when you do as the poster above suggested and zoom in.

I've uploaded a save for this just for reference but I'm going to open a new thread for this bug. (New thread here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=119530 ) It happens in exactly the scene the save is at, where it's zoomed in, it's made worse when you mouseover one of the entities. Screenshot attached showing the exact situation and render debug menu.

11-03-2024, 04-22-13.png (4.32 MiB) Viewed 1224 times