[2.0.7] Frequent FPS slowdowns during gameplay (Apple Silicon)

[Oleg_7777776]

Any update on this issue @vinzenz @posila?

(Is there another way to tag users or maybe I just don't have permissions to do so? In the preview it doesn't look like it's tagging.)

I asked the same question in private messages, with no result yet(((I’m studying how to install Windows on a mac book, I don’t see any other ways yet

[Oleg_7777776]

Any update on this issue @vinzenz @posila?

(Is there another way to tag users or maybe I just don't have permissions to do so? In the preview it doesn't look like it's tagging.)

I asked the same question in private messages, with no result yet(((I’m studying how to install Windows on a mac book, I don’t see any other ways yet

[Fadwheen]

Any updates on the issue? Mac users unite or we are screwed as always.

[vinzenz]

Hey there, we're aware of this thread, but so far we haven't found a good way to replicate these slowdowns on our Apple hardware. So it seems like there's no easy fix we can implement for now. The team is also focusing on crashes and bugs at the moment, performance improvements will come later.

[collinvandyck]

Understood that crashes and bugs take priority. That's interesting though that you're having a hard time replicating it, given that it usually happens to me within 5 minutes or so of playing on my M2 Pro when it's hooked up to an external monitor. I'm happy to help with a repro in whatever way I can, please let me know when the opportunity arises!

[Akyri]

Just adding my two cents here. Long time Mac player on a 14-inch 2023 M2 Pro MacBook Pro (model A2779). I'm getting unplayable stuttering after 5 or so minutes, even in the barebones scenario/tutorial maps. I have friends who have also encountered the same behavior. Before this DLC, I never experienced any technical issues with Factorio at all, it was a prime example of efficient game development!

[Teralink]

I can help too, if you need some log-files or some testing. Playing on a MacBook Air M3 16/512GB on an external monitor in 1920x1080. Basegame runs smooth, even with bigger factories. Space Age has slowdowns from the beginning, but on Gleba it's just not fun to play. It's like playing in slow motion

[Oleg_7777776]

Какие-нибудь новости по этому вопросу? Пользователи Mac объединяются, или мы облажались, как всегда. [/цитата]

viewtopic.php? p=633414#p633414
more or less recent information here, we are still waiting

[posila]

Dropping bellow 60 FPS, or stuttering sucks

For macOS players, I recommend to disable "Render in native resolution" in graphics settings, if you run into FPS issues.

Space Age has lot more complicated rendering to compose all the sprites and shader effects in somewhat acceptable way. We are always trying to find good compromises between visual fidelity and performance costs.

Hello, to say it clearly. Factorio 2.0 is more demanding on GPU than 1.1 was, and Space Age significantly so.

If you could play 1.1 on high resolution display with "Render in native resolution" graphics option enabled and 60 FPS, your might not keep 60 FPS on highest graphics settings in Space Age, and possibly even in base 2.0.

To improve the framerate, at the moment you can:

• Disable "Render in native resolution" (and restart the game)
• Disable individual effects like Show clouds, Show fog, Animated water, ...

Our plan is:

• Implement Resolution scaling option, so that the game can be rendered in lower resolution (for example 70% scale) but GUI can be rendered in native resolution.
• Explore optimizations that would utilize high power of Apple Silicon CPUs to lessen workload put on its GPU.

[collinvandyck]

In the interest of being clear, I also just want to reiterate that these jolts from 60fps to 30s and in between do not happen under load. These are on new maps, when nothing much is going on. I'm not arguing that what you are saying is wrong, but I also want to say that as a software developer myself, this feels like a hitch that is not entirely load related, but rather some other kind of contention in the pipeline in the circumstance where an external monitor is attached.

I have previously taken your suggestion to disable native resolution. This helps temporarily, but the low FPS are usually back within a minute or so. I have not tried disabling other effects you mentioned, but I will do so at some point in the future.

Will live it here and say thank you for a great game! I've got a PC laptop that I can play on in the meantime, so the factory will continue to grow.

[brunzenstein]

Could the language setting be the culprit?
Being aware of the current problem with Factorio on the Mac, I refrained from buying space age and stay with 2.0 for the moment.
That said, I can run Factorio 2.0 in English language even on my vintage 2016 MacBook Pro and also on my silicon MacBook Pro M2 as shown.
No trouble whatsoever.
I never tried Factorio in my native German language thought.

[Oleg_7777776]

Hello, to say it clearly. Factorio 2.0 is more demanding on GPU than 1.1 was, and Space Age significantly so.

If you could play 1.1 on high resolution display with "Render in native resolution" graphics option enabled and 60 FPS, your might not keep 60 FPS on highest graphics settings in Space Age, and possibly even in base 2.0.

To improve the framerate, at the moment you can:

• Disable "Render in native resolution" (and restart the game)
• Disable individual effects like Show clouds, Show fog, Animated water, ...

Our plan is:

• Implement Resolution scaling option, so that the game can be rendered in lower resolution (for example 70% scale) but GUI can be rendered in native resolution.
• Explore optimizations that would utilize high power of Apple Silicon CPUs to lessen workload put on its GPU.

Thanks! We are looking forward to it!

[Var18]

Dropping bellow 60 FPS, or stuttering sucks

For macOS players, I recommend to disable "Render in native resolution" in graphics settings, if you run into FPS issues.

Space Age has lot more complicated rendering to compose all the sprites and shader effects in somewhat acceptable way. We are always trying to find good compromises between visual fidelity and performance costs.

Hello, to say it clearly. Factorio 2.0 is more demanding on GPU than 1.1 was, and Space Age significantly so.

If you could play 1.1 on high resolution display with "Render in native resolution" graphics option enabled and 60 FPS, your might not keep 60 FPS on highest graphics settings in Space Age, and possibly even in base 2.0.

To improve the framerate, at the moment you can:

• Disable "Render in native resolution" (and restart the game)
• Disable individual effects like Show clouds, Show fog, Animated water, ...

Our plan is:

• Implement Resolution scaling option, so that the game can be rendered in lower resolution (for example 70% scale) but GUI can be rendered in native resolution.
• Explore optimizations that would utilize high power of Apple Silicon CPUs to lessen workload put on its GPU.

Does that theory really make sense given the data in this thread? It seems to be related to the usage of external monitors. I'm surprised the team hasn't been able to get a repro of this issue with an Apple silicon mac plugged into an external monitor. Not to be too alarmist but I think this is close to "request a refund" territory, except the fact that 1.1 performance was great and we have faith the team is going to fix the issue. I understand MacOS users aren't a majority of the player base but I think this is pretty widespread and impactful, hope it gets the priority it deserves.

Thanks for the work and support post-launch, we appreciate it.

[UnfunnyChris]

I noticed that Space Age is more demanding, but this is not the problem at all (for me).
The game runs totally fine on my M1 Macbook Pro for hours with native resolution off and high details. The significant drops in frame rate only occur on the external monitor (on the same settings).
But as there is so much going on in Factorio it is so much better to play on a big screen.

[omcnoe]

11-08-2024, 16-58-45.png (7.44 MiB) Viewed 504 times

* Issue isn't just for Apple Silicon macs, issue affects Intel macs also
* Issue isn't just for external displays, there are performance issues on internal display also

I can easily reproduce the issue, certain previews in the menu cause the game to lag really badly. The preview where many biters attack the copper mine, or any space platform preview.
I used the Activity Monitor "GPU History" and when FPS tanks, the GPU usage also drops down very low. Not sure what this means. And CPU usage will also be low.

Also, I noticed that sometimes slightly downsizing the window can suddenly get the game back to 60 FPS. Game will be struggling at <10FPS, slightly shrink the window down (not by a significant amount, <20% size difference) and it springs back up to 60. Feels a lot more like a bug than a lack of GPU performance, performance just hits a cliff in some scenes and dies.

IMO shouldn't plan specific fixes til they have an actual reproduction of the bug.

[posila]

Does that theory really make sense given the data in this thread? It seems to be related to the usage of external monitors. I'm surprised the team hasn't been able to get a repro of this issue with an Apple silicon mac plugged into an external monitor.

In the interest of being clear, I also just want to reiterate that these jolts from 60fps to 30s and in between do not happen under load. These are on new maps, when nothing much is going on. I'm not arguing that what you are saying is wrong, but I also want to say that as a software developer myself, this feels like a hitch that is not entirely load related, but rather some other kind of contention in the pipeline in the circumstance where an external monitor is attached.

Right, it does appear there is also some issue related to external monitors. Some of the posters here say they have 4K monitors, for them I believe my previous post applies. When I test it with USB-C to HDMI cable and 1920x1200 monitor, the game runs smoothly on the monitor in 1920x1200. And it also runs smoothly in 1650x1050 on the internal screen when external monitor is plugged in. When I did this, I saw some JPEG-like compression artifacts on mac desktop and also in the game, on the external LCD. I don't know how video over USB-C works, but it seems to me like some compression is happening, and perhaps GPU does the compression as opposed some dedicated chip, which would mean more load on the GPU? Also just having second screen, and OS having to compose image for that screen adds load to the GPU too.

I can see people have problems when using external monitors, I have not been able to reproduce the issue so far. We are releasing 2.0.16 with SDL updated to the new version, so let's see if that helps anything. If not, we'll get into investigating hard issues like this when tsunami of after-release-bug-reports falls off.

If you want to refund the game until it is solved, I think that is perfectly reasonable and fair thing for you to do.

[posila]

* Issue isn't just for Apple Silicon macs, issue affects Intel macs also
* Issue isn't just for external displays, there are performance issues on internal display also

Right, the 2.0 is more demanding then 1.1, Space Age is more demanding than vanilla 2.0. The higher the resolution and the weaker the GPU, more likely it is you'll run into performance issues. What resolution is your screen set in?

I used the Activity Monitor "GPU History" and when FPS tanks, the GPU usage also drops down very low. Not sure what this means. And CPU usage will also be low.

Also, I noticed that sometimes slightly downsizing the window can suddenly get the game back to 60 FPS. Game will be struggling at <10FPS, slightly shrink the window down (not by a significant amount, <20% size difference) and it springs back up to 60. Feels a lot more like a bug than a lack of GPU performance, performance just hits a cliff in some scenes and dies.

That's interesting, I have a theory that OpenGL or OS evicts our framebuffers or important textures from VRAM to RAM, making writing to framebuffers much slower. When you resize window, framebuffers get reallocated to match the new window size and now that they are smaller, they get allocated in VRAM again (or the evicted texture is made resident again)

Either way, resolution scaling option should help in this case too.

[Oleg_7777776]

* Issue isn't just for Apple Silicon macs, issue affects Intel macs also
* Issue isn't just for external displays, there are performance issues on internal display also

Right, the 2.0 is more demanding then 1.1, Space Age is more demanding than vanilla 2.0. The higher the resolution and the weaker the GPU, more likely it is you'll run into performance issues. What resolution is your screen set in?

I used the Activity Monitor "GPU History" and when FPS tanks, the GPU usage also drops down very low. Not sure what this means. And CPU usage will also be low.

Also, I noticed that sometimes slightly downsizing the window can suddenly get the game back to 60 FPS. Game will be struggling at <10FPS, slightly shrink the window down (not by a significant amount, <20% size difference) and it springs back up to 60. Feels a lot more like a bug than a lack of GPU performance, performance just hits a cliff in some scenes and dies.

That's interesting, I have a theory that OpenGL or OS evicts our framebuffers or important textures from VRAM to RAM, making writing to framebuffers much slower. When you resize window, framebuffers get reallocated to match the new window size and now that they are smaller, they get allocated in VRAM again (or the evicted texture is made resident again)

Either way, resolution scaling option should help in this case too.

After playing for three weeks, I noticed that fps drops after 1 minute (as if some buffer or GUI memory should be filled). any change in resolution after the FPS starts to decrease, or a change in graphics settings seems to reset this, and you have another 50-60 seconds before the drawdown begins (as if memory or some buffer will overflow again), the effect is most easily visible when changing the monitor resolution. everyone writes about similar effects in one form or another.
Pastila thanks for the promptness! I think in November there will be a full-fledged Factorio release for me, which we are all very happy about

[Mavets]

Hi all. scaled my base and also faced this problem. fps from 60 dropped to 45-50 and there are constant microfreezes, by the way after the last patch they became more.

Uncheck the native resolution is not an option, the graphics becomes terrible, with it will not be able to enjoy the game.

I really, really hope that soon it will be possible to optimize performance, the new dlc is great - 11/10, but the optimization...(

looking forward to the news.

macbook m1 pro 16 ram

[Oleg_7777776]

after SDL update, overall almost always 60/60 (rendering enabled) dips noticed
1) 500 drones flying out at once in drone mall - 30/60
2) flying over water 50/60
3) watching train unloading at station 30/30