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

[MRI-One]

2.0.21 works better, and with high resolution much better, thank you.

Factorio running at native resolution (5120x2160, 11 MPixel):
Where .20 would drop the frame rate down to 50fps, .21 runs cleanly at 60fps. I was surprised to see that the power consumption has barely changed. That power consumption is 40W, compared to 85W when fully stressing the GPU and around 14W with an idle desktop.
Factorio running at 3840x1680 HiRes, 24 MPixel:
old version would be quite slow, below 30fps, and now .21 runs fluently, and consuming around 75W
This is with a M2 Max, 40 Core GPU, and no changes in graphics settings.

There must have been quite a few waits in the old graphics code. Could it be that the old code had inadvertently activated some gpu thread syncs?

[posila]

2.0.21 works better, and with high resolution much better, thank you.
...
Factorio running at 3840x1680 HiRes, 24 MPixel:
old version would be quite slow, below 30fps, and now .21 runs fluently, and consuming around 75W

There must have been quite a few waits in the old graphics code. Could it be that the old code had inadvertently activated some gpu thread syncs?

Aww, that's awesome. Thank you!

Yes, it seems call to OpenGL function glQueryCounter to query GPU timer was probably causing CPU-GPU sync on macOS. We used it since 0.17, but I suppose more demanding renderer made this issue really pop-up. And V-sync made the problem even worse.

And I also found big performance problem with querying GL_TIMESTAMP on macOS. We use it to time how long did GPU take to process some operations, Apple's OpenGL never implemented it (it always return 0) so I was surprised it was taking non-trivial amount of time on macOS and probably caused CPU to wait for GPU when it didn't need to.

THANK YOU, @posila for all your hard work!

2.0.21 is a very noticeable improvement, at this point the game feels as fluent as 1.1.

Thank you, I appreciate it and I am glad to hear that.

After cleaning those fans and air vents my notebook does not overheat anymore (resulting in thermal throttling) and the framerate stays constant.

Oh, cool, I am glad you were able to get resolve the slowdowns. Resolution scaling option is coming soon-ish, in the mean time, you can try disabling the new "Occlude light sprites" option to be able to achieve 60 FPS in full 4K.

[brunzenstein]

thank you indeed postila for your dedication!

[Akyri]

Issue completely resolved for me too on 2.0.21! Excellent work posila, thanks so much for taking care of the community here! There are so many other modern game studios that would let an issue like this slide under the radar forever due to: *shrug* that's Mac. I really appreciate your dedication to us.

[epiccoleman]

This thread seems like it's largely resolved, but I just wanted to chime in and add to the chorus - from some quick testing my game seems to be performing way better, and I haven't been able to trigger a similar slowdown to what I was seeing before.

Kudos all around! Thanks especially to posila and to Wube in general. This is gamedev done right. Thanks again.