[2.0.76] pernicious, cross-os periodic fps drops

[Dhumina]

this is an issue which has been long standing for me but ignorable until recently. in vanilla (with some qol mods), this issue would happen every five minutes or so, and would constitute a brief drop to 45 fps, then go back up to 60. i noticed it only because i always have my fps/ups counter on. i proceeded to ignore it for months.

now i am playing the pyanodon modpack, and it has become bad enough that i am having difficulty playing. intermittently, anywhere from every 30 seconds to every few minutes, my fps will drop to about 45 fps, and my ups will drop to 58, before going back up to 60 after a few seconds. at the moment of the drop, my whole game will freeze briefly. i have been able to confirm that this increase in severity happens specifically when there are pyanodon: alien life buildings running in my world. to be clear: this issue happens regardless of whether im playing in vanilla or modded, but becomes much worse when i am playing heavily modded saves like pyanodon.

1. this issue has occured on windows, bazzite, and linux mint (i am currently on linux mint). enabling compatibility modes in steam on linux has not made a difference. i realize this is a big indicator that the problem is related to hardware, but i have reason to believe that it is not a question of lacking specs

2. this issue gets worse with the addition of mods, but is still present even in a completely vanilla save.

3. the size of my factory does not affect this issue, but the presence of certain modded buildings exacerbates it greatly.

4. this issue is not affected by the number of other programs i have open. having obs, firefox, discord, and an entire other game open at the same time does not increase the frequency or severity of this issue. having only factorio and no other program open does not decrease the frequency or severity of the issue.

5. no other game gives me performance problems. i have played elden ring, shapez 2, and warframe throughout my time having this issue. all very hardware demanding games, all at high graphics options, none of which have had a similar issue or indeed any fps related issues at all. my system is beefy enough with an rtx 3070 and an intel i7-8700k, that i do not believe my system's capability is the issue here, despite its age. when i looked at system resource monitors like task manager in windows, and htop and resource monitor in linux, factorio simply has not shown any significant resource usage for cpu, memory, vram, or overall graphics card usage. by all accounts, my computer should be eating this game for breakfast.

6. this issue is not affected by changing any graphics options whatsoever. low or high, off or on, absolutely no graphics option affects the frequency or severity of the issue. ive tested all of them individually and together.

7. sometimes, the game will start up and stay at 48 fps unless i tab out and tab back in or restart the game. this only happens occasionally.

i have tried absolutely everything i can think of to fix this issue myself, including disabling freesync, lowering my graphics options, eliminating building animations, trying out open source vs proprietary nvidia graphics drivers, increasing my swapfile size, using different proton versions in steam, using the standalone edition of factorio, uninstalling amp, uninstalling docker, really at this point im just throwing spaghetti at the wall. i dont know what to do. i just wanna play pyanodon.

[r3nt5ch3r]

I would start checking your CPU. Just look up older test results and verify in some benchmarks that it gives the performance it should.
You won't see single thread limitations that easily. Might be that overall CPU-Usage is 10%, but it's already limiting on a single thread.

Knowing your complete Hardware would also be beneficial.
Like SSD, RAM... You can use HWiNFO to provide basic system overview:

grafik.png (179.26 KiB) Viewed 220 times

Also post your save file:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=68653

Is it also happening on vanilla without any mods?

[Loewchen]

The update cycle seems to be no factor, so I would think this is purely an issue of the rendering loop. The debug info does not show anything clear though, if you can provide a debug screenshot with a more significant fps drop it might show more. I would also make sure the grafics driver runs factorio in high performance mode as some power saving could cause this issue.

[Dhumina]

I would start checking your CPU. Just look up older test results and verify in some benchmarks that it gives the performance it should.
You won't see single thread limitations that easily. Might be that overall CPU-Usage is 10%, but it's already limiting on a single thread.

Knowing your complete Hardware would also be beneficial.
Like SSD, RAM... You can use HWiNFO to provide basic system overview:

second pyanodon.zip

(27.18 MiB) Downloaded 12 times

Also post your save file:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=68653

Is it also happening on vanilla without any mods?

hardware info:

Code: Select all

cpu:                                                            
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4375 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4325 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4400 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4394 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4394 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4400 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4400 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4307 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4400 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4400 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4400 MHz
                       Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz, 4400 MHz
keyboard:
  /dev/input/event3    Logitech G513 RGB MECHANICAL GAMING KEYBOARD
mouse:
  /dev/input/mice      Sony DualShock 4 [CUH-ZCT2x]
  /dev/input/mice      Logitech G600 Gaming Mouse
monitor:
                       VG271U
                       VG271U
graphics card:
                       nVidia GA104 [GeForce RTX 3070]
sound:
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH cAVS
                       nVidia GA104 High Definition Audio Controller
                       C-Media Electronics Blue Snowball
                       Sony DualShock 4 [CUH-ZCT2x]
storage:
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH SATA AHCI Controller
                       Samsung Electronics NVMe SSD Controller PM9A1/PM9A3/980PRO
network:
  eno1                 Intel Ethernet Connection (7) I219-V
                       Broadcom BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
network interface:
  lo                   Loopback network interface
  eno1                 Ethernet network interface
  docker0              Ethernet network interface
disk:
  /dev/nvme0n1         Samsung Electronics NVMe SSD Controller PM9A1/PM9A3/980PRO
  /dev/sdb             Samsung SSD 860
  /dev/sdc             WDC WD40EZAX-00C
  /dev/sda             WDC WD10EZEX-75W

usb controller:
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller
bios:
                       BIOS
bridge:
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #1
                       Intel Z390 Chipset LPC/eSPI Controller
                       Intel 6th-10th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16)
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #8
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #17
                       ASUSTeK PRIME H310M-D
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #9
hub:
                       Genesys Logic Hub
                       Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
                       Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
memory:
                       Main Memory
unknown:
                       FPU
                       DMA controller
                       PIC
                       Keyboard controller
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH Shared SRAM
                       Intel Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller
                       Serial controller
                       USB3.0 HD Audio Capture USB3.0 HD Video Capture
                       ASUSTek Broadcom BCM20702A0 Bluetooth
                       C-Media Electronics Blue Snowball
                       HP HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless
  /dev/input/event7    Logitech G600 Gaming Mouse
  /dev/input/event4    Logitech G513 RGB MECHANICAL GAMING KEYBOARD

i have attached my two saves. i can confirm that it happens without mods (other than space age). the non pyanodon save i have here is only quality of life mods and can be run in vanilla space age, and still produces the framedrop. it does seem that a factory of sufficient size needs to be present for this to start happening, as it doesnt happen in a new game with no buildings placed, or at least isnt noticeable at that point.