Factorio Forums

Hi! I'm considering buying Factorio, but I am concerned that my computer may not be able to run it.

Mostly, this is about vram, because all I could find was that you had to have 512mb. However, my old 2007 macbook pro (running Linux and with 4gb RAM, 2.2Ghz dual core CPU) only has a 128mb dedicated NVIDIA card. I can run Minecraft and even Team Fortress 2 well enough to be playable, but since I saw somewhere that this game loads all of its graphics into vram I am genuinely worried that the game won't work at all, or that many graphical elements would simply fail to load.

I have tested playing the demo and it works rather well, though apparently because of its reduced content it has lower hardware requirements.

Can anyone give me a definitive answer? I would hate to buy this game just to find out I can't handle it...

Very doubtful.

You can buy it on steam and refund it within 2 hours of playing time if it doesn't work. I've done this with a few games already. Intel graphics 3000 card here, which is a bit of a hit&mis with various games. Not for vram problems, but other issues. So I am quite happy with steams policy on this.

http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

I did have performance issues with the smoke in factorio, but you can disable that.

Yeah I've got 1.5GB VRAM and I have trouble with smoke. Just a little jumpy in some areas, though when I did my no-solar run I had to disable it because I couldn't get near them lol.

thegamemaster1234 wrote: I am concerned that my computer may not be able to run it.

You can rock it:

Oh, I'll mention I tried it on my work computer once with a 512mb quad card and it was pretty bad, maybe 5fps on just a starting base before even automation 2, but I was running all four screens at the time (only one on Factorio of course). I suspect if I disabled three screens it would run okay.

Thanks for the support, guys! If I buy the game, I'll be sure to let you know how things work out.

EDIT: I bought the game, and things are looking better than expected! Despite having but a fourth of the vram supposedly required, the game loaded up just fine and doesn't seem to have any issues besides some lag (but I was expecting this). After tweaking the graphics settings a bit much of the lag went away, and it looks like I'm ready to go!

Even with the demo you cannot tell if this game runs on your pc, because only a big base puts strain on your cpu. But i guess 2,2ghz is perfectly fine to complete the game, but far from being able to run a megabase.
Completing the game requires you to launch 1 rocket and you have hours time. In megabases you launch 1 rocket every minute or something like that, so essentially they are literally 100 times more complex.