Factorio Forums

It seems Factorio can often cause an enormous amount of System Interrupts on Windows 7 (enough to completely choke up a 3GHz-core) when looking at forests.

When running Factorio, the game regularly starts stuttering. I at first attributed that to normal performance issues, but noticed that it also affected Spotify when that was running in the background. I have an 8-core computer, and Factorio isn't even nearly using all of that, so it can't simply be high CPU-load, and RAM and disk were both fine as well. I ultimately found that Factorio seems to cause a huge amount of System Interrupts (or at least causes the System Interrupt process to take up an entire CPU-core at 100% load), which then impacts the performance of Factorio and all other programs running (in the case of Spotify, causing sound to stutter; in Factorio, both graphics and sound stutter). The issue worsens the longer Factorio is running, and reloading or restarting does only sometimes fix the issue.

Furthermore, this quite clearly seems to be tied to graphics (or sound?) - pausing the game (by bringing up the menu) does not help, but switching to map-mode and zooming out does. Based on scrolling around while in map-mode, it seems the issue occurs only or mainly when looking at heavily forested areas, and gets worse when one zooms in - probably either because trees fill a proportionally larger part of the screen, or because the issue is caused by tree details somehow. Notably, these issues doesn't seem to appear even in the middle of my base, with the by far largest amount of moving parts and logical elements around.

I suspect that the trees may be causing a large amounts of (subsequently caught) Exceptions or something like that, but that is ultimately just me speculating

Thanks for the report.

The issue is related to how much VRAM your graphics card has and the graphics quality setting you're using.

Your graphics card only has 2 GB of dedicated video memory which is right on the limits of being able to run high quality smoothly. Trees are large sprites with a large amount of semi-transparent pixels which puts a high load on the GPU and pushes it beyond what it can handle resulting in the issues you're seeing.

You'll need to turn t he graphics quality from "high" to "normal" if you want to prevent the stuttering.

(also; there are no exceptions thrown during the rendering process so it's not that )

Thank you for the quick reply, I'll try reducing the graphics settings and see if that works. If the issue persists nonetheless, I'll update this thread.