[1.1.94] Aggravating ups / fps due to high "flip"

[swni]

I have had Factorio on my current machine for a long time with no issues, including late game SpaceEx bases. The worst I get is a little lag when zoomed out in a big forest. I have screenshots from 2021 of getting 60.0 fps and ups, and with "flip" values in the range 1 - 5 ms.

Recently I picked up factorio after a hiatus and with a fresh vanilla game found it to be quite aggravating to try to play; fps was hovering around 30ish, which is fine, but ups was variously going between equal to the fps and equal to 60, and of course the game would become super sluggish every time the ups dropped to 30. "flip" consistently showed around 20 to 25 ms.

Much messing about with graphics settings had no effect. Suddenly, one of the times I restarted the game the problem had resolved itself, and I was back to my prior performance. The only thing I had changed before that particular restart was to delete achievements (probably irrelevant). "flip" went back down to around 0.8 to 1 ms.

All fixed for about a month, but then just as abruptly when I recently booted factorio the problem returned. (I had been playing factorio with no issue just minutes earlier.) I tried restarting about 20 times and it continues to persist (I also tried restarting the computer).

This happens even with no other applications running on the computer (besides steam, and a command line terminal), with 12 GB of ram free. I suspect there is some problem outside of factorio but I don't have any idea where to look.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz with integrated gpu

Gentoo 4.20.4 (yes my kernel is old)

Factorio 1.1.94 build 61774

The first screenshot is from a completely fresh, vanilla game, with fps 40 and already ups down to 51.6. This is okay but the second screenshot is from a very early (70 minutes) vanilla game and ups is below 40. Note curiously that ups exactly equals fps even though I don't see any reason this should happen if graphics is the problem.

Thanks

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2023-10-31-23-06-41.png (1.75 MiB) Viewed 482 times

[swni]

I thought it was a strange coincidence that deleting achievements fixed the problem, and the problem came back immediately after getting "Getting on track like a pro" so I did some more testing. Deleting achievements and then restarting factorio consistently fixes the problem, and acquiring "Getting on track like a pro" causes the problem to recur (and persist across restarts). I tested this about 5 times and it happened every time.

This is especially odd since I've had 100% achievements for some years already.

[swni]

I had a hunch -- "Getting on track like a pro" is the only early game achievement whose steam icon is animated. I wasn't able to figure out how to run factorio without steam, so in all of my testing I had to leave steam open.

It turns out the problem only occurs if the "Getting on track like a pro" icon is visible on steam *and* I have factorio running on the same desktop as steam. I can solve the problem by simply switching to a different desktop, or just scrolling down the steam page so that the icon is not visible anymore.

Problem solved.

[Atraps003]

The steam free version can be downloaded from the factorio website.