i have noticed a large amount of shuttering and slowdowns on in my modded factorio game (that was runing fine for about 17 hours before shutters started), however when I went to look at my CPU usage, I noticed that factorio was only using:
4% - 5.5% of my CPU (of 98%ish available CPU)
1.4 GB of memory (of 11 GB of available memory)
between 1% and 12% GPU (100%ish of available GPU)
it says my power uses is 'very high', however after looking it up I don't know if that is relevant? (I'm not using a laptop)
status gotten from task manager
other more resource intensive games tend to run fine, but with factorio its all shutters and general slowdowns for no reason.
any ideas what is going on? I don't think factorio should be shuttering when I'm using so few resources?
factorio not using CPU or memory
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alaricdragon
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Re: factorio not using CPU or memory
Factorio is primarily single threaded, so it's basically never going to use a significant percentage of your CPU (No more than 1/Number of cores), and it's engine is very different from most other games so the bottlenecks are usually in different spots. Some tasks are limited by memory bandwidth, rather than CPU speed or RAM size, which task manager isn't going to show.
GPU wise having enough VRAM to hold all the sprites is more important than any actual processing power - drawing sprites doesn't tax the GPU, but if it has to stream those sprites from RAM or a drive the game will run slowly. Mods can dramatically increase the number of sprites and thus the needed VRAM.
It's also quite possible one of your mods is running scripts that are taking a long time to complete.
Hit F4 to bring up the debug menu and activate the show-fps and show-time-usage options (and maybe show-gpu-time-usage) and it'll give an idea of why it's stuttering. If you don't know how to read that info, post a screenshot up and someone will probably take a look at it.
GPU wise having enough VRAM to hold all the sprites is more important than any actual processing power - drawing sprites doesn't tax the GPU, but if it has to stream those sprites from RAM or a drive the game will run slowly. Mods can dramatically increase the number of sprites and thus the needed VRAM.
It's also quite possible one of your mods is running scripts that are taking a long time to complete.
Hit F4 to bring up the debug menu and activate the show-fps and show-time-usage options (and maybe show-gpu-time-usage) and it'll give an idea of why it's stuttering. If you don't know how to read that info, post a screenshot up and someone will probably take a look at it.
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alaricdragon
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Re: factorio not using CPU or memory
- screenshot with show-fps, show-time-usage, and show-gpu-time-usage
- Screenshot (2).png (3.4 MiB) Viewed 3445 times
- some exstra data from a scan thing or something
- blaaaa.gif (23.42 KiB) Viewed 3445 times
- some exstra data from a scan thing or something
- blaaaaa2.gif (21.54 KiB) Viewed 3445 times
the 'space exploration mod' is blocking some of the things in the screen shot of factorio. no idea how to remove that without removing the mod
the second two attachments are from an program a friend recommended I download, to see what is being used. no idea if it is useful or not though, but thought I would share it just in case.
Re: factorio not using CPU or memory
Seems CPU bound, if you post your log and save file someone could tell you if this is unusual.
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alaricdragon
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Re: factorio not using CPU or memory
my save file, and what I think is my log file? as requested
Re: factorio not using CPU or memory
Entity update is taking a loooooong time. The base in your screenshot looks fairly large, so if you've got similar sized ones on other surfaces from SE then the speed seems pretty normal. Your logfile says you have a 24 logical core CPU, which means task manager is only going to report ~4-5% usage if one core is being fully utilized, which matches what you said above, so yes you're very likely CPU bound. The game uses threading where it can, but overall it's still very bound to single core performance.
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alaricdragon
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Re: factorio not using CPU or memory
I think the entity update's comes from natural evolution enemy's and biter factions, the 2 mods like each other a little two mush I think, as the base you see is all my buildings and units, no other bases anywhere
so its the fact that by the nature of this game it needs to use only a single 'logical core CPU' to do things that is causing the lag then? that's the bottleneck? that's too bad. I will have to do something about this, so things can work better.
regardless, thanks for the fast responses, I was kind of worried it would take a year or two before I got some answers to what the lag is, and I'm glad that this difficulty is resolved then.
so its the fact that by the nature of this game it needs to use only a single 'logical core CPU' to do things that is causing the lag then? that's the bottleneck? that's too bad. I will have to do something about this, so things can work better.
regardless, thanks for the fast responses, I was kind of worried it would take a year or two before I got some answers to what the lag is, and I'm glad that this difficulty is resolved then.
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alaricdragon
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Re: factorio not using CPU or memory
I removed the 'natural evolution enemy's' mod, and it seams that there were some 130k small alien artifacts on the ground, about 750 'ne-fire-flame-0 and some odd 1.5k units got removed. guess all the infighting with 'bitter factions' started to take clog up my system?