Rapid flickering and sometimes tearing

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swni
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Rapid flickering and sometimes tearing

Post by swni »

I've begun experiencing significant flickering within Factorio only; I'm unsure if this is a bug or can be fixed with more appropriate graphics settings. No other application has had any such problem.

Issue: Flickering within Factorio. Speed of flickering is often steady around 1 Hz, sometimes slower, sometimes up to 5 Hz. Usually no flickering at all. 1st screenshot below shows a capture of terrain / entities / world as momentarily black, while gui elements are unaffected. When the pause menu or other windows are open, the flickering lets me see the world being rendered behind the windows. Rarely, walking results in horizontal or vertical tears in the terrain (2nd screenshot) which goes away when zoom is changed. The tears are usually black. Debug output of gpu time usage seems really odd (2nd screenshot; details below). Some of the numbers are negative, but I think they are supposed to be render times??

Circumstances: This might only happen when my free RAM is low. I have only observed this problem in a game with the Space Exploration mod, which has a lot of large graphics. I have seen it in a new Space Exploration game but not in a new vanilla game. Until this issue started a few weeks ago, I have many many times played Factorio (including with other large mod packs) concurrently with heavy ram and cpu usage with no issue. FPS / UPS remains pegged at 60.0 while this is happening. These problems started shortly after upgrading my linux kernel from 4.20.4 to 5.10.9. Around the same time, Factorio had updated a few minor versions (I didn't see anything relevant in the change log), I also did some system updates that should be unrelated. Some mods had also updated in the meantime; I don't think the changes are related. I had actively used the Space Exploration mod for 90 hours before the issue began. I haven't figured out any particular steps to trigger the flickering, which come and go very unpredictably, even if the game is just sitting paused. Flickering does not seem to depend on how much stuff is within view.

Computer specs: Factorio 1.1.25. Space Exploration 0.5.37. Gentoo linux 5.10.9. Intel i7-4790 (haswell). "ASRock Incorporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller". RAM 16 GB. System has been fully updated a few days ago. No hardware changes in years.

I tried stress testing cpu and no flickering in Factorio occurred. I tried stress testing ram (only by 4GB, maybe not even hitting swap) and my whole system's graphics got totally hosed; I'm unsure if the culprit was Factorio, the system, or the stress tester, and I'm not eager to try it again.

I can't reasonably attach my mods folder as the Space Exploration graphics alone are 300 MB zipped.

This workaround had no effect: viewtopic.php?f=182&t=70991&p=437285#p437285

Nothing interesting in the log.

I saw some odd behavior when gpu debug timing was enabled. I thought the numbers were times (in ms / frame?), and they were normal most of the time, but when flickering started their behavior was totally wacky, spiking to large negative numbers (in the hundreds). See second screenshot. There seemed to be a weird wave cycle where, over the course of about 0.5 seconds, first light composition becomes large negative, then tree shadows becomes large (negative?), then draw-engine becomes large, then terrain becomes large; and all numbers go back to normal until it happens again within a second or so. Not sure exactly.

Graphics settings are shown in third screenshot; note also some weird numbers there as well. I tried a variety of settings with no change. I think I have them on the most conservative settings possible but not sure.

swni
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Re: Rapid flickering and sometimes tearing

Post by swni »

Sorry, the attachments got dropped, I try again.
screenshot 1: mid-flicker
screenshot 1: mid-flicker
2021-02-25-19-48-12.png (289.49 KiB) Viewed 985 times
screenshot 2: tearing and weird debug timing numbers
screenshot 2: tearing and weird debug timing numbers
2021-02-25-19-51-08.png (3.04 MiB) Viewed 985 times
screenshot 3: graphics setting and more weird numbers
screenshot 3: graphics setting and more weird numbers
2021-02-25-19-51-35.png (1.74 MiB) Viewed 985 times
Attachments
factorio-current.log
(55.95 KiB) Downloaded 58 times

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