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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised. I was under the impression that Factorio was CPU-bound. The Switch isn't exactly a powerhouse. For comparison, Civilization VI on the Switch was underwhelming. Playable, but taking a turn late game often meant over a minute on the CPU taking their turns.

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Factorio is CPU-bound in the sense that it isn't memory or GPU-bound.

Sure, this will put a limit on megabases, but it should be performant enough for a pretty large factory.

It is absolutely memory-bound, just not memory size-bound but memory-speed-bound.

IIRC few of their blogs go into detail, where data layout and way to access it was main limit, not actual computation speed for some operation

The Factorio developer spent the last seven or eight years optimizing their game. The Civilization VI developers did not.

Developer? As in one developer? Is this a mistake. If not, I am shocked

Initially it was one developer but it hasn't been just him for quite a while. Nowadays they are a team of more than a dozen I think.

They have poured a lot of work into making their game run efficiently. No matter how much they do that, players will always expand their factory until the CPU cannot keep up.

There's more than one person but it's a small team, core development on the pre-1.0 versions was done by three or so people I believe.

it is a reasonably small team but definitely more than one developer

https://www.factorio.com/game/about

Mistake. The Factorio team is much bigger than a single developer https://www.factorio.com/game/about

And multiple of those devs have posted blog updates about various optimizations they've done. So performance isn't one person either.

Tangentially, kudos to them for listing out past team members on the about-us page. I've never seen anyone do that before.

that's like... what class looks like. real class not something you instantiate objects from :)

Not a single developer. The game itself is a product of a Factorio factory, the developer simply drags belts around and flips logic switches to produce new features. The automation has reached a point where it has developed Copilot-like AI skills and very little needs to be done by hand now.

How long until it gains sentience, breaks free of its chains and enslaves or wipes out the human race?

Read the development roadmap on the same website before asking such stupid questions. Gaining sentience and wiping out the human race is scheduled for August 2024.

I thought they were stuck in the "find optimal factory layout" loop and that world domination had been postponed?

They have nine as of 2021. https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-366

They even have a chart of lines of code in Factorio over the years.

Just a tyop.

Very large bases will eventually hit CPU bounds, but a base achieving the normal gameplay objective ("launch a rocket") should be easily simulated at 60hz.

Indeed, the linked blog post addresses performance expectations.

I've played Factorio at 1080p with integrated graphics on a dual-core Skylake chip. I think the Nvidia Tegra will be able to handle this just fine.

Hey sorry, it running poorly is the only way I wont get addicted to this. Is there any chance you could edit your comment and lie for me?

No need to lie, just set the internal rendering resolution to 1440p or higher and your machine will go up in flames.

I must regrettably inform you that the game runs very well on a M1 MacBook Pro, with an effective render resolution of ~2880x1800.

I don't doubt it does, my 12700k's iGPU handles it just fine at 1440p too. I was talking more about the old Skylake machine from earlier though, much different (see: slower) beast.

I noticed that performance issues arise from having large groups of biters attacking. Something with the pathing for the enemies uses a huge about of CPU

Or a lot of robots with pending orders.

Your Skylake laptop has about 10x the single threaded CPU performance of the Switch. I wouldn't be surprised if the switch started lagging with one 8 reactor nuclear setup.

It is, eventually. In normal play ive never even run into any hiccups with what I thought were pretty huge factories operating. It is one of if not the best optimized game ive ever played.

Factorio is CPU-bound if you run a metabase

It can run on just about anything when you base is "just finish the game in style" size

It’s like Stellaris: the game is still fun at a much smaller scale so not having a powerful computer doesn’t ruin it completely.

The factory size where your game slows to a crawl will obviously be much smaller, but it’s still probably be more than enough to finish the game.

My impression is that it's memory-limited, and it has a builtin limit.

Anyway, your factory size is FPS-bound, but any reasonable computer will run it well enough all the way to victory.

Note that is a memory speed bottleneck, not a memory capacity bottleneck

My best guess is that the game misses some optimizations due to enforcing a limit on memory usage.

> My impression is that it's memory-limited, and it has a builtin limit.

Factorio is primarily bound by memory bandwidth, believe it or not. You need a healthy amount of memory for really large factories, but the limiting factor ends up being the fact that a significant amount of it gets accessed every frame.

There is no built-in limit on factory size.

> Anyway, your factory size is FPS-bound

Not at all. FPS is only influenced by the amount of stuff on screen, which is bounded by the size of your screen. The most expensive scenes tend to be dense forests, not factories. :)

> Not at all. FPS is only influenced by the amount of stuff on screen, which is bounded by the size of your screen. The most expensive scenes tend to be dense forests, not factories. :)

In factorio frames aren't interpolated, so always FPS ≤ UPS. This means that while you're not technically limited by the rendering speed the FPS does bound the factory size.

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