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Comment by SpacePortKnight | Hacker News Reader

Factorio's official requirement for x86 is a dual core 3.0Ghz processor & yet it's able to run on Switch which has a very weak 1Ghz quad core cortex-A57 ARM CPU.

How is this possible? I would imagine CPU requirements to be more or less same across any resolution / operating system.

This is what makes Nintendo Switch interesting to me. It's CPU is even less powerful than an Raspberry Pi 4. Even midrange android smartphones today are much more efficient and powerful than Switch and yet Switch can run Doom / Skyrim just fine.

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Because the Switch is running Factorio on top of a bit of code optimized for running games. A PC is running Factorio on top of a full-featured general-purpose OS, and most PC users are going to be running other things concurrently; web browsers, Electron messaging apps, malware, etc.

Of course, being able to target a single hardware platform with very minor differences like the Switch also means the ability to make optimizations to that specific platform without having to care about possibly breaking compatibility with others. It'd be like being able to optimize your game for people with Nvidia cards and completely ignore those with ATI, Intel, or any other brands on the PC.

Switch can't run Doom "just fine", it downscales down to 360p frequently and chogs between 20-30fps. It's barely playable. Mind you, Doom is one of the better optimized games of this gen. And running it sub~60fps on with all settings turned down to ultra low is a sin.

Factorio is pretty well optimized too, however the factory size Switch can handle are on the - can launch the rocket - scale. This is but a small fraction of the factory size people end up building

If it does i do not notice Doom down scaling in the first 3 hours of game play.

Part of it might just be that they have lower expectations for Switch in terms of the CPU being able to keep up with a large megabase. They expect players to be able to launch a rocket without any noticeable lag, but one-rocket-per-minute bases might be a bit much.

Also, they mentioned in the previous blog post that they've done some optimization to keep the framerate from bogging down, so maybe even the x86 requirements are lower these days (or will be when those optimizations show up in the public version, which might not have happened yet).

> Switch and yet Switch can run Doom / Skyrim just fine.

That "just fine" hides a massive understatement on just how compromised these games are on Switch. They usually run on settings even below lowest possible on PC and regularly drop resolution way down to even 640x360, making everything extremely oily and blurry.

These games run and can be enjoyable - but "fine" is not really a word that fits into their performance :)

A modern 1.6ghz laptop cpu like the 1240U is probably fine for factorio.

A Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3ghz probably isn't.

They don't want to test and then list the minimum CPU for every generation of cpu for the last decade or more when listing system requirements. So they go a little higher in the stated requirements than is probably needed with newer gens so people don't get angry and disappointed that their older gen cpu doesn't run well despite having the listed clock speed.

The Switch CPU isn't actually that terrible. You can run into issues with the number of cores. The main thing you will find is that generally most codebases are full of potential optimizions but they aren't acted on until you find yourself constrained.

The platform variance for x86/x64 CPUs is... way bigger. The actual instructions per-clock could be wildly different and has massive impact on performance than just the clockspeed.

I wonder if they could release a Pi 4 port or finally a mobile version (controls will be troublesome).

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