As far as the game in concerned, the sprites are all just 2D assets. The fact that those assets came from a 3d model during development has no effect on performance. They also do manual post-processing on most of the 2D renders.
Your wording can easily be read as them shipping 3d models and rendering them as 2d at runtime. It's a weird way to say the game is made up of 2d assets.
The game doesn't consume that much VRAM. It plays on 4 GB GPUs just fine. The GPU only needs to keep resident what's currently on the screen. Even including every animation frame, that's 1 GB tops.
Hell, the minimum requirements are a GeForce 750 Ti, or Radeon r7 360. Those are 2 GB GPUs.
You can make it consume more VRAM if you want. There's a 13GB texture modpack that I use so it looks nice on my high DPI screen. Totally optional but it sure looks good.
I'm not certain but my guess is Factorio doesn't have the elaborate systems for streaming and unloading textures 3d games has.
That's the amount of VRAM that has shipped in budget to midtier gpu's since at least 2016 with the RX470/480 from AMD. You can find even older & slower examples from Nvidia and AMD (ex. Nvidia 740GT 4GB edition)
Gaming hardware reviewers have been complaining about 4GB of VRAM not being enough since probably 2018 onward.
I have a weird setup with two very old 5:4 1280x1024 monitors I like to use for fun, and even playing Subnautica (2018 Release date) I can use up 3.4GB of VRAM at that low of a resolution on High settings. (playing on a single monitor)
> That's the amount of VRAM that has shipped in budget to midtier gpu's since at least 2016
In desktops maybe, which will be somewhat popular still among people who play a lot of games but not a majority (IDC has laptop sales at a 3 to 1 ratio to desktops in 2022, but that's not specific to people who play games, much less (2d) Factorio players specifically). The system I bought before my current one was in 2018 and mid-tier then was 2GB. There was no craze for (V)RAM at the time, more a question of which setting you want to play games at (and with which render distance) than whether a given laptop works for games at all
> The system I bought before my current one was in 2018 and mid-tier then was 2GB.
Mid-tier laptop GPU in 2018 would have been a GeForce 1060, which came in either 3 or 6 GB variants. GeForce 1050 Ti came in a 2 GB variant, but I wouldn't classify that as mid-tier. The x050 variants (1050, 2050, etc) are budget tier.
Steam having a massive collection of users with older hardware doesn't really make 4GB of VRAM any larger. My current main machine reports less than 1GB since its an iGPU. (But I've seen it use over 8gb of system memory as VRAM)
>I'm not familiar with Subnautica, is that known for being particularly efficient?
Its a pretty well made unity engine game with a minimum requirement of Intel HD4000 integrated graphics. IDK if it would be consideredban efficient game vs other visually nice from this time frame like DOOM 2016 which runs really well on 4GB vram cards if you stick to 900p and below resoultions.
> As of last month, Steam reports that >15% of their customers still have 4GB VRAM or less...
Based on my testing (and the fact that Factorio officially runs on the OG Switch) Factorio fits comfortably in less than 4GB of VRAM. So, the relevant percentage is 9.6%... the slice of their customers that have 3GB of VRAM or less.
But, the slice is actually smaller than that! The minimum graphics requirement listed on the Steam Store page is
Given that Wubi actively tested on hardware with 1GB of VRAM [0] and that they've proven themselves to be highly-technical people that sweat the details and talk about it both publicly and in-depth, I believe that to be an accurate minimum system requirement. Requiring 1GB of VRAM excludes 2.7% of those who chose to do the Steam Hardware survey.
Given that very few OpenGL/D3D/Vulkan 3D games [1] released in the past like ten years will run with 512MB of VRAM, 1GB of VRAM seems to be a fine cutoff point to me.
[1] Yes, I'm aware that Factorio is a 2D game. The comment that started this discussion claimed that Factorio "uses so much VRAM" because it's a 2D game rather than a 3D one.
> As of last month, Steam reports that >15% of their customers still have 4GB VRAM or less
4 GB is the recommended size, which manes >90% of steam-user are already in the optimal area. The lower recommendation is even 1 GB, which means >97% of steam user. Maybe if you play on a $100 mini-toaster, or some budget-laptot, it will get critical, but the vast majority of steam users are fine with playing this game.
If you play video games, it's basically nothing. I bought a 6 GB VRAM card for ~$300 a decade ago. Many recent games require a minimum of 8 GB VRAM and can scale up to 16 GB VRAM on higher settings.
Sure I play video games, but not usually the ones from the current year. Besides the price of the game itself, it won't run well on laptop hardware anyway and there's such an enormous collection of great games from past years. Factorio is an exception for me, I've played it since not long after the initial release in 2016 and actually got entertainment for so many hours that I thought it fair to buy it a second time ^^'
> Sure I play video games, but not usually the ones from the current year.
So you're extrapolating "I bought a budget tier system in 2018 and it plays a 2016 game just fine" to "Nobody needs more than 4 GB of VRAM unless you're running an LLM"
Please point out where you took that quote from, or what statement I made that could even be remotely paraphrased to that, or stop accusing people of saying things that you've misunderstood
The 2D graphics are heavier than you might suspect. But Factorio is overall a very well optimized game, and it runs far better on my office notebook than any comparable game. This will work fine on any not ancient notebook with integrated graphics.
I first beat Factorio on a 2012 MacBook Pro with integrated graphics. It is not a hard game to run until you get into the mega-megabase size, and even then you are typically CPU-bound.
I have found that HN has this population of people that think a budget system bought in 2015 should last them forever and they should never need an upgrade.
You can play Factorio on laptops and other devices that don’t have dedicated GPUs. A mid-grade computer from 2013 would be a $599 laptop with a Core i3 integrated GPU that shared the 4 GB of system RAM.
the "minimum requirements" aren't even the actual minimum, the game can definitely play on worse machines than that (just inconsistently). I know from personal experience that you can play factorio (at least the base game) on a crappy old 2009 toshiba laptop. Pretty sure it doesn't even have a GPU, just integrated graphics. It doesn't run well but it's not an action game, a little stutter isn't the end of the world and anybody playing on a system like that should not be surprised by it.
The most potato i've run it on was a CB131 chromebook, (which was about a hundred bucks in 2017) and even then, even though video was chugging at 20fps, the main update loop was locked at 60TPS. very impressive. (and helpful for a 9 hour layover on christmas eve, anecdotally)
I don't have it installed now (lest I get tempted into a quick 2-hour session and end up being late for work 12 hours later), but IIRC it performed the same for me on iGPU and 4090, even on the big saves running below 60 FPS/UPS.
Purely from a vram perspective. A triangle is just 3 vertices and some edges. A few bytes of data.
A similar 2d image of a triangle would likely be thousands of bits of data.
The 2d probably uses a little less per pixel. Whereas the triangle has slightly more expensive compute per pixel cost. But modern gpu have dedicated hardware for that.
3d is probably more expensive compute but cheaper vram usage. At least to a point and a certain set of conditions. Barring things like textures and others.
As a graphics programmer, the most charitable interpretation I have here is that in 2D all the animations are baked into texture atlases. A 3D model would re-use its textures during animation, in 2D it’s a new one.
But I don’t see Factorio as being a VRAM pig, even with all their animations, which you could certainly improve on from the simplistic “every animation frame is a whole new texture” model.
you do not need a different texel for every rendered pixel in every animation frame, which is what you need, and factorio has, with the sprite approach.
There are assumptions being made about texture resolution.
The high quality sprites are 64 pixels across per tile. With each tile being 1 meter, 1 pixel is 1.56 cm (About 0.63 inches) across. By today's standards, that's a very low texture resolution, though they can get away with it when your camera is so far away.
But if the game was 3D, you could expect players to put the camera closer to your objects. You'd need significantly higher texture resolutions. And you'd need a texture for each part of the object.
Meanwhile, consider a 3x3 object. That's 192x192 = 36,864 pixels. Assume it has a 60 fps, 2-second animation loop. That's 4,423,680 pixels. With 8 bytes per channel and 4 channels (RGBA), that's about 17.7 MB, which allows you to store 56 objects per GB.
Which doesn't sound like a lot, but we're making some huge assumptions. Not all objects are 3x3 tiles. Most don't have 120 frames of animation.
And as I mentioned in another comment, you don't need to store ALL the game's art in VRAM at once. Only what's on the screen. And you can certainly fit an entire screen's worth of animations in a 2 GB GPU.
> Meanwhile, consider a 3x3 object. That's 192x192 = 36,864 pixels. Assume it has a 60 fps, 2-second animation loop. That's 4,423,680 pixels. With 8 bytes per channel and 4 channels (RGBA), that's about 17.7 MB, which allows you to store 56 objects per GB.
I am assuming that they are laveraging multiple compression technics like using texture specific compression on the gpu, or sub sampling the resolution directly.
8 bytes per channel seems rather large here as well.
Hmmm... The Factorio team is famously performance oriented, and more scenes are often far less so. Are you sure the problem wasn't the mods? I have good memories of sending my Kerbal frame rates to hell with generous modding, both for graphics and the physics engine.
I also struggled with performance in space age and mentioned it to a developer, but the solution was setting a setting which I had tested previously (no fog) and did nothing... on Nauvis. Turns out it's the difference between stuttering and smooth when in space platform view. They do still care but I guess there's only so much you can do if you also have other tasks to get to
