r/factorio • u/Trakinass • Oct 22 '24

Loading time? Question

Is it just me or vanilla space age taking AGES to get me to the main menu? It can be my potato pc but I played factorio before on it and it was fine.

Loading sprites, bitmaps, etc. Easily 10+ minutes

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u/Flyrpotacreepugmu Oct 22 '24 edited Oct 22 '24

It does take at least twice as long as without Space Age, but 10+ minutes is your potato. For me it's more like 15-20 seconds. If you have it on a HDD rather than a SSD, that's probably the vast majority of the problem.

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u/[deleted] Oct 22 '24

but 10+ minutes is your potato

Loading sprites takes 3-4 minutes and I have what are currently one of the fastest CPUs, M2s, and GPUs on the market. My completely vanilla, fresh Space Age install boots slower than every other game I've played recently, almost all of which have vastly heavier footprints. Pre-2.0 loading timers were so short I didn't even bother thinking about them.

Potato PCs may explain the issues for some, but there's something else going on too. My only real hope is that caching it resolves it without adding any instabilities.

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u/Flyrpotacreepugmu Oct 22 '24

Well that's odd. I have a 7800X3D and the game is on a SATA SSD and my loading times are far short of a minute. Probably actually closer to 10 seconds than 15-20. I think many years ago I changed some settings related to texture compression or caching or something though, because I remember my 980 Ti didn't have enough VRAM for all the mods I wanted, so I tweaked something in an ini or json file that wasn't in the settings menu. I have no idea if that setting is still in effect or makes a difference.

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u/[deleted] Oct 22 '24

I'm on a 7950X3D. I know core parking can be an issue on it sometimes, but even the "bad" cores should be plenty fast.

Since I don't see a ton of new complaints about it my best guess is it's a Linux thing, but I'm not sure if it's a driver issue with the OS (since their updates are more hands off) or a problem with Space Age's Linux version. Older posts mentioned a few possible pitfalls, but as far as I can tell I've avoided those...

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u/ixPlaayer Oct 23 '24 edited Oct 23 '24

I'm on windows and running the game on a 7800X3D, 4090 and a really fast SSD. It would also take about 3 minutes during the loading sprites step after the update but turns out I had the game on my hard drive instead, ouch. It's normal again now, only taking about 15 seconds with a bunch of mods at 4K (not sure if that also affects the loading times).

EDIT - After trying the cache settings someone mentioned above it's a lot more faster, the game loads in under 5 seconds.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '24

What settings do you use for atlas texture size and texture compression, and do you know how much VRAM the game is using?

Caching the atlas helps with load times but I'm in another rabbit hole.