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Comment by louwrentius | Hacker News Reader

I have a 10 year old i5 and it struggles with my 10,000 SPM mega base. So I don’t think a switch is a device for building mega bases (Factorio points this out themselves).

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Perhaps there's a higher percentage among the HN readership, but the number of people who make it to 'just' a 1kSPM base is very small indeed as a fraction of the playerbase. Only 18% get as far as launching the rocket according to Steam stats!

It's a serious amount of both learning and building so I can imagine that a stat like that is true.

> Only 18% get as far as launching the rocket according to Steam stats!

One caveat is that Steam achievements are only granted to players who don't have any mods enabled. There's probably a nontrivial number of players who have only completed the game with mods.

It's probably memory throughput and latency more than single core performance in your case. Factorio is primarily limited by CPU cache misses. It ticks 50% faster on a Ryzen 7 5800X3D than on an 5800X because of the extra 64 MB L3.

Needless to say the Switch won't fare well for mega bases with it's 2 MB L2.

Wow, that's interesting[0] as I'm planning to replace the 10 year old i5 with something new to run my mega bases at 60 UPS.

[0]: https://factoriobox.1au.us/results/cpus?map=d3c52cb60a225a29...

There will be at least one Zen 4 CPU with 3D cache coming this year, with DDR5-6000 it will be the belle of the Factorio ball.

NGL, performance in Factorio and Dwarf Fortress will probably be criteria for when I will be upgrading my rig.

I wonder if I should upgrade my old ass intel 5820k (looks like it has 15mb "smart cache") to the basically just as old 6950x with a whopping 25mb

My i5 4670K does like 107 on 6MB of cache. Whereas a modern CPU does double that.

https://factoriobox.1au.us/results/cpus?map=4c5f65003d84370f...

You'd be surprised how much efficiency an engineering team can squeeze out of their games with time and motivation. A lot of bloat happens just to get the game out the door and is then good enough.

While I didn't work on the port itself, the effort that went into the Doom Eternal switch port paid off pretty well. https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2021-doom-eternal-s...

I'm hopeful that working with Nintendo would provide the time, money, and expertise needed to put the effort into making this a solid port.

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