They got as far as to make their own graphic engine mid-development : https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230 Fa

They got as far as to make their own graphic engine mid-development : https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230 Factorio asks different things from GPUs. that today are much more used to accelerate 3D. not 2D graphics : https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281 Also : > Contemporary integrated GPUs are also significantly faster, and while it might not be as much of a challenge to render the game for them, they do share some resources with the CPU - be it the last level of cache, or CPU cooler, so the integrated GPU working hard may cause the CPU to slow down. > However, the point I wanted to illustrate by this post is how broad a range of GPUs there is. People see a 2D game and expect to be able to play it on essentially anything. If we want to live up to that expectations, we have to impose a lot of limitations on ourselves, because 'anything' also includes a couple orders of magnitude slower GPU than is found in an average gaming computer of today. CPUs got a lot faster in the last decade too, but mostly due to increasing the number of cores and adding wider vector computation units. They didn't get that much faster when executing serial code, which is unfortunately most of Factorio's game code. So if you play the game on a laptop with a Core 2 Duo and GeForce 320M, you'll run into framerate issues due to the weak GPU much sooner than a UPS slowdown due to the old CPU. https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-333 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-333 But, yeah, Factorio is one of those games that don't impose a maximum limit of entities on themselves and are mostly bottlenecked by singlethreaded CPU than GPU performance, like any simulation-like game with lots of entities, each of which can have a gameplay (and not just display) effect on another : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvI_5S3aITk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvI_5S3aITk (And also, specifically, RAM latency is important for Factorio : https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/4h647g/factorio_performance_test_cpuram_based_fpsups/ https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/4h647g/factorio_p... )