I got annoyed at hitting c.240 and having my ridiculously high spec notebook hit advanced worldgen performance issues to the extreme. It was bad enough that I actually couldn't pause/finish worldgen, even though worldgen was still progressing at a snail's pace.
So I decided to do !!SCIENCE!!
I setup XP mode on the notebook, along with VMWare Player (with a Windows 7 x64 image). These two were particularly of interest because of their ability to provide a seamless desktop app experience, as such.
The theory here is that virtualisation could deliver a better experience, or at least stronger control if it wanted to do the whole app hanging crap. There's a level of acceleration applied with virtualisation that makes both scenarios at least theoretically possible .. and the minimal graphics experience that DF delivers should be fairly well suited to virtualisation.
I won't go through the stupidly customer-unfriendly experience of installing the current VMWare Player version's Tools! But suffice to say it was setup and running both as an XP mode and a VMWare based Win7 image, set to run in Unity for a similar (not identical) operation to XP mode. Without a doubt, the VMWare image was going to outperform XP Mode, due to Win7, the ability to use multiple cores, and many other good reasons. But testing both seemed worthwhile.
XP mode, sadly, proved to be a bust. Advanced Worldgen with Large Region - my test parameters, no changes to defaults - would cause DF to crash consistently around year 200. It was noticeably slower than running native to that point, too. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the crash is a DF bug, perhaps even tied to XP. I did think it could've been RAM, but I bumped the VM up from 1Gb to 2Gb with no joy. It's unlikely that any higher value would have made any further difference since it wasn't even using that much RAM within the VM.
VMWare Player, though, might just be workable. Speed was possibly slightly faster than native thanks to acceleration, but more importantly - no crash. It even works with the OpenGL stuff, whereas XP mode needed the 2D setting (note, however, that there is unlikely to be any real benefit to running anything but 2D). Tilesets work fine, even the hybrid Phoebus/Ironhand customised one I've dodgied up. I did note that load was being somewhat more balanced across the maximum 4 cores allowed by player, rather than primarily on a single core in native. That would certainly have some welcome aspects, even if the max load for DF still equated more or less to a single core. This one's entireley subjective though, and I wouldn't go counting on it to do magic.
It's still not perfect. In my first run, the app still went to not responding multiple times - but I was using VBO as a setting. Bumping this down to 2D seems to have made a noticeable difference. Running in Unity may be more annoyance than it's worth during Worldgen, since VMWare Player will keep minimising it and bringing it to foreground. But you can always go back to the full desktop and reserve Unity for actually playing.
It's still difficult to pause/finish worldgen (based on my initial test), but you get the added advantage of hibernating a VM mid-worldgen, lower impact on your native machine, and some overall incremental improvements over native handling of the process. Being able to set the priority of DF to High or even Realtime without hitting your system for six is a definite plus, too.
I'd love to throw my old employer's ESX farm at it for some real performance, but that'd be overkill.
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Topic: Recommendation for running DF2012 (Read 1957 times)