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[VerdantSF]

After I abandoned my last 4x4 fort due to FPS death, I've been playing 3x3 maps. I've also been capping at smaller populations. Between Embark Size and Population, which has a greater affect on FPS? 

[melphel]

Personally, I find that embark size kills fps more than population.  My embarks are usually 2x2 or 3x3 and even with 200+ dwarves the framerate doesn't really choke unless they all cram into the same area for a mass dump order or something. 

[ivanthe8th]

As I understand it, one of the biggest causes of FPS issues is pathing. The more creatures you have moving on the map, and the more space they have to move in, the more pathing calculations eat up your CPU.

The population cap method is basically attempting to reduce pathing calculations by reducing the number of dwarves whose paths need computed. Therefore one solution is to have a smaller population cap, but having large numbers of animals (depending on your playstyle) can cause the same problems. So in a similar vein, try mass-slaughter of the creatures in your embark area.

Another solution is having a smaller area within which a creature can path. This can be solved by having a smaller embark, or by somehow limiting the area in which pathing-capable creatures can move. This thread does a good job of explaining why pathing is such a problem, and how you can use traffic designations to help the situation (for your dwarves at least). Try pasturing your animals or sealing them in small rooms, as they will not respect traffic designations.

[TruePikachu]

I would say that population is more important, at least in the case of forts that I make. The reason being is the number of pathing operations needed - if you double the population, that is nearly double the number of operations needed. But, provided that the fortress is generally underground, and you do not have any malicious traffic designations set (e.g. marking major passages as restricted), there will be few, if no, additional cells checked - quadrupling the embark size will generally double the longest path lengths (surface paths), but will do next to nothing to paths underground.

Another view is the number of entities that need to be tracked by the game - quadrupling the embark size will generally quadruple the amount of wildlife you see, but in most cases I've seen, there are very few pieces of wildlife. However, this wildlife will have to also travel twice as far, making it 8 times as expensive.

[Di]

Guys above have already explained how fps is eaten. I'll just express my support to their version.
Also, unless you've dug some horrible twisted maze instead of hallways or dug completely unused large area next to main passages, traffic designations won't improve much.

[Hyndis]

The biggest factors for FPS loss are:

1) Embark size. Bigger the embark the more pathing possibilities, and the more crunching required. This can also happen even on a small embark if you design your fortress poorly or have an enormous number of creatures in the fortress.
2) Temperature. Every tile has a temperature which may interact with other tiles, massive number crunching required.
3) Active pumps. When you first turn on a pump stack it will drop your FPS to 1 until it stabilizes. Try to minimum pumping if at all possible.

[itg]

Temperature is huge. You fps could double by turning it off, and in many fortresses, it will hardly change gameplay at all.

Having too many items will eat away at your fps over time. Every troll fur sock your goblin neighbors bring in needs to be checked for wear, body parts need to be checked for decay, etc. Atom smashing all the junk you don't need will help keep things running smoothly.