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[darkshaed]

Does playing DF on higher resolutions take more processing power?

I'm playing it in a window that is 1920x1100 right now, I do it because I like to stay in window form so i can surf the web on my other monitor. Is DF going to run slower because its resolution is much higher than the default?

[Derakon]

The slowdown in DF comes entirely from all the processing it has to do for the simulation - dwarfish personalities, pathfinding, job sorting, fluid simulations, and so on. The actual rendering of the image is practically an afterthought after all that.

[zagibu]

Yeah, if you have hardware acceleration, you shouldn't worry about DF's graphics. Otherwise, though...

[Derakon]

Hardware acceleration is utterly irrelevant for DF's graphics, as they're software-rendered.

[Jifodus]

If your system doesn't support hardware rendering, then you will probably see a slight slow down. I have a question, does your performance improve at a lower resolution?

Also, is the filtering method in the init options set to nearest?

[zagibu]

quote:Originally posted by Derakon:
<STRONG>Hardware acceleration is utterly irrelevant for DF's graphics, as they're software-rendered.</STRONG>

Hmmm, am I misunderstanding something, or is DF using OpenGL? If it is, which I believe is correct, then it is hardware accelerated, provided you use a graphics card with proper OpenGL driver. If you don't have such a graphics card, the cpu will have to do the rendering.

[The-Moon]

quote:Originally posted by darkshaed:
<STRONG>Does playing DF on higher resolutions take more processing power?

I'm playing it in a window that is 1920x1100 right now, I do it because I like to stay in window form so i can surf the web on my other monitor. Is DF going to run slower because its resolution is much higher than the default?</STRONG>

Umm when your playing DF you should not be browsing the web... Thats going to cause significate slow downs right there. Run DF in Fullscreen and don't do nothing else while running it.

If you want to browse the web, save and shut down DF first.

[Sowelu]

pff.  I always multitask.  It'll run slower, but I'm less bored while waiting for things to happen!

[herrbdog]

quote:Originally posted by Sowelu:
<STRONG>pff.  I always multitask.  It'll run slower, but I'm less bored while waiting for things to happen!</STRONG>

qft  

[The-Moon]

quote:Originally posted by Sowelu:
<STRONG>pff.  I always multitask.  It'll run slower, but I'm less bored while waiting for things to happen!</STRONG>

Thats why you should have 2 computers next to each other and a tv....

[ToxicFrog]

DF doesn't use multiple threads, so on a multicore machine there should be effectively no slowdown unless you start hitting swap. And even on a single core machine, web browsing is unlikely to cause significant slowdown unless the browser you're using is a massive CPU hog.

As far as the display goes, if you don't have actual hardware openGL support and instead have a driver that fakes it in software (eg Mesa), you might get resolution-dependent slowdown - but on any video card with working OGL support (which these days should be pretty much all of them) performance will be unaffected by resolution. It's just doing simple 2d blits from video memory to screen.

[Geofferic]

quote: And even on a single core machine, web browsing is unlikely to cause significant slowdown unless the browser you're using is a massive CPU hog.

Utter nonsense.  DF can peg a processor all by itself once population has gotten pretty large.  It doesn't matter what browser you're using, it will be a problem.

[Derakon]

ToxicFrog's point was that the browser doesn't use a significant portion of your computer's CPU (when it isn't loading pages, anyway), which means that it won't intrude significantly on your Dwarf Fortress experience.

Personally, I'd trade a half-dozen FPS for the ability to browse webpages while I wait for things to happen.

[Hyperturtle]

yeah if you think the browser is taking up cpu time, then why don't you open up the task manager and measure it?

Computer has been up for over a week.

idle time: 323:19:10
firefox: 1:20:22
This evening's dwarf fortress: 36:22 so far.

So my web viewing for a week has taken an hour and twenty minutes of cpu time.  DF so far tonight has been 36 minutes.  I think DF is the greater processor hog, as I have probably spent more than an hour and 20 minutes reading the forums this week.