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[nuget102]

IIRC the reason for the major drop in FPS is due to the world. In 34.11 the game only had to simulate your fort, in 40.xx it now has to simulate the entire world. So a pocket world with a 2x2 embark will run much better than a large world with the exact same 2x2 embark. And I believe temperature isn't much of a problem anymore, as the bug that was causing it to refresh when it's not supposed to was recently fixed. You can do some experiments to find out for sure though. c: And if you have dfhack you do a 'nano embark' (refer to here ) and that'll run the best you possibly could (if done in a pocketworld) currently I'm playing small worlds with all cavern layers and temperature and all that on a 2x2 embark and I have okay FPS. But my processor sucks, so I can't really do much more. :c

[Miuramir]

Oh damn, looks like I need to read up on CPUs again. Sorry for giving out the wrong information.

The usual (and most honest) way to list speed of a multi-core processor is the top speed at which all cores can run simultaneously, while putting out no more heat than the max rated TDP.  Almost all modern CPUs can run at lower speeds, to save power, increase battery life, and/or reduce heat loads.  Most can run faster under certain conditions. 

The common Intel Core CPUs, for instance, have a "Turbo" rating which varies depending on how many cores are in use, and on sufficient power and cooling being available.  For instance, an Ivy Bridge quad-core rated at 2.4 GHz might have a Turbo rating of 8/8/9/10 with 100 MHz steps; this means that it can run at up to 3.2 GHz if four or three cores are in use, up to 3.3 GHz with two cores, and 3.4 GHz with only one core used; all this *if* your cooling system can keep the chip from heating up to the point where its internal sensors slow it back down as a safety precaution.  Some older and/or mobile chips had more dramatically different Turbo scaling; for instance, some early i7 Nehalem-based mobile quad-cores had scaling of 1/1/6/9 with 133 MHz steps, so it would indeed run considerably faster with two or only one cores than with three or four; but this was the result of internal technological and design limitations, not based on any sort of simple additive logic. 

The OP's A6-3400M is a 4-core laptop chip; it's officially rated at 1.4 GHz, with single-stage Turbo up to 2.3 GHz.  However, most laptops don't have sufficient cooling to sustain Turbo for long, if at all; and I don't think that line of AMD chips have the ability to Turbo clock individual cores separate from each other, just the whole CPU at once. 

Note that none of the above is technically "overclocking"; it's all within the rated and warrantied envelop of the chips.  In effect, the simplest sort of what used to be overclocking has been built-in these days.  Real overclocking can (sometimes) generate more dramatic results; but tends to reduce component lifetime even under the best of circumstances, and has real risks of damaging your system if you don't know what you are doing, or are pushing the edge. 

[malvado]

And then you also have IPC per core / cpu which wary from Intel to Amd (from best to worst).
An 3Ghz Intel Hashwell will outperform an 5Ghz Amd 9570 FX in most performance tests and consume lesser power.

Anyway a few things that does seem to help :

*Lower amount of civilizations.
*Embark year 125.
*Medium world size or small.

This does tend to reduce playability a bit when you want to do something special , but it also helps fps speed.
Hopefully with 64 bit code and better use of multiple cores it should be possible to improve performance back or way over what is has been before. A lot of things could be done on different cores like :

*Temperature calculations , pathfinding , background world interactions , world battles and updates.

[Kryxx]

Bluepheonix

I think your thinking of threading.  Where it's sharing a single core but splitting the processing into multiple threads.

There is 4 physical cores sharing that can each run independent and process things at the same time.  They do share some of the same L1/L2/L3 caches though.   

One thing Toady could work on is the GPU and the sound CPU on separate cores if it allowed it.   It's a 2d game so it won't ever touch the gfx processor. 

But damn I'd love it if it allowed the gfx processor to handle all calcs.   Because they are generations ahead as far as math calculations go.   Which is mostly what this is.

[Authority2]

Hey, I just updated to 40.11, on the same computer, and I'm back to averaging 90 FPS!

Really? I should give that a try - my computer's old enough that the 40.x versions of DF have been unplayable past the first year.

[Borge]

The new version is insanity with the amount of FPS lag. I have a 200 dwarf fortress that's 14 years old, with all caverns open and quite a few pets, running at 54 FPS constant in version 34.11. I have a 5 year old fort with 190 dwarves in 40.10 and i'm getting 14 FPS.

Something in the coding is considerably slowing down the game in DF2014 to the point of becoming unplayable after a few years, which is very unfortunate.

[smjjames]

I don't think he has gotten to the optimization phase yet guys.

[Robsoie]

The difficulty is to find what part of the framerate big drops are due to the optimisation not started and what part is due to plain bugs that should be reported.

Pathfinding bugs have been a big source of framerate destruction, i remember fliers eternally stuck were lowering the framerate (so if you removed the [FLIER] tag of the raws of your save, the framerate suddenly got much better) a bug that should be fixed in current version.

Dwarves stuck somewhere unable to find a path to come back could easily bring the whole game to its knees (i had a case in early 40.0x like that in which in fortress mode a dwarf jumped from an opening on a giant fungus in a cavern, and unable to jump back to the opening simply destroyed the framerate so much that the game crashed)

Or animals/citizens overpopulations on sites that affected a lot adventure mode (and probably continue to, as i still see report about very high numbers on the trackers)

[Mercurial0ne]

Thanks for all the replies, everyone. Very supportive community on this Forum!

[Urist Tilaturist]

Toady has been busy bug fixing, so he has not done much work on optimisation. It should be his next priority, once he has finished patching out the bugs.