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[vidboi]

Faster RAM (not more RAM!) + faster CPU = the only thing that will speed up the game.

I cannot convince my buddy of this.  Maybe I can convice you.  But there is another thing to increase, aswell.  A faster HD.  With the shortage in hard drives, this might be difficult.  But try a couple 10,000 RPM hard drives in a RAID array.  There was some crazy hype about that kind of gaming system, a while back.  Not sure if it still puts up competitive numbers or not.  I should do some SCIENCE, before I speak.  Ya might also see a little boost, if ya coordinate your memory to your vid card.  Some memory sticks are optimized for certain vid cards.. they say, 'nVidia optimized' on the RAM cover.   Find the compatibility table in your mobo's manual, then look for optimized variants.  Dunno if this is a sales gimic or not, but I bought into that one.  *shrug*  Don't buy into the heatsink on RAM gimic tho, that is just to hide the crappy lowend specs that they sell us at overpriced values.  Silicon is on every beach.  Its no more valuable after turned into a PC part, than it was as a grain of dust.  That shiny heatsink gives the corporate lawyers somewhere to slap the sign, 'Voids Warranty if Removed' and 'Professional Installation Only' 

The courts and lawyers ruined the PC gaming industry, not the console makers, and not the buyers.  Don't be fooled.  They want to put a coinslot on your PC.

Knutor

As other people have said, having a faster write speed doesn't help when all the data you're accessing is stored in memory. It might slow the system from slowing occasionally but it won't increase your top speed. If you're looking to speed up disk read/write processes anyway you should think about an intermediate SSD before the main HD. I'd rebuke the claim that a silicon component is no more valuable than the sand is was made out of, is your house no more valuable than the clay the bricks were made from and the logs the roof beams were made from? A lot of the profit does however go to executive overheads rather than developments, and most sales teams have no idea what they're doing (from personal exprience) so there's a lot of jargon to sift through.

[Thorik]

6 by 6.  I don't have my fps counter on but on this fort I have 80 dwarves and I barely feel any lag unless alot of stuff is going on at once.  I haven't even done anything to maximize my fps such as dfhack clean or other things. 

[knutor]

Do you paint a donut shaped restricted travel area around that 6x6 topside border, now that we can paint over multiplayer layers?  To help keep your beekeepers and hunters alive?  I've been doing that ever since we got the ability to paint over multiple zones.  That painting over z-levels was shear genius on the part of the Great Toad.  Take care, Knutor

[Thief^]

Last time I investigated hard-disks, the Spinpoint F3 500GB (single platter high-density 7200 rpm hdd) had much higher transfer rates than the raptors. Access time was a little worse, but raptors just don't have the density to win on raw transfer speed...

You can get SSDs for crazy cheap now that will blow all spinning disks out of the water speed-wise, so raptors have lost their point IMO.

[LoSboccacc]

Last time I investigated hard-disks, the Spinpoint F3 500GB (single platter high-density 7200 rpm hdd) had much higher transfer rates than the raptors. Access time was a little worse, but raptors just don't have the density to win on raw transfer speed...

true, but no application in this world seems to access disk linearly. maybe oracle when it's configured to use raw partitions.

You can get SSDs for crazy cheap now that will blow all spinning disks out of the water speed-wise, so raptors have lost their point IMO.

very true, but I got my raptors some year ago and ssd weren't yet the solution (pricey but also risky, I remember that there were bad chipset being sold around in that timeframe)

I still think that huge ram and a os with good caching are still the way for long running applications. or you can do a ramdisk 

[Tierre]

Make a RAID5 - it will load insanely fast... though will be sloer on writing. And it gives you best redundancy (well RAID6 is even better but even slower on writing).

I use 5*5. Never played enough to be FPS dead:) But 34.10 is waaaaay slower than 31.25:(

[vjek]

4x2 on the landscape monitor,
2x2 on the portrait monitor.

Never had a need for anything bigger than 4x2, and there's no scrolling with 1920x1200, in ascii mode.

[knutor]

I'm thinking of going fullscreen.  Been avoiding it, because of all the additional panning that is needed to center the pointer somewhere.  I don't use a mouse.  But now that we can link a fella to a function key and watch him walking about, that opens up a whole new level of excitement.  Watching these blips hunt is keeping me up far too late at night. 

Gonna play around with openning up my caverns, so the blips go down there to hunt.  With narrow halls, the subteraneans pathing AI sometimes breaks and scrolls errors.  If I open the caverns up some, then they prolly will hunt there, aswell.  That'd be fun to watch.  Knutor