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[RabblerouserGT]

I'm just curious if my recent RAM upgrade on my old dinosaur is enough to fix some FPS issues.

[Angel Of Death]

CPU. It's heavily reliant on your main core, too.

[MrWiggles]

As with most RL games, it really heavy on the GPU.

[Rex_Nex]

I sense jest!

[Urist McDepravity]

Single-core CPU performance (speed, cache) and RAM speed. Bringing more RAM is useless, same goes for more cores and hyperthreading stuff.

[EmperorJon]

Single-core CPU performance (speed, cache) and RAM speed. Bringing more RAM is useless, same goes for more cores and hyperthreading stuff.

Not quite true:

There are several instances where DF can crash from not having enough RAM, mainly when embarking in large areas or long world gen runs. It's also important to note that more RAM and at least 1 more core means DF can get it's own core and plenty of space on RAM. A single core is running your OS and everything else as well as DF. The more cores, the more things you could run at the same time as DF, but from 1 to 2 there should be a reasonable increase.

[Kogut]

There are several instances where DF can crash from not having enough RAM

Than adding more RAM will change nothing (DF will still crash), adding more RAm is good idea if DF is forced to use swap file (hard drive used as RAM).

[banned4trolling]

A good benchmark of CPU power for DF use would be superPI - it's a singlethreaded app that crunches some numbers.

http://www.superpi.net/Scores/?action=searchScores&test=-12&vendor=&platform=&series=&rpp=20

The CPU needs to be properly cooled to work with those frequencies. Recommended cooling is liquid magm nitrogen.
As for RAM the faster the better. 4gb would be plenty for DF.

Use DDR-1600 CL9.

GPU doesn't really matter. I'm pretty sure even stonesense doesn't use hardware acceleration (which is a kind of pants-on-head retarded decision on their part)

[MrWiggles]

Yea, but come on, GPU is massively important to Dwarf Fortress.

[Urist McDepravity]

A good benchmark of CPU power for DF use would be superPI - it's a singlethreaded app that crunches some numbers.

Not exactly - DF has to traverse lots of data on each iteration, so pure computational problems approximate it very poorly.

[banned4trolling]

Not exactly - DF has to traverse lots of data on each iteration, so pure computational problems approximate it very poorly.

They don't have to approximate DF to see which CPU handles single-threaded applications the fastest. The CPU which handles single-thread apps the fastest is the best for DF - only with the exception that you also need to get RAM to match.

[banned4trolling]

Yea, but come on, GPU is massively important to Dwarf Fortress.

So did you at least get a free GFX card from the GPU manufacturer you're doing all that whisper marketing for? If so where can I sign up?

[kaijyuu]

The #1 thing DF relies on is black magic.

The more your computer is capable of it, the better. I suggest sacrificing kittens and cute orphan children before playing.

[Greiger]

CPU is the most important.  Primarily the speed.  Although other factors have an influence.  A dual core would work well as it means DF can get a core basically to itself, but there won't be a significant diffrence between a dual and a quad.   Age of the processor matters a bit as well, newer cores can often have improved architecture, working through instructions more efficiently.

As long as you have 4 GB of ram, how much ram you have is mostly irrelevant.  DF is not large address aware, and can only see 4GB of ram no matter how much you have.  A little more than that lets the OS run a bit better in the background, but won't make a big difference.  Ram speed is more important above 4 GB than the amount.   If you have less than 4GB more would not hurt.

For the GPU, DF is actually using graphics instead of pure text, upgrading from an integrated chip to an actual graphics card could do some good (as those drain from RAM instead of having their own to use), but as long as the graphics card is remotely modern there shouldn't be an issue.  It's more the capabilities of the card that is important, not so much the usual specs like speed and gpu memory.

[Sizik]

As long as you have 4 GB of ram, how much ram you have is mostly irrelevant.  DF is not large address aware, and can only see 4GB of ram no matter how much you have.

Correction: DF can only see 2 GiB of RAM. Making it Large Address Aware (there's a mod to do so) would increase its capability to 4 GiB. To go beyond that, it'd need to be a 64-bit application.