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[follower of nux]

Well hello there!
Im running a pretty good rig here, 6core phenom 2@3.5ghz and 8gb ram @1666mhz, power is available. version is up to date (phoebus tileset with game included)
5x5 embarks dont cause any trouble at all, even with 150 dwarfes and more but any embark area larger than that is giving me stutters every few seconds from the start. FPS usually hangs around at 80-100 but after these stutters, which completely lock the game and the window, it temporarily goes down by about 20 fps. i already tried turning weather and temp off with no success.
Playing without a tileset also gives stutters, although they're not as long as in phoebus but have the same occurrence.
Already tried LAA ,legacy and fiddling around in the inits, turning the other 5 cores down and removing 1 memory stick and playing with core affinity and priorities.

I've already taken an eye onto other threads about exactly this but nobody knew the answers.
maybe we can start working stuff out again and hopefully find an answer

[krenshala]

How much swap space is available for use on your system?  What OS are you running?  I'm assuming its 64bit, or having 8G of memory is a waste (32bit can only see 4G, and only use 4G minus what it allocates for internal addressing, so usually 3.25 to 3.5 G available).

The problem with this problem is that there are a number of variables that could be affecting it, and most of them directly affect the others.

[psychologicalshock]

I think the game can only use one core which is when when I overclocked #1 to 4.0 Ghz I got a lot more performance out of this game. I similarly could never make an embark larger than 5x5, who knows what it might be, RAM, processing power? One of those.

The only thing I could think of to test this is to generate shallow worlds and see if 6x6 works there, then it's probably a ram issue.

[CaptainArchmage]

I can run a 3x16 embark OK on a laptop, which is not really new. Whilst I get the same kind of FPS as I seem to get from 4x4 embarks, there are larger fluctuations in the FPS.

[follower of nux]

ah yeah, its win7 64 bit and i already played around with the swapfiles ,too to see its effect on df but nothing changed.
yeah, the game is single threaded but the special thing about this is:
5x5  embarks are no problemo even with a lot of stuff going on. a step up to 6x6 brings in the stuttering. no low fps or anything as its always higher than 80 anyway, just stuttering every few seconds.
this is similar to client lags someone might experience in other games, everything comes to a halt every few seconds for...about 1 second.

[follower of nux]

mind you, the stuttering starts from the very beginning on any embarks larger than 5x5.
do any of the viewers have this problem, too ?

[blue sam3]

I notice that going from 5x5 to 6x6 takes you over 2¹⁶ tiles/z-level. Perhaps there's something that's forcing it to do something slow when it updates tiles other than the first 2^16 on a z-level. To check, do you get this problem under the following situations:

6x5 (should)
6x4 (shouldn't)
7x4 (shouldn't)
7x5 (should)
8x4 (should)
9x3 (shouldn't)
9x4 (should)
10x2 (shouldn't)
10x3 (should)
11x2 (shouldn't)
11x3 (should)
12x2 (shouldn't)
12x3 (should)
13x2 (shouldn't)
13x3 (should)
14x2 (shouldn't)
14x3 (should)
15x2 (should)

[Quietust]

Exceeding 2¹⁶ tiles/z-level is insignificant, since map blocks themselves contain a lot more data than just tile types. Each 16x16 map block uses up 7560 bytes of memory, so a 6x6 embark would be using about 2.3 megabytes of RAM per Z-level. The main problem is likely the number of actual Z-levels present - if you're embarking in an island world (as is the default unless you use advanced worldgen) you've probably got a lot of Z-levels underground...

[reality.auditor]

It's probably pathfinding. If path fails, A* will change into glorified floodfill, thus making surprise coitus with your CPU. Woo.

[codyorr]

Well hello there!
Im running a pretty good rig here, 6core phenom 2@3.5ghz and 8gb ram @1666mhz, power is available. version is up to date (phoebus tileset with game included)
5x5 embarks dont cause any trouble at all, even with 150 dwarfes and more but any embark area larger than that is giving me stutters every few seconds from the start. FPS usually hangs around at 80-100 but after these stutters, which completely lock the game and the window, it temporarily goes down by about 20 fps. i already tried turning weather and temp off with no success.
Playing without a tileset also gives stutters, although they're not as long as in phoebus but have the same occurrence.
Already tried LAA ,legacy and fiddling around in the inits, turning the other 5 cores down and removing 1 memory stick and playing with core affinity and priorities.

I've already taken an eye onto other threads about exactly this but nobody knew the answers.
maybe we can start working stuff out again and hopefully find an answer

Hum... 1/2 the power and half the RAM of my computer. I think your problem is economics.

[FallingWhale]

The game only runs on up to two cores at once. One for tile sets the other for everything else.

[follower of nux]

going to test what blue sam posted. i know economics are still on "on" in the raws, but in the game its disabled anyway, huh ?

[Helgoland]

going to test what blue sam posted. i know economics are still on "on" in the raws, but in the game its disabled anyway, huh ?

Not the dwarves' economics, yours! He called your machine suboptimal...
(With which I'll have to disagree; it's pretty nice to the 2.0 GHz laptop with 2 GB RAM that is five years old and bluescreens every so often on which I have to play.)

[follower of nux]

going to test what blue sam posted. i know economics are still on "on" in the raws, but in the game its disabled anyway, huh ?

Not the dwarves' economics, yours! He called your machine suboptimal...

what?!
well, i know amd's per mhz performance is very bad compared to sandy/ivybridge but i never imaged it would be ☼this☼ bad.
anyhow, i dont think there isnt enough power. as i said, i can run 5x5 embarks with about 150 dwarfs at 80-100 fps and the fps even in 10x10 embarks arent really bad.
these stutters are the result of a ..."spike" in calculations. after this spike everything speeds up to an abnormal rate for a moment, its like the program is trying to make up that time which was lost due to the stutter

[Anathema]

I had a friend with an identical problem, running an ancient single-core AMD (I forget the model, but it was like 2.2GHz). Performance wasn't great but it was still playable - he got like 20-50 fps on 4x4 maps, depending on the number of dwarves - except occasionally the program would freeze, that is the interface and everything would stop responding completely, for a couple seconds before resuming with a rush.

edit: I did some testing, my old 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo gets the same problem; it runs a fresh 6x6 embark at 160-200fps, clearly the hardware is powerful enough. And yet I get half-second freezes now and then, a few times a minute, makes the game frustrating to play. I never saw this before because I used to limit myself to 4x4 on that machine.

A little further testing: my i7 runs a 6x6 smoothly, but I can get it to exhibit the stuttering on a 12x12. FPS is a slow but playable ~25, however there are moments of very brief freezing. It's more noticeable if you watch some dwarves covering a long distance, they'll move steadily for a while, then they'll all seem to pause for a moment, then quickly rush over 5-6 steps, etc.

So I guess the short answer is: get better hardware if you want to run a 6x6 smoothly. The long answer is: there's some limit to the embark size your computer can handle depending on its specs, past that point you'll experience brief freezes even if your fps is otherwise good. As to why that happens, well, one might guess that DF is occasionally performing a surge of calculations that will freeze the program until it resolves, but the freeze is only long enough to be noticeable if the ratio of your embark size to hardware specs is high enough.