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[ForgottenBeast]

Tricks that I can't find on the Wiki at least. I'm just full of questions today. But I'm trying to figure out how to improve my FPS as much as possible in order to start recording a Let's Play. I have consulted the Wiki on FPS performance, but I wondered what tricks/tips you guys have found useful.

[NedeN]

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Maximizing_framerate

[Trif]

It doesn't matter which graphics you use, ASCII isn't faster than a different tileset. (I don't know why the wiki says otherwise.)

The wiki page is pretty much everything you need. I recommend playing around with the G_FPS and the print mode, that might help a lot for your fortresses. If you're doing a Let's Play, you probably don't want to turn off weather and/or temperature to show the game properly.

And keep in mind that Dwarf Fortress uses only one CPU core (except for the graphics, but that isn't much), so you won't have a lot of FPS loss if you put the recording software on a second core.

[celem]

The single core point is fairly important.  The sad truth is that while the game remains single-threaded you can actually expect performance to drop everytime you upgrade your machine.  DF runs fastest on my 7 yr old serverbox because it has a monolithic 2.5G single core.  My 'gaming' rig has 4x 900MHz cores.  Thats like playing on an oldschool Pent3 or something.

[toomanysecrets]

Best FPS tips in my opinion are:

* turning off weather (downsides are no rain, no snow, no freezing in wintertime)
* turning off temperature (downsides are you can't vaporize enemies/items with magma)
* Lower G_FPS as low as you can (Most go with 10-20 I think, I like mine at 5-8)
* Smash/butcher useless animals
* Smash/"autodump destroy" useless items
* Trade away worn clothes/useless items

Item count is actually very important.  In older versions when you would accumulate lots of stone, "autodump destroy"ing 1000's of stones you didn't need could give you a noticeable boost in FPS. Same goes for clothes, crummy mechanisms, useless goblin items.....get rid of it if you don't need it!

There are some who swear by traffic designations, but I only use them to "restrict" huge mined out rooms that will never be visited by anyone again. I never see much benefit from traffic designations, and even the wiki says you may get a 10% FPS boost from meticulously setting traffic designations throughout your fort. But you also may not get any benefit, it just depends. Worst part is if you are careless or you don't know what you're doing traffic designations can actually hurt your FPS.

[ForgottenBeast]

Alright thank you for the replies guys. Those should help.

[Quietust]

DF runs fastest on my 7 yr old serverbox because it has a monolithic 2.5G single core.  My 'gaming' rig has 4x 900MHz cores.  Thats like playing on an oldschool Pent3 or something.

Er, your old serverbox is probably a Pentium 4, where even 3GHz is significantly slower than a single core from a 2GHz Core Duo from several years ago. Also, your "gaming" rig would have to be absolutely pathetic to only be 900MHz, so you're probably wrong about its specs - if you have a 3.6GHz quad core CPU, that means each core is 3.6GHz, so if it runs DF slower than a 7 year-old system then there's something else slowing it down significantly (such as an underpowered video card, but that wouldn't make sense for a "gaming" rig)...

[hiroshi42]

* turning off weather (downsides are no rain, no snow, no freezing in wintertime)

Just to nitpick, but you will get temperature related weather stuff like freezing and pools evaporating if you turn of weather but have temperature on. 

[Quietust]

* turning off weather (downsides are no rain, no snow, no freezing in wintertime)

Just to nitpick, but you will get temperature related weather stuff like freezing and pools evaporating if you turn of weather but have temperature on.

Are you sure about that? It stands to reason that weather is responsible for outdoor temperature changes, and that disabling weather ought to effectively keep it stuck in whatever season you left it at...