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[firsal]

FPS is now getting low in my fort of Talllabors, with a 180 dwarves running around half-drunk and all. It's gotten to around 20-50 FPS, and I fear any future endeavors regarding magma and water will cause FPS death. So, I've decided to get my PC and upgrade. Would it be better if I got more RAM, or a better processor?

Current RAM is 2GB and processor is AMD A4-4000 APU @ 3.00 Ghz

[dorf]

Get enough RAM for your operating system, DF and any other applications you have open at the time (web browser, music player...).
 
There are faster CPUs on the market than what you currently own, but I reckon you will get more boost with more memory. But only if the memory amount is the bottleneck to begin with.

You should also note that 180 dwarves is a very high number of dwarves to have running around and even with the best PC in the world you won't see the boost in FPS that you are expecting.

[foil]

Its the APU, they are not really designed for gaming and are more suited to low power systems or tablets.

They are about 1/2 as powerful as Intels cheapest i3.

How much do you have to spend?

[Kappas]

The wiki has an article about system requirements. It is stated that DF does not require that much memory nor processing power, but low RAM latency, which comes with modern systems, apparently.

CPU and FPS are mildly correlated, but this correlation has been attributed as a non-causative one. Rather, newer CPUs seem to come with faster RAM, but for the purpose of a Dwarf Fortress computer, RAM is more important.

EDIT: I also agree that 180 dwarves is a bit much. When ever I play nowadays, I would consider above 50 too much pain to manage, even if you dismiss the performance impact.

[dennislp3]

Unless you are running XP (and even then) 2GB of RAM is very small and I wouldn't be surprised if it is forcing DF to write some stuff to the disk with the swap files which is very bad. The CHEAPEST thing you could do to get better performance is bump up your RAM at least one more GB. This is all assuming you are running other things in the background that eat up RAM beside the game. Replacing the processor would be a good idea too and like noted above I would recommend an Intel i3 or i5 processor...but that will require a completely new motherboard and setup. I am not familiar with AMD but I would assume you can probably grab a better processor than what you have that will fit your motherboard.

[King Mir]

You'd want to upgrade your RAM, not to get more, but to get low-latency performance RAM. But that's also limited by your mother board and CPU support. So you may end needing to upgrade either or both of those. If you need to upgrade the CPU, try to also get one with the biggest L3 cache. DF is dual threaded, with most of the work going on on one thread, so having many cores will not be beneficial.

[Azerax]

I ran into an issue where my fort of ~138 years ended up going down to less than 10fps.  I got it back up to about 50 by doing:

1. draw bridges to close off any caverns/mined out areas (this was the biggest boost)
2. dfhack to fix fat dwarves
3. built an atom smasher to get rid of crap (I had 30K plump helmets and 20K drinks)
4. Turned off temperature and weather

cheers,
Scott

[firsal]

I guess I'm upgrading my RAM to 4GB. Getting an Intel processor would mean I'd probably need a new motherboard, which is out of the question. Thanks for the info guys!

[foil]

Easiest way to tell is when the game is lagging, run "task manager" by right clicking on Taskbar at bottom of screen.

Then see if its low memory or the cpu or one of its cores maxing 100% thats causing the lag. (right click on graph and set to "show graph for each core"

You could always upgrade to another AMD cpu depending if the bios supports it.

[Telgin]

You'd want to upgrade your RAM, not to get more, but to get low-latency performance RAM.

Doing this absolutely will help, but more RAM is also important in this case.  2GB of RAM just isn't enough for any OS made in the past 10 years that DF will run on.  Getting more RAM would almost certainly help, up to about 3.5-4GB.  I really can't recommend more than that though.  On my Windows 7 computer, I've never gone past about 3.6 GB of memory usage, no matter what I've got running.

[Kappas]

Yeah, I would also agree that more RAM would help in case the OS pushes stuff to swap. Disc operations do take a lot of time in comparison to RAM. This may be bit old, but Warcraft 3 worked much better with 384 MB than 128 MB, especially in large maps and battles.

[dennislp3]

You'd want to upgrade your RAM, not to get more, but to get low-latency performance RAM.

Doing this absolutely will help, but more RAM is also important in this case.  2GB of RAM just isn't enough for any OS made in the past 10 years that DF will run on.  Getting more RAM would almost certainly help, up to about 3.5-4GB.  I really can't recommend more than that though.  On my Windows 7 computer, I've never gone past about 3.6 GB of memory usage, no matter what I've got running.

If you have a 64 bit OS there is no real reason to get less than 8GB these days with RAM as cheap as it is. This would also allow you to remove page files all together (making things faster) and will allow multiple programs to run better at the same time as well as helping some programs not crash as much. You can also open larger pictures and files in general if thats your thing. Unless you are REALLY strapped for cash...there is almost no reason to purposefully skimp especially on RAM and hard drive space...both of which are cheap nowadays. This also helps future proof the computer some. There are also plenty of 8BG RAM kits for as cheap if not cheaper than 4GB RAM kits. Not to mention pretty much the whole point of a 64 bit OS is to allow more than 4GB of RAM to be used (dont nitpick that sentence...I know it does more...but for 90% of users that is the one main advantage).

[Telgin]

It's been a long time since I've bought RAM, and I had the unfortunate pleasure of having to buy extra expensive server RAM for my last desktop.  That cost me several hundred dollars for 4GB's worth a few years back.  It's plenty cheap these days though, and if 8GB is about the same price as 4GB, why not?

The point I was poorly making is that more than 4GB rarely has any tangible benefit on a desktop.  Even if some RAM does get demand paged out to disk, it's pretty unlikely to have any impact on Dwarf Fortress FPS.  You'd have to have a pretty gigantic embark to take advantage of such a huge amount of memory, and even then you'd need some other substantial stuff going to make use of it since DF can't allocate more than 4GB of memory still.

[Bouchart]

I usually run forts that are 2x2 or 3x3 in size with over a hundred dwarves.  I can get ~10FPS or so on a computer with 1GB RAM.  Building a fort on a small map makes it run a lot faster.

[fractalman]

EDIT: I also agree that 180 dwarves is a bit much. When ever I play nowadays, I would consider above 50 too much pain to manage, even if you dismiss the performance impact.

Bah humbug, 200 dwarves is perfectly fine if you remove the performance impact. 
I say that before I use therapist, btw. 

[says the guy who once played an entire year through on swordthunders, one of the 5(?) laggiest community fortresses in dwarven history. ]