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[miauw62]

My computer runs Morwind, Minecraft, and Dark Souls 2 perfectly on their highest settings. Can barely handle Dwarf Fortress at 60 dwarves.

Morrowind is old, and there's a significant difference between those games since they tax the GPU, not the CPU.

[Number7]

Dwarf fortress can run on only a single thread and core. This means high end quad cores (i-7 4790k) are the best it can get (each core starts at 4 ghz, can turbo to 4.4ghz, which means dwarf fortress should be getting the benefit of a 4.4ghz single core in that instance). The direction the new intel extremes and AMD cores are going are more cores and more threads, so you might actually hurt dwarf fortress performance funnily enough if you bought say, a $1000 CPU in the i7 5960x

Clock speeds are completely and utterly irrelevant, especially when it comes to Dwarf Fortress, where a gigantic amount of the CPU's time is likely spent waiting for RAM to do stuff.

That my friend, is why you overclock the RAM too

Also, that's using ONLY the mhz to compare processors between each other, its not about clock speeds being completely irrelevant, they arent. you can compare clock speeds within the same family of processors in apples to apples comparison. If i was to say, compare sandy bridge to broadwell, then no, the same clock speed does not mean the same thing and you have to refer to benchmarks. Does my example have backup in benchmarks? yes it does, the latest intel extreme models (5960x for example) are HEAVILY hyperthreaded and show no benefits, and sometimes can be slower than a devils canyon CPU for games, especially games that arent hypertthreaded.

[Sergarr]

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?_mc=sm_eet&doc_id=1324403&page_number=3

An experimental processor achieves 4x the performance compared to the currently existing approaches by using hardware multi-threading.

This may be the technology that will finally allows us to run DF at a reasonable speed! And also will make all people suggesting to add multi-threading to the game finally shut up.

Reposting this here.

[wierd]

My computer runs Morwind, Minecraft, and Dark Souls 2 perfectly on their highest settings. Can barely handle Dwarf Fortress at 60 dwarves.

Morrowind is old, and there's a significant difference between those games since they tax the GPU, not the CPU.

Sorry man, but I know a good deal about how Morrowind runs under the hood; it uses the CPU very aggressively for graphical functions. It's a DX7 title, which has DX8 vertex and pixel shading tacked on top.  It also uses the CPU for atmospheric sound effects processing by default.

Almost all of the menu transparency effects are done using software overlay rendering, and not using hardware based methods. (This is likely due to the issues with transparency in hardware implementations at the time, where AMD cards and nVidia cards did things in radically different ways, which would have been tricky to deal with. That, and the gamebryo/netimmerse engine is total crap.)

Things like FPS Optimizer and pals actually patch the in-memory game executable's code to force it to run in hardware accelerated modes!


Sorry to nitpick, on that. Carry on.


That said, I recently have come into possession of a dual CPU socket (Each sporting dual core XEONs) rackmount enterprise server (An HP ProLiant DL380 G4).  It's an older model intended for use with windows server 2008 (basically winxp, but for servers), with 16gb of RAM.  I am not too sure about what the memory bus width is for memory accesses, but this is still a server grade appliance. (Dual PSUs, Scsi RAID disk array, and all.) I recently decided to try running DF on it, but was... disappointed... with the outcome.

The baked in graphics chip has absolutely NO ACCELERATION AT ALL. No, Not even 2D.  I suspect that this is the issue. Even with the CPU basically doing everything, and the graphics being little more than a dumb framebuffer, it gets about 25fps on a large embark.  Not too bad, but I would have expected better.

[atomicthumbs]

No 2D acceleration? Just pop a Matrox in the VLB slot and you're golden