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[fasquardon]

So I am thinking about getting a new computer at some point this year, and Dwarf Fortress is the most taxing program I run on my machine by a long shot.  What do people think the best system build for good Fortress play would be?

fasquardon

[Putnam]

My fairly high-end AMD CPU with RAM that's at least 3 years old can run a nanofort with 78 citizens and surface-covering blood rain can run the game at 1000 FPS consistently, so it's not too much of a problem as long as you're willing to go small.

(AMD cpus are pretty much unilaterally worse than intel CPUs at DF and faster RAM is extremely important for performance)

[Reelya]

For the CPU, probably intel, and you want at least dual core, with the fastest core speed you can find. The main thread in DF runs single-core, but you can give it more room to run by having dual or quad core, and things like graphics, operating system tasks run in the other cores. Since DF is mainly running in one core, base core speed is very important, as compared to multi-threaded apps where having many slower cores can work better.

A large CPU cache is important too, this is built-in RAM on the CPU which backs up data from memory in the background. It reduces memory wait times because often-accessed memory is backed up on the CPU. So high cache ram is important for cpu-intensive apps.

Fast RAM is very important, so you need to research DDR3 / DDR4 ram and find which ones have the most data throughput. Different motherboards support different speeds. DDR3 is cheaper and supported by more motherboards. It runs at speeds of 800-2400, so you really want to just go straight to 2400 if you get a DDR3 motherboard. DDR4 is new, more expensive, and runs at speeds of 1600-3200, so it would give you more room to upgrade even if you can't get the fastest RAM right away.

You might get a little improvement by running DF off a fast solid state drive too, but mainly for things like Autosave. This is something you can tweak any time though, so you don't need to consider it as part of your build.

Things like video card aren't going to be very important, since DF doesn't tax these systems. A built-in video or a video card pulled from an older machine will be fine, just check that the new motherboard has a compatible video card slot with any older card you want to use.

[Grimlocke]

The objectively best DF-CPU would be any current overclockable Intel CPU set to run at as high a frequency as possible, possibly with all but two cores disabled. The overclockable i5 CPU would probably be the point where spending more wouldn't get you much of a performance increase.

I'm not sure how much of an impact memory has on DF, for typical consumer workloads on Intel CPUs faster memory usually provides only a very marginal performance gain, usually not worth the extra cost. I don't know about DF specifically though.

I wouldn't worry too much about DDR4 for now as its only available on Intels highest-end platform which would be a huge and costly overkill.

That said if your on a budget and don't intend to do much other demanding work on the computer then any i3 coupled with 4gb, preferably 8gb, of memory should give you perfectly acceptable performance.

Also someone needs to photoshop a CPU-Z screenshot with Spirit of Rock's 'specs'.

[Putnam]

Disabling cores would be pretty worthless. No reason to do it at all in the context of DF.

Also, as for RAM: Consider: at 3 GHz, it's ~0.3333 ns per clock cycle. Meanwhile, RAM takes on average 83 ns (zoom in at the top) to access and return[/url]. DF does a lot of RAM checking.

Also, remember: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=1081&cmp[]=1955

GHz don't matter nearly as much as having a modern CPU.

[fricy]

AMD CPUs are less powerful than intel for this specific workload.  You're interested in single thread performance, look around and choose the highest performer  according to your budget. Best buys are an i5-4690, and i3-4370. If money is no problem raise that to an i7-4790. Choose a fitting main board, fast ram, and an ssd boot-drive can help a lot.

[Grimlocke]

Disabling cores would be pretty worthless. No reason to do it at all in the context of DF.

Also, as for RAM: Consider: at 3 GHz, it's ~0.3333 ns per clock cycle. Meanwhile, RAM takes on average 83 ns (zoom in at the top) to access and return[/url]. DF does a lot of RAM checking.

Also, remember: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=1081&cmp[]=1955

GHz don't matter nearly as much as having a modern CPU.

Once you start overclocking it matters for the heat dissipation. Particularly in CPUs with more than 4 cores some cores get hotter than others as some are surrounded by 3 cores and others only by 2. The effect is actually fairly noticeable on my hexacore processor.

Of course if your not going to get into overcloking this is all moot, but the question was best possible DF rig and that is the answer.

[Bloax]

For maximum performance overclocking the CPU/RAM (lowering the timings is technically overclocking :v) should not even be a question, it is a necessity.

You might get a little improvement by running DF off a fast solid state drive too, but mainly for things like Autosave. This is something you can tweak any time though, so you don't need to consider it as part of your build.

Setting up a RAM drive is quick and painless and even better than running something off a SSD, I would recommend having at least 8 GB so that you can safely make it a nice and comfortable 2 GB drive instead of <=1 GB as you would with 4 GB.
The only price you pay is having to drop off your files onto your normal storage drive before shutting down/restarting your system. (I'm not sure if it survives sleep/hibernation?)

[fasquardon]

Very interesting about the RAM - I'll certainly keep that in mind.  And the CPU cache.

So DF still doesn't use the graphics card for anything?  I thought that something had been shunted off to the GPU a year or two back?

With the CPU, which sort of benchmark most closely approximates the sort of load DF puts on the processor?

fasquardon

[Reelya]

A graphics card can't be directly programmed without CPU instructions. The CPU sends all the rendering data to the card, plus sets up the scene via CPU instructions. The GPU does some maths for rendering and handles things like angle of view and one polygon being in front of another, but all textures and polygons and information for the scene still need to be sent from the CPU to GPU. And this process basically has to happen every single frame. So the GPU takes up some of the workload, but it's basically a dumb machine that waits to be told what to do by the CPU.

With DF, Toady uses the SDL library, and this has a main thread for his program plus side threads to handle input and graphics etc. But the graphics aren't very intense in terms of CPU load, so a dual core machine will have DF in one core, and the operating system plus graphics rendering thread in the other.

[Grimlocke]

Very interesting about the RAM - I'll certainly keep that in mind.  And the CPU cache.

So DF still doesn't use the graphics card for anything?  I thought that something had been shunted off to the GPU a year or two back?

With the CPU, which sort of benchmark most closely approximates the sort of load DF puts on the processor?

fasquardon

Single-thread cinebench, or superpi should give you a decent enough idea. The results would theoretically be somewhat skewed with single-core processors but those are not even sold for consumer PCs anymore.

Though there is not a whole lot of variance there in the current CPU market. Just avoid the cheaper pentium CPUs from Intel as those have significantly worse single-threaded performance, same for AMDs whole lineup sadly. Intels i3 processors would be the most fitting choice, if only they could be overclocked...

[Putnam]

Any single-core CPU you could find would be absolutely awful for DF simply because any single-core CPU you could find would be old as hell.

[Reelya]

idk, a P4 3.8 GHz should run DF pretty well. But tough luck finding one of those.

[Orange Wizard]

Holy crap, Putnam was right.

Um, anyway:

idk, a P4 3.8 GHz should run DF pretty well. But tough luck finding one of those.

No, because clock speed (the 3.8 GHz) is actually totally irrelevant in terms of how fast the processor actually is.

[Aranador]

Surely the best computer would be a computer built within dwarf fortress itself.