Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Gelatinous yam]

I'm stress testing a computer to see how well I can expect it to run dwarf fortress, but I don't have any forts on the new version. Does anyone have a population ~200 fort I could use to check performance?

[NW_Kohaku]

Why not use an old version one?  The basic hardware reasons why forts slow down haven't changed.

But anyway, thanks to the way that DF is made, (single thread and 32-bit) and it's unusual load requirements, (extremely large amounts of data being tested near-randomly,) I can say that the single most important thing you can have is fast RAM.  Most games have bottlenecks in rendering/GPU or failure to properly cache, but everything that is the bottleneck of DF lies with RAM.  Pathfinding and the sheer size of vectors of items mean accessing memory unpredictably, which means you have caches misses nigh-constantly. 

Hence, if you want a stellar DF rig, buy the fastest RAM you can, and... well, do whatever with the rest.

Comparatively, your CPU generally is only of marginal importance, as they haven't really been getting faster within a single core for years, and RAM is so much more significant a bottleneck, and a GPU is totally optional. 

[Putnam]

Actually, CPUs in recent years have been getting better at that kind of thing, even in the last few years, so it's best to get a good one.

https://youtu.be/Nsf2_Au6KxU?t=393

I'd recommend the whole video, though; it gives good insight as to DF's weirdness.

[Gelatinous yam]

Thanks a ton, that's really useful information.

[SanDiego]

Try last save of Murdermachines: http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=10705
Disclaimer: Author of this post is not responsible for any lasting damage to your PC and/or sanity.

[miauw62]

I assume that short pipelines would also help, since a branch misprediction is also rather costly.
(not that you're going to find one of those in a modern CPU afaik)