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[Sky-Streamer]

Hello everyone!

I have a really low RAM (8 GB) because I play on a laptop, so I don't know how to best play DF. I have a decent idea of how to best generate worlds, but I need some advice on what to place my population cap at, as well as some strategies to maximize RAM. Please give me some advice!

[methylatedspirit]

To my understanding, 8GB of RAM is plenty for unmodded DF, unless you have something in the background taking up RAM. It's not a lot for modern games (16GB is the minimum for some AAA games, good lord), but that's more than enough for DF. I'm doing a Large worldgen with all the settings maxed out to test RAM usage, and at year 125, it's only taking up 1GB. It'll probably climb to... 3 GB max by the end of this. That is as much RAM as unmodded DF will use unless you crank up the world size to an unreasonable degree. I used to play on a PC with 8GB, and it never crashed because it specifically ran out of RAM.

Your RAM shouldn't be a problem for you. Now, the CPU, which is where most of your performance bottleneck would be... that's a different story. I admit, I don't know much on how to optimize for that, so I'll hand it off to someone else who knows more.

[delphonso]

I play on a pretty weak laptop. And yeah, it's the CPU.

My pop cap is between 30-60 and that's fine. 80 or 90 gets slow, but no worse than a usual fort after around 180 dwarves on a normal computer.

Lower the number of animals. Embark on small maps (2x2) and make a better-layed-out fort to increase performance speed.

[bloop_bleep]

Actually I believe RAM speed is an important metric. 8 GB is okay though.

[methylatedspirit]

Actually I believe RAM speed is an important metric.

I suppose. Pushing 3600MHz (especially on Ryzen) would be better than 2400, doing CL16 is better than CL-whatever, there's all sorts of fun (and !!FUN!!, considering how much you'll probably crash) to be had there. Problem is, that's basically reserved for desktop and very-high-end gaming laptops. I doubt OP happens to have that.

There is a hardware upgrade that would give you some performance uplift, assuming your CPU can even run dual-channel RAM and the laptop itself has 2 RAM slots: upgrading the RAM to dual-channel. Put in two identical sticks of RAM, and assuming it's supported, you'll get an improvement to performance. I would suggest using CPU-Z to check, assuming you're running Windows. I got a 20% improvement on my laptop. I'm not quite sure if it was worth it. I did it mostly to end up with 16GB of RAM, but it was fun to see some extra speed from this thing.

Of course, dual-channel RAM only speeds DF up if your CPU is fast enough to benefit from it. I had this crappy laptop, it had some crap pre-Ryzen AMD APU (off topic, but: don't get one ever. Ryzen is so much better. If the CPU name starts with "A-" or "E-", and it's an AMD, stay the hell away from it.), and even though it ran 1866 MHz RAM, it was far slower than my computer at the time, whose RAM ran at 1600MHz. RAM speed is nice, but if it's bottlenecked by the CPU, you're not gonna gain anything from it.

[PatrikLundell]

The most important parameter for RAM is probably the embark size. Keep it down to a reasonable level and RAM amount shouldn't be the issue. The standard 4*4 should be fine, although the the FPS drop will probably set in later with a smaller one (and the FPS drop isn't due to running out of RAM, but the program reading from the RAM a lot).

[Sky-Streamer]

Thank you for all the help everyone!
And, here's a quiiiick funny story as to why I made this post;

I had a massive frame drop in my current fortress because half of my dwarves (~40) were doing a diagnositian training.

EDIT: It was a raven.
Trying to get through a door.
For fuck's sake.

[A_Curious_Cat]

EDIT: It was a raven.
Trying to get through a door.
For fuck's sake.

I believe that is a known bug.

Edit:  ah yes, here it is.