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[JMerry]

Hi everyone, first post, adore DF, etc. etc.

When I first found out about DF, from the SA goons, I had an old laptop, single core (bout 1.6 GHz, can't remember), 512mb ram and an Intel integrated graphics card, Windows XP Media Center.  DF ran quite well on this, I can't remember exactly the fps, but it ran fast and I had no trouble with it.
However, issues forced me to buy a brand new laptop:
Intel Core2 Duo- 1.5 Ghz each
2 GB RAM
SiS Mirage 3 Graphics Card
Windows Vista Home Premium

In my infinite wisdom, I splurged a considerable amount of cash without actually checking if the graphics card was any good, or anyway integrated with Vista at all.
DF now runs at around 10 fps, maybe 17 on a good day.  I've tried turning off the options in the .ini file, as in the wiki, sertting the affinty to one core, realtime priority, just about everything suggested.
Now I'm pretty sure at this point that it's this craptacular video card not wanting to work at all (other problems with games has meant that I found through other forums this card isn't working well with vista, when a 3d game from 1999 doesn't work on high graphics settings on a computer like this, you know something's up).  
So, can anyone hear think of anything I can do, aside from waiting for either a better driver and/or buy a brand new video card?  I love this game enourmously, and losing isn't fun when it takes the best part of half an hour to flood my tiny tiny fortress from a river.  Thanks in advance for trying to help me out!

[Jay]

I've never even HEARD of that graphics card before. It's pretty safe to say that that's the bottleneck of your system there.

[JMerry]

I'm sorry, I should have been clearer.  It is a fairly obscure graphics card, and I believe they're mainly found in lower end computers here in the UK.  Thanks, I thought it was this, just wanted to make sure.

[Shzar]

Your graphics card shouldn't make a difference for DF, though in general, I would strongly advise you to stay away from SiS crap. Case in point, I have a crummy old laptop with only 256 megs of RAM and some fossilized SiS chipset (worse than yours, I assure you) but with temp/weather disabled, G_FPS set to 10, on a 3x3 with 100 dwarves (and 60 or so animals) I still squeeze out about 25 FPS average, which is really not bad.

The funny thing is, a graphics card won't help DF much, but it will hurt performance. Try disabling VSync in your graphics card options, and try different drivers. Maybe the newest ones aren't the best.

[JMerry]

I'd disable it, but the card seems to think I prefer pretty hovering boxes with pictures rather than full control of my settings, as after searching for a good time all I can get it to do is change the hue of the smegging moniter.
However, my FPS has just slightly improved to 20-25 just by chosing another driver, which is a good start.  Thanks!

[nunix]

My guess is more Vista than anything else.

I'm running DF via wine under ubuntu 7.04 on an HP Pavillion with integrated Intel graphics and some generic sound chip; single-core ~2ghz, 2gb ram. No significant slowdown issues. DF doesn't actually use dual-cores at all right now (from what I've read on the boards) but 1.5 should be plenty big speed for DF.