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[DrJonez]

Hi,

I'm soon going to be buying one of the new Asus EEEPC laptops that they're coming out with. For those of you who aren't aware, it's a full featured computer, but it's very small, and as such doesn't have all the bells and whistles that a normal laptop would have.

Mainly, I'm wondering if this will be able to run DF. I don't expect to be able to play many games on it, but DF would be a good one to tote around  

Specs:

7 inch screen (800x480)
900mhz Pentium Mobile CPU
512MB RAM
Windows XP
Not sure on the video, but it's not a 3d card, just some onboard basic laptop video card

Will that run DF at a playable rate? I've never had any trouble running it fine on my home PC, but a friend of mine's older laptop seemed to run it at what felt like 2-3 fps.  

[Shades]

Turn off weather and temperature effects and you should be able to get something out of it, probably not 100fps or anything close but not too bad I hope. The lack of graphics shouldn't be an issue, the cpu might be

[DrJonez]

The video requirements of DF are higher than you might think by just looking at the ASCII graphics. When it wouldn't run well on my friend's laptop I thought something surely must be wrong, since it couldn't possibly be that hard to just draw some text on the screen, right? Well I found out later on that it's not just spewing out ASCII, but actually using OpenGL to draw them as tiles on the screen. That means a beefier video card is required.

Doesn't DF run in 800x480 by default? If so, it'd be pretty awesome to have a little tiny device I can take anywhere to play DF on  

[Felix the Cat]

TBH if it wouldn't run well on your friend's laptop it was probably something other than the graphics card. Simple 2D rendering in OpenGL doesn't require too much graphics computing power. One of those cruddy Intel integrated chips would suffice.

[Core Xii]

900 MHz is not much, and DF is a game that's very heavy on the processing.

[Slartibartfast]

I'm guessing its a very slim chance.
In order to run, DF must have some sort of real GPU with hardware acceleration. It definitely doesn't have to be top-of-the-line, and you won't see any difference between a 8800GTS and a geforce 4 mx420, but it has to be there.
Furthermore, CPU power is very important. You could probably handle a small fortress even with a weak CPU, but temperature, weather and bigger fortresses put a heavy toll on your CPU, and with the next version it will probably be even heavier.

[[[I wrote this several hours ago and was sure I posted it. I'm posting it now and hoping its still relevant. Don't be angry if the question was answered 29034 posts up ]]]

[DrJonez]

The graphics card it has is listed as:

# Graphics: integrated Intel GMA 900 graphics processor (sharing memory)

According to Wikipedia:

GMA 900

The GMA 900 was the first graphics core produced under Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator product name, and was incorporated in the Intel 910G, 915G, and 915Gx chipsets. The GMA 900 was a notable upgrade from the previous Extreme 3D graphics processors, but was still relatively basic compared to other graphics solutions. For example, its 3D graphics core lacks support for hardware transform and lighting and the similar vertex shader technologies, an important part of the 3D acceleration pipeline. It instead emulated this functionality in software, reducing compatibility and performance with 3D games.

The GMA 900 has four pixel pipelines running at a core clock rate of 333 MHz, and a RAMDAC at 400 MHz. This allows it a peak pixel fillrate performance of 1333 MPixel/s. Like its predecessors (i810/815/845G), the GMA 900 has hardware support for MPEG-2 motion compensation, color-space conversion and DirectDraw overlay.

Does that sound fast enough?  

[BurnedToast]

900 mhz cpu is the killer, that's SLOW and DF devours cpu cycles. Even with temp and weather off, good luck with more then 25 dwarves or so.

A siege, or one of them massive 100 ratman invasions will cause it to grind to a halt.

[Fourth Triad]

crap double posted

[ September 08, 2007: Message edited by: Fourth Triad ]

[Fourth Triad]

I heard one person on the bay12games irc channel say that they got it to run on a pc with a 400mhz processor(somehow) they said it was hella slow though, but that was several releases ago I think.

[ September 08, 2007: Message edited by: Fourth Triad ]

[Felix the Cat]

quote:Originally posted by DrJonez:
<STRONG>The graphics card it has is listed as:

# Graphics: integrated Intel GMA 900 graphics processor (sharing memory)

According to Wikipedia:

GMA 900

The GMA 900 was the first graphics core produced under Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator product name, and was incorporated in the Intel 910G, 915G, and 915Gx chipsets. The GMA 900 was a notable upgrade from the previous Extreme 3D graphics processors, but was still relatively basic compared to other graphics solutions. For example, its 3D graphics core lacks support for hardware transform and lighting and the similar vertex shader technologies, an important part of the 3D acceleration pipeline. It instead emulated this functionality in software, reducing compatibility and performance with 3D games.

The GMA 900 has four pixel pipelines running at a core clock rate of 333 MHz, and a RAMDAC at 400 MHz. This allows it a peak pixel fillrate performance of 1333 MPixel/s. Like its predecessors (i810/815/845G), the GMA 900 has hardware support for MPEG-2 motion compensation, color-space conversion and DirectDraw overlay.

Does that sound fast enough?   </STRONG>

GMA 900 supports OpenGL, so it's not a problem. It's a crappy graphics chip, but DF is not graphics-intensive.

The problem is not the graphics card, it's the processor. I sort of doubt that DF would run on a 900MHz processor, and if it did it would be SLOW.

At least there's enough RAM.

I don't even think I'd try to run Windows XP on that. It would constantly take up ~10% of the CPU's processing time for the random crap it likes to do.

[Eagleon]

quote:Originally posted by Fourth Triad:
<STRONG>I heard one person on the bay12games irc channel say that they got it to run on a pc with a 400mhz processor(somehow) they said it was hella slow though, but that was several releases ago I think.

[ September 08, 2007: Message edited by: Fourth Triad ]</STRONG>

That might have been me. It wasn't too bad, actually, although I don't think I got to beyond 30 dwarves. Adventure mode worked fine except for some delayed movement and slow overland map movement. I doubt it'd work on the next version, of course.

[DrJonez]

I don't really have a problem with running a smaller fortress. It's more fun that way sometimes anyway. Although I guess I won't be able to get all the nobles and stuff :\

So what's with all the CPU usage? I mean, I realize DF is really complex, but at the same time it's not like every other game out there doesn't have a bajillion calculations it needs to do while you play. And those games have a bunch of fancy 3d graphics and stuff on top of them to make it even more stressful on your system.

900mhz is still fast enough to do millions and millions of calculations per second, so why can't it keep track of a few dwarves running around in a cave?

[Core Xii]

quote:Originally posted by DrJonez:
<STRONG>900mhz is still fast enough to do millions and millions of calculations per second, so why can't it keep track of a few dwarves running around in a cave?</STRONG>

It can. There's just more to DF than that.

I bet it's going to take you like an hour to generate a new world.

[AlanL]

Actually, my computer is 750 MHZ and it runs just fine, although its been a while, if i remember right it actually did take 30 minutes to 1.5 hours to make a new world on average (depending on luck). I've had no real problems with DF, a little bit of lag under intensive scenarios but nothing game breaking. (Then again, i've always stayed with the guaranteed 8 or less because thats my play style).

Edit: Also, I've generally always left all the bells and whistles like weather and temperature on.

[ September 14, 2007: Message edited by: AlanL ]