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[brucemo]

Normally I start out a game of DF with my FPS near 100 and when I get to around 80 dwarves I end up with 17-20 fps and I quit playing because I think of something else to do, usually involving a new fort.

I have a 2.6 ghz AMD dual core so my computer is not the best, but still I would like to do better than this.  So I have read the threads and the wiki article about maximizing FPS.  There are a lots of things that have been speculated to affect FPS, including world size, population, population that isn't in cages, open space, congested space, stairs vs ramps, useless junk, water and magma flow, and so on.  Some of these have been touted as having huge effects, like wide vs narrow corridors, caged versus uncaged tame animals, and ramps versus stairs.

I had high hopes for various strategies but when I've tried them, nothing seems to work much.

I currently have a fortress with 86 dwarves, 6 uncaged pets, 92 animals in one cage, z-level changes handled via one 3-wide spiral staircase, no river (power is one single-waterwheel reactor powering a millstone), a volcano as magma source, and what seems to me to be pretty generous traffic paths compared to what I've had in the past.  I've also been pretty careful about not opening huge areas and leaving a lot of rock lying loose (there are about a thousand rocks lying around, most of them metal ores).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've opened the caverns but haven't explored them thoroughly.

FPS is around 25 now.  So it looks like the various things I've been told are panaceas aren't.  Short of capping population very low, does anyone know of a way to keep FPS up that works?

[Khift]

I've had very similar experiences. So far none of the general FPS tips have had any effect on my actual FPS. I do have a question, though: how many z-levels is your map? Like, the lowest you can view to the highest you can view. All of my maps have been huge on that regard, and I'm wondering if at least on my side that has something to do with it.

[FleshForge]

I've just spent a lot of time with a 5x5 fort that had a ton of water movement (36 tile wide major river with a stream above it dropping 9 z-levels in a waterfall), ~100 uncaged animals, ~25,000 loose rock ... basically all the things that people say are going to ruin your frame rate.  It had a much higher frame rate than many simpler and less ambitious forts of mine that had less of everything going on.  Specific situations like flooding a large cavern, that required a lot of overhead and made a big dent in FPS, but once the flooding was done the great majority of the overhead went away.  As far as I can tell, 90% of your overhead comes from dwarves doing their thing.  I also had a big drop in FPS when I got hit with a large siege and they were all trying to path into my fort, but that's to be expected.

[brucemo]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I put the spiral down to the magma sea, which is at 115.  The lowest workshop is on 137, and the surface is 148.

The map has a cauldera, so part of cavern level 3 was visible at embark.  I had to dig through cavern layers to get to flux, which is 118-121.

Normally I try to do sedimentary surface layers with flux (dolomite rules), but I couldn't find a volcano on a sedimentary embark, so I had to go with igneous extrusive, so no coal and no flux near the surface.

When I discovered this game I started out playing pancake style, then I went telephone pole style, and now I'm trying to play more cube-like since I went with a spiral and wider traffic zones.

I like my current design, which is stacked 11x11 blocks with the spiral in a 4x4 block in one corner, and adjacent blocks being used in space intensive levels like food production/storage.  Rather than lining up, the mined out areas form a helix.  This gets kind of messy when going through a cavern, but since the rooms are not right on top of each other I can for example dig out a well or a magma channel without impacting the level below too much.

+-----------+
|+++++++^^^#|
|++++++++++v|
|++++++++++v|
|++++++++++v|
|+++++++++++|
|+++++++++++|
|+++++++++++|
|+++++++++++|
|+++++++++++|
|+++++++++++|
|+++++++++++|
+-----------+

The level below is rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees with the "#" square directly below the "#" square on this level.

[brucemo]

I've just spent a lot of time with a 5x5 fort that had a ton of water movement (36 tile wide major river with a stream above it dropping 9 z-levels in a waterfall), ~100 uncaged animals, ~25,000 loose rock ... basically all the things that people say are going to ruin your frame rate.  It had a much higher frame rate than many simpler and less ambitious forts of mine that had less of everything going on.  Specific situations like flooding a large cavern, that required a lot of overhead and made a big dent in FPS, but once the flooding was done the great majority of the overhead went away.  As far as I can tell, 90% of your overhead comes from dwarves doing their thing.  I also had a big drop in FPS when I got hit with a large siege and they were all trying to path into my fort, but that's to be expected.

Yes, I've avoided all that stuff and it doesn't seem to matter.

What is your FPS, dwarf-count, and processor speed when you are normally operating?  I'd rather have a river and a waterfall and have bad FPS than have none of this and bad FPS.

Although I have been very spoiled by having the volcano right there.  I'll have a hard time moving away from that in the future.

[Ceaser]

My set up is similar to yours, the only thing that I noticed having a major impact was turning off temperature. That gave me about a 25% boost in FPS. I had really wanted a lava moat this fort but decided the loss of 5-6 fps wasn't worth it.

[FleshForge]

My processor was, once upon a time, a top shelf chip, but that was about four years ago now (not overclocked).  Raw CPU clock speed isn't terribly meaningful, as the overall speed at which a CPU does stuff is determined by many features of the chip and motherboard - all things being equal, higher clock speed is better, but all things are NOT equal.  Instruction set efficiency, internal and external cache, exactly what kind of math is being done, all kinds of stuff has an impact on overall speed.

My forts tend to be at around 20-25 fps with a large population and map (150-200 dwarves, 50+ animals, typically 5x5 map).  Obviously I'm not bragging, because that's not exactly awesome, but what I'm saying is that there has been little difference between a sloppy setup with a lot of running water and many dozens of loose pets, compared to a mostly dry map where I killed as many pets as I possibly could.  I have not seen an appreciable FPS difference between volcano maps (which I like) and non-volcano maps (which I also like).  Even when dwarves are "idle", they still take a lot of overhead to do their thing, although I do notice that when I have a large area designated to be engraved, FPS takes a nose dive -- apparently something very complicated goes on while engraving is being done, probably loading world history into large text arrays to be concattenated together to form the text of each engraving.

Anyway don't worry too much about your volcano, I think it's unlikely to be a big source of overhead.  A waterfall or two here and there isn't a big deal either.  I think you could have a very low overhead fort if you kept your population small and your map small, with as few tiles dug out as possible.  As far as I understand it, "compexity" of pathing is irrelevant, it only boils down to distance and the raw number of possible paths, so I dunno how important it is to keep a "simple" fort design - might be nice to hear confirmation from Toady one way or the other.  Either way, you have to balance a fun design vs. a fast design.

oops, ps: number of cores is irrelevant, since the game is single threaded and will only run on one core regardless of what hardware you have.

[FleshForge]

Incidentally about caverns, once you crack them at all, every tile there will start "cooking" whether you've explored it or not.  There is an obvious difference between opened and unopened caverns, because after some time has passed you'll see huge amounts of plants growing everywhere, compared to a cavern you just broke into that is mostly bare.  I'm sure this takes a bit of overhead to manage, but I doubt it's very much - again I've had games where I had all cavern areas exposed, and games where none of it was exposed, and there has been little if any FPS difference between.

[Ceaser]

oops, ps: number of cores is irrelevant, since the game is single threaded and will only run on one core regardless of what hardware you have.

Graphics and sound run on different core if I'm not mistaken. One core is still doing the great majority of the work but yeah.

[FleshForge]

Maybe, I haven't had sound turned on for a long time - nice music but after 100+ hours of it, well ...