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[Darkmere]

Thus far in the game I stick to a default 4X4 embark with 3 cavern levels, but after a while regardless of pop cap (at 50) and walled off caverns, my FPS just drops to 25 for no discernible reason. Laying out traffic areas doesn't help, changing display modes doesn't help, walling off caverns and caging all animals from the start doesn't help, and turning off weather... doesn't help. I'm also sitting at 5k stone, so it's nowhere near enough that should be killing framerate that badly. Also no flowing liquids save 4 water reactors (everything else is stable).


So next time, would I get a better permanent gain by a 3X3 embark or removing one cavern layer at worldgen?

[gtmattz]

I have gone to generating worlds with 1 cavern layer and embarking on flat 3x3 areas to keep framerates up.  It seems to work for me, not sure how well it would do you.

[Thorzog]

The only other thing I can think of to do (if your using Windows Vista or 7) for better fps is to turn off window transparency and other features (Windows Key + Pause/Break Key > Advanced system settings > Advanced tab > Performance area > Settings button). If you aren't already using the best performance option this could get you an extra 20 fps depending on your system. Also turn off unnecessary background programs.

[Darkmere]

Oddly enough, on a lark I sent my 9 military dwarves into two of the FB-overrrun caverns and shut down two reactor cells. 5 dead FB's later I'm back up to 50 FPS. I suppose the FB's were madly pondering how to breach the walls and get at my mayor's creamy filling? I'd attribute it to reactor flow but they haven't actually shut down yet, and are still powering my full-up pump stack (but it's only 9 floors tall). I really hadn't anticipated a gain like that, I might keep at it with this fort for a while yet. But I will definitely work on the windows settings and a 3X3 embark.

[Victuz]

Setting ARB_SYNC to yes in the init.ini file helped my framerate a lot (from regular 35-40 on embark it jumped up to 60-70 even with high population). I also increased the fps cap and g_fps cap to 100 (don't know if that did anything though ).

Oh and I also set the priority to "high" in the init file so I don't have to do it manually each times. it helps to squeeze extra 3-4 frames out of your rig.

PS. Also right now I have that 60-70 fps on a 5x5 embark with 3 layers of caverns.

[Darkmere]

I found the ARB_sync setting a while back as well, and it worked for me too. However, the G-FPS setting might net you a tad bit more if you set it to 40-ish. That value determines how many graphical frames the game draws per second, which is separate from the number of frames the game calculates per second. As a reference, regular speed dwarfs move about 1 tile per 10 frames, so 20 G_fps should keep them moving along fairly well. I set mine to 20 and gained 15 FPS out of it.

[Tsarwash]

I just gained 2 fps by walling off a large section of fortress that was not ever being used. (A very large section.)

[Emily]

If anything, lowering the GFPS cap should improve your framerate.  If it only has to output the screen once every other frame, for example, it should go faster.

...I haven't run any tests though, so no clue if this is the case.

[Grax]

Thus far in the game I stick to a default 4X4 embark with 3 cavern levels, but after a while regardless of pop cap (at 50) and walled off caverns, my FPS just drops to 25 for no discernible reason. Laying out traffic areas doesn't help, changing display modes doesn't help, walling off caverns and caging all animals from the start doesn't help, and turning off weather... doesn't help.

Turning off the TEMPERATURE help a lot, almost doubling FPS for me. (But it means no fun with fire traps)

I'm also sitting at 5k stone, so it's nowhere near enough that should be killing framerate that badly. Also no flowing liquids save 4 water reactors (everything else is stable).

So next time, would I get a better permanent gain by a 3X3 embark or removing one cavern layer at worldgen?

I can surely say that nanofortress (i've played it once) stays about 500fps on a tenth year even with 250 pop, with 3 cavern layers and about 150 zlevels of stone.

Seminanofortress (2*1) stays about 150-200fps till death.

[helf]

Definitely give nanofortress a shot. I'm piddling around on my old 300mhz pentium II laptop with 128mb ram running a stripped XP and with a 1x1 fort with no other init tweaks yet, I get 40-50FPS on embark which is mind boggling for such a slow laptop. I'm going to piddle with it a bit more. I think i can deal with turning off weather and temp

[Darkmere]

I tried turning off temperature, it feels to me like it neuters the game a bit, though I wouldn't be opposed to switching it off temporarily for megaconstruction. I will give a smaller embark a go next time I start a new fort, as it seems I almost never make full use of a 4X4. I'm still a bit curious whether pathfinding or wide-area temperature calculations (i.e. large tracts of undeveloped cavern growth) take up more CPU power. Oddly enough, the original FPS problem for this fort disappeared when I slaughtered all the FB's I had walled off in the caverns, which is bizarre because there were only 5 or 6 trapped down there.