*Clears throat*
I recently purchased a massive beast of a computer.
Running a Quad core 3.4 GHz processor, will it be enough to play with a Major River on a 5x5 embark area? Will my fortress go into snail-speed FPS when I get up to 50 dwarves?
What about without the Major River. Will my fort's FPS decline when I get 100-200 ?
I'd like if someone could post some guildelines of the optimal embark area I can settle in to match my processor without the risk of FPSSlow
(If it matters, I've got two sticks of 4GB RAM. So 4GBx2)
(Oh, and another question would be if Dwarf Fortress uses a single core or multiple.)
Easiest questions first; DF is mostly single threaded. The SLD stuff, is partially on another thread, so DF, from my understanding, receives little boost from multi core machine. It however, does allow one core to do only DF. There is some debate if setting DF affinity to one core does boost performance, from what I can tell, the debate seems to be leaning towards setting the core affinity to one core.
DF, I believe can take at most four gigs of ram.
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As for optimal embark site; there isn't any universal answer. There are numerous things which will degrade FPS. A major river could, depending how much of the map it takes up. Then there how many embark tiles your embark size. Then there how many entities DF has to track. (Such as animals, invaders, and dorfs.) How many items there are to track. How many revealed tiles there are. If you use doors. If the dorfs (or any entities) have to path find over multiple Z levels. I'm sure I'm missing couple dozen other things.
In the end, you're going to have to just embark a bunch of time and find what site size, and how much crap you can have on it before it becomes unbearable.