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[JonBrant]

It's time to upgrade. I do a bit of gaming, which is good and great and all, but sadly I only really care about DF performance. What should I look for in a processor for DF? I noticed it's not multithreaded, so don't need too many cores. Dual core ought to suit me. What other things should I look for?

[SkyRender]

 Your processor counts for far less than your RAM with Dwarf Fortress.  The main bottleneck is how much RAM you have free and how fast that RAM works.  8GB of top-quality DDR3 RAM will run DF faster than 4GB of top-quality DDR2 RAM, even with equal processors.

 All that said, I've had a good track record with AMD processors and DF.  My 3GHz quad-core runs the game like a dream most of the time, and as with most users, my main bottleneck is the fact that I don't have top-quality DDR3 RAM.

[Akura]

Just remember that a multi-core doesn't do all that much for DF, which isn't designed to take advantage of multi-cores. And extra processor would probably allow DF to run entirely on one processor, and everything else on the other, but that's pretty much it.

[Zrk2]

I have 6gigs of DDR3 ram and a T6600 processor and for a fort of 175 dwarves I get 15fps. On a laptop.

[JonBrant]

Ah, did NOT know ram came into play more. Makes sense though. Good, because it's cheaper to get good ram than a better CPU

[AngleWyrm]

I have a hand-crank egg-mixer strapped to a gerbil in a treadmill, and I get 10 scrambled eggs/minute. I'm thinking about upgrading to a two-gerbil treadmill for the extra torque.

[Plutoman]

Once you get past 4 gigs I can't see it mattering much at all..  DF usually takes up 500mb-2gigs of RAM.

[Quietust]

Once you get past 4 gigs I can't see it mattering much at all..  DF usually takes up 500mb-2gigs of RAM.

Unless it obeys the /3GB option, Dwarf Fortress will never use more than 2 gigabytes of RAM; if it does, then the limit will be 3 gigabytes.

[MrWiggles]

I thought DF could use up to four gigs?
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Since we're talking about RAM. Whats the deal with so-dimm? From what I can gather, it suppose to be less energy efficient.

[shibdib]

wth are u guys talking about.. df pathfinding is all cpu intensive. Like some1 said the ram usage doesnt get above 2gb 99% of the time.

That said, unfortunetly i dont think DF is multithreaded, so it cant utilize more then one core.

[Schmlok]

so-dimms are laptop memory

[ChairmanPoo]

You know, there should be a heavy session of brainstorming and benchmark comparisons, in order to put on the wiki an article on the perfect hardware for DF and what kind of performance can you expect out of it (and, for that matter, what kind of perfo can you expect from different systems)

[shibdib]

You know, there should be a heavy session of brainstorming and benchmark comparisons, in order to put on the wiki an article on the perfect hardware for DF and what kind of performance can you expect out of it (and, for that matter, what kind of perfo can you expect from different systems)

their is.. its, and system will lag with 100+ dwarves.. the end

[Encased in burning magma]

No, ram is not important, unless you want to run 2+ fortresses at the same time.

Processor is really fucking important.
Disk access time? Uh, no idea.

[duckInferno]

I don't see how memory could possibly be more important than CPU, considering almost all lag stems from calculating paths.