Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sallen]

OK, this is a strange issue. I don't know if I should've posted it in the bug reports forum and I couldn't manage to find anything regarding this on the forums or Google. Please move it if it should be there.

When my game is paused, the FPS goes over 400,000. I know it's supposed to max out when paused, but...
And whenever the game is running, I get around 30 or 50 even at the start (just the wagon and the initial dwarves, no buildings or anything).

I'm running 0.31.25 on an AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.20 GHz (Quad core). Windows 7 64 bits and 4 GB of RAM. ATI Radeon HD 4600 series, 1GB. I have never had trouble with this computer before, and I have tried using different FPS cap settings, render modes and whatnot. Why is this happening all of a sudden? Have you seen this behaviour before?

[Flying Dice]

I don't know too much about this, as I usually stay at around 120 FPS regardless, and thus never needed to do much investigating, but DF only uses a single core, so a good dual-core computer would run at higher FPS than a decent quad-core.

[morgoththegreat]

This only happens when you have your FPS uncapped.  If you are only getting 30-50 FPS there's no reason not to go into the init file and change your FPS cap to an actual value.  Or turn off the FPS counter and not worry about what it says.

[Sallen]

I see... Well, I have never had trouble before, as I said. I usually leave my FPS uncapped so that my fort grows fast at the beginning. That goes usually at 500 FPS. I don't really remember.

The thing is something has changed since I last played. Either the update introduced something that doesn't like my computer, or something's wrong with my settings (default settings won't work either), or my computer (which apparently runs fine).

I hoped someone who had seen this before could give me some clues.

EDIT:

This only happens when you have your FPS uncapped.  If you are only getting 30-50 FPS there's no reason not to go into the init file and change your FPS cap to an actual value.  Or turn off the FPS counter and not worry about what it says.

The problem is, even with my FPS capped to 500, or 200, it won't go past 50 while playing (even with vsync disabled), and skyrockets when I pause the game. As if it was ignoring the settings.

It's not a permissions problem either because I'm running it from the desktop.

 

[thijser]

same problem but I had it without pausing the game (ok it was about 20 000 fps). It's what happens if you have uncapped fps and aren't really using any proccesing powers (in my case it was a small embark with only 7 dwarfs no water and no animals so barly any pathing and nothing else going on). Now in my case this al ment that it wasn't really playable and I capped it again. So the fix is easy (recap) and it's not really a problem.
But what kind of embark are we talking about here?  3x3 embark is more then twice as taxing on your system as a 2x2 embark and is only sligtly more then half as taxing as a 4x4 embark so a large embark can quickly bring your machine to it's knees.
To me this sounds like you just started a new embark and met with something the requires a lot of proccesing or is this in all embarks (embark on some diffrend areas with diffrend sized embarks)?
You could always try to lower the default pathing cost I found that it easily shaves of about 25% of your pathing cost (make a normal traffic option cost 1 instead of 2 it does mean you can't use high traffic anymore).

[Sallen]

I downloaded DF again, capped to 500 FPS and reduced the pathing cost. I went up to 40 FPS on a 4x4 embark with caverns revealed and extensive deep underground digging. 51 dwarves. I think I'm OK with that.

This issue happened with another fortress I was playing on an older dual core computer with no problems. On this (presumably higher end) computer, it's slower :S

[Jessoftherocks]

Go in the {init} file and turn fps cap to zero and tell me what happens.

[kotekzot]

Why do you care how fast the game does nothing?

[Dutchling]

Because it won't show the correct value when it actually does anything for a while...

[Sallen]

Why do you care how fast the game does nothing?

I care about how slow it is when the game is unpaused. The huge and unrealistic FPS increase while paused is just a side-effect that I hoped would ring a bell here and help me track down the origin of the problem.

Go in the {init} file and turn fps cap to zero and tell me what happens.

Happens what I described in the OP. +400,000 FPS when paused, 30 FPS when running (any embark, any time, any number of dwarfs). 

[Niseg]

AMD used to have a timer problem I thought they fixed it by now. I did a search and it's related to RDTSC oppcode. I don't think it should matter. The symptoms  for this is games running too fast.

[kotekzot]

Why do you care how fast the game does nothing?

I care about how slow it is when the game is unpaused.

I guess I misunderstood you. Your post gave me the exact opposite impression. Anyway, unrealistic uncapped FPS while paused is not an AMD-specific "problem", I'm getting 440k FPS on my Q6600. Try going through the usual FPS maximizing motions.

[Sallen]

After redownloading I'm getting a correct capped framerate when paused and around 30 FPS when running. It has been 30 since embark, and now with ~130 dwarves it's still 30 FPS...

Anyway, I have deactivated the FPS counter and decided to enjoy the game as it is, since it won't slow down further and 30 FPS is quite playable. With the size of my fort right now I wouldn't expect higher framerates anyway.

Why do you care how fast the game does nothing?

I care about how slow it is when the game is unpaused.

I guess I misunderstood you. Your post gave me the exact opposite impression. Anyway, unrealistic uncapped FPS while paused is not an AMD-specific "problem", I'm getting 440k FPS on my Q6600. Try going through the usual FPS maximizing motions.

I guess I put too much emphasis on the +400,000 FPS thing. I hoped it was a common thing

[Girlinhat]

I forgot to turn on the FPS counter back when... .21 came out, I think.  I realized it makes me much calmer not to have a slowly decreasing stress-bomb in the screen corner.

[FrankMcFuzz]

I don't know too much about this, as I usually stay at around 120 FPS regardless, and thus never needed to do much investigating, but DF only uses a single core, so a good dual-core computer would run at higher FPS than a decent quad-core.

I believe this post is quite accurate. I'm running a very average machine with a quad-core, and I only get a max of 25 FPS when the game is unpaused 10 years in, usually.

KILLING THE CATS DOES NOTHING!