Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF General Discussion => Topic started by: Haytrid on November 07, 2012, 09:36:44 am
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Anyone running one of these new piledriver CPU's yet? Are these the best CPU's for DF now? Not because of the 8-core because I know DF doesn't use that but because of the natural 4.0/4.2 clock speed. I seem to remember reading on the forums that DF favored single high clock speeds.
Have any of you zealots with huge fortresses tried revisiting some of your lag-death fortresses on this CPU?
What other CPU features does DF prefer?
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I seem to recall that the biggest improvement you can get is faster ram speed, I'm assuming that this 4ghz processsor would probably support the fastest ram you can get tehse days, and if so you would probably get stupidly good FPS.
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Yeah, higher ram bus speed ( I think it's displayed as DDR number ) improves DF a lot more, because it's very memory-demanding program. Cache and high CPU processing rate don't helps much if they can't get the data to munch on :D
Of course having both as good as possible would make for the best DF machine!
Having more cores seems to decrease the throughput in general, but that might've been related to heat issues and a bit dated to a few years ago.
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If you want a boost in frame rate and are on a spinning hard drive, copy the game to a usb key, and play it from there. Also this is a good way to get the game spread throughout your company at whatever job you have, and you could probably pass it off as some super heavy number crunching whizbang manifold making piece of engineering software. No worries boss, it's just something too technical for you to understand. :o
And if this game ever goes multiplayer, you'll be able to play with your IT guys(Trust me, if they haven't heard of this game, introduce it to them, you'll be their best friend FOREVER.)
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If you want a boost in frame rate and are on a spinning hard drive, copy the game to a usb key, and play it from there. Also this is a good way to get the game spread throughout your company at whatever job you have, and you could probably pass it off as some super heavy number crunching whizbang manifold making piece of engineering software. No worries boss, it's just something too technical for you to understand. :o
And if this game ever goes multiplayer, you'll be able to play with your IT guys(Trust me, if they haven't heard of this game, introduce it to them, you'll be their best friend FOREVER.)
USB's actually slower when it comes to data transfer rate than internal hard drive, SSD would be the way to go. BUT! DF's bottleneck isn't the primary storage rate, outside of saving/loading game but that's still rare enough that it's not a improvement. Also, USB write rate is a lot slower than even SSD rate.
Portability, on other hand, is good argument for USB stick :D
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What about playing it on a NAS?
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Anyone running one of these new piledriver CPU's yet? Are these the best CPU's for DF now? Not because of the 8-core because I know DF doesn't use that but because of the natural 4.0/4.2 clock speed. I seem to remember reading on the forums that DF favored single high clock speeds.
Have any of you zealots with huge fortresses tried revisiting some of your lag-death fortresses on this CPU?
What other CPU features does DF prefer?
The best CPU for DF is an Intel Ivy Bridge.
AMD is far behind intel in IPC (Instruction per clock) and this is what's important to DF. Choosing an AMD cpu for DF is a poor choice.
My 2600k Sandy Bridge (one generation behind Ivy) is clocked at 4.7Ghz and excel as playing DF.
To speed up DF load and save, put your DF folder in a RAM Drive.
That is, a folder in your RAM. This is an order of magnitude faster then the best SSD. You can use the free software imdisk to setup your ram drive, and automatically keep a backup.
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Anyone running one of these new piledriver CPU's yet? Are these the best CPU's for DF now? Not because of the 8-core because I know DF doesn't use that but because of the natural 4.0/4.2 clock speed. I seem to remember reading on the forums that DF favored single high clock speeds.
Have any of you zealots with huge fortresses tried revisiting some of your lag-death fortresses on this CPU?
What other CPU features does DF prefer?
The best CPU for DF is an Intel Ivy Bridge.
AMD is far behind intel in IPC (Instruction per clock) and this is what's important to DF. Choosing an AMD cpu for DF is a poor choice.
My 2600k Sandy Bridge (one generation behind Ivy) is clocked at 4.7Ghz and excel as playing DF.
To speed up DF load and save, put your DF folder in a RAM Drive.
That is, a folder in your RAM. This is an order of magnitude faster then the best SSD. You can use the free software imdisk to setup your ram drive, and automatically keep a backup.
Wait... you can DO that!?
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Anyone running one of these new piledriver CPU's yet? Are these the best CPU's for DF now? Not because of the 8-core because I know DF doesn't use that but because of the natural 4.0/4.2 clock speed. I seem to remember reading on the forums that DF favored single high clock speeds.
Have any of you zealots with huge fortresses tried revisiting some of your lag-death fortresses on this CPU?
What other CPU features does DF prefer?
The best CPU for DF is an Intel Ivy Bridge.
AMD is far behind intel in IPC (Instruction per clock) and this is what's important to DF. Choosing an AMD cpu for DF is a poor choice.
My 2600k Sandy Bridge (one generation behind Ivy) is clocked at 4.7Ghz and excel as playing DF.
To speed up DF load and save, put your DF folder in a RAM Drive.
That is, a folder in your RAM. This is an order of magnitude faster then the best SSD. You can use the free software imdisk to setup your ram drive, and automatically keep a backup.
Wait... you can DO that!?
As long as the whole thing can fit in RAM you does have left and don't exceeds around 2 or 3 gigs in total, you could do it. Though 64 bits version could probably go past that 2 or 3 gig limit. Not really worth it outside of faster seasonal saves probably.
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It's amazing how things change. In the old days (DOS era, insofar as PCs are concerned) people used to go for RAM Doublers, which was useful for people with 256Kb RAM or less[1]. And others went for RAMdisks (useful for working off of floppies only, where one SS/DD (40 track) 5.25" one might be the "system" disk (360kb, wasn't that?), and you might have swapped it out in order to put in a program disk unless you had a B: drive as well.
I evenheard of someone using a RAM Doubler and a RAMDisk. I'm not sure what they ended up with, except a load of overhead lost in both capacity and performance. ;)
(Actually, if the RAM-doubling involved compression, maybe they ended up with more effective working space, but slower at it. But if you're just running at the speed of your typing it might not have been noticeable.)
Erm, sorry, gone all nostalgic. Ignore me.
I was also mentioning the amount of memory (probably) needed, but now I've been ninjaed on that issue, so I'll snippety snip that out again.
[1] The first 'proper'[2] PC I used was less than that. And less than 10Mb HDD. Not sure it was fully 100% IBM-PC compatible, but did well, and had good (albeit monochrome) graphics with its Hercules graphics card and high end (albeit green) monitor.
[2] Though I first used a DOS-alike on a BBC/Torch Graduate combo. (No, not ADFS, which was a separate boot disk and called GDFS, anyway.)
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I often play starcraft 2 from a ram drigve with imdisk.
I create a 8Gb ramdrive, copy sc2 over it then enjoy how fast the the game loads in the loading screen. There isn't much point to it however.
imdisk does not have a 2Gb limit.
But you need to have enough ram.
DF is very small, and 1Gb is plenty.
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Indeed back then after my upgrade to 64Mb of RAM on my Pentium 166 I was playing Duke3D in DOS 6.1 in a RAMDRIVE.
Duke 3d was about 30Mb, and so it would fit!
I wanted to play Quake that way as well, but IIRC it was about 50Mb tat would leave to little ram to play.
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I have 8Gb of RAM on my Ivy Bridge laptop. Would it be worth it in this case to go for the RAM drive setup, or would the loss of actual working memory to the storage be a bigger factor than the speed gain?
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I have 8Gb of RAM on my Ivy Bridge laptop. Would it be worth it in this case to go for the RAM drive setup, or would the loss of actual working memory to the storage be a bigger factor than the speed gain?
If you think faster seasonal save is worth it, give it a shot. Personally I don't think it's worth it, DF don't uses HD outside of loading or saving ( at least no usage that I've seen ). If your computer have a core to dedicate to DF and another core to do all kind of stuff, it won't hurt much, I imagine :D
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I have 8Gb of RAM on my Ivy Bridge laptop. Would it be worth it in this case to go for the RAM drive setup, or would the loss of actual working memory to the storage be a bigger factor than the speed gain?
If you think faster seasonal save is worth it, give it a shot. Personally I don't think it's worth it, DF don't uses HD outside of loading or saving ( at least no usage that I've seen ). If your computer have a core to dedicate to DF and another core to do all kind of stuff, it won't hurt much, I imagine :D
With 8Gb, setup a 1Gb ramdrive for DF. The remaining 7Gb is PLENTY.
It is pointless to dedicate a core to DF, let your OS execute its processes in peace :)
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Something useful to contribute, I think... I read a review in a computer magazine which generally praised the latest AMD FXs (four core to eight core versions) and said they did quite well in using those multiple cores... but that they scored lower than the equivalent Intel chips for single-threaded applications. So perhaps the subject-titled chip is not the best DF CPU.
(Pity, I've quite liked AMD, for quite a while now, and having turned around the early Bulldozer stuff for this newer (Piledriver?) set of chips that don't disappoint as much, I'd quite like to be able to say that AMD is the way to go. However, as the above is second-hand information and (what's more) only half-remembered, and I've not been seriously comparing chips and chipsets personally for a while, grains of salt may be needed.)
((To go Geeky again... I wonder how Crusoe chips would have fared, if they had successfully become the mainstream "third option" in the Intel/AMD marketplace?))
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Ramdisks? Seriously? Has anyone ever benchmarked that with DF?
My current save (a 10 year old fort) is slightly below 32 Mb. And even my cheap, crappy 5400 rpm disk can write that in a few seconds. I seriously doubt that HD speed is the bottleneck when it comes to saving...
USB's actually slower when it comes to data transfer rate than internal hard drive
Not necessarily. While SATA is generally faster, the bottleneck is usually the storage device. So a solid-state USB device (read: memory stick) will often be faster than a spindisk.
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http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/08/hard-choices-amd-cpu-update/ (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/08/hard-choices-amd-cpu-update/)
heres what i think is an informed opinion on the new AMD chips vs Intel with gaming in mind (probably not DF mind you).
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I've always been a content AMD fan. It was with great difficulty that my computer hardware geek friends convinced me that for DF, I'd be better off with Intel than AMD this time.
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Anyone running one of these new piledriver CPU's yet? Are these the best CPU's for DF now? Not because of the 8-core because I know DF doesn't use that but because of the natural 4.0/4.2 clock speed. I seem to remember reading on the forums that DF favored single high clock speeds.
Have any of you zealots with huge fortresses tried revisiting some of your lag-death fortresses on this CPU?
What other CPU features does DF prefer?
The best CPU for DF is an Intel Ivy Bridge.
AMD is far behind intel in IPC (Instruction per clock) and this is what's important to DF. Choosing an AMD cpu for DF is a poor choice.
My 2600k Sandy Bridge (one generation behind Ivy) is clocked at 4.7Ghz and excel as playing DF.
To speed up DF load and save, put your DF folder in a RAM Drive.
That is, a folder in your RAM. This is an order of magnitude faster then the best SSD. You can use the free software imdisk to setup your ram drive, and automatically keep a backup.
4.7 GHz?? Back in 2008 the fastest processer was 3.6 GHz.
I guess Moore's law applies in this situation.
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We'll, I AM the IT guy at work so it's not a problem. My system at home is a Raid-5 array on a nice 3-ware card with SSD boot drive running at 300 mb/s consistently so drive speed I think is definitely not an issue!
If you want a boost in frame rate and are on a spinning hard drive, copy the game to a usb key, and play it from there. Also this is a good way to get the game spread throughout your company at whatever job you have, and you could probably pass it off as some super heavy number crunching whizbang manifold making piece of engineering software. No worries boss, it's just something too technical for you to understand. :o
And if this game ever goes multiplayer, you'll be able to play with your IT guys(Trust me, if they haven't heard of this game, introduce it to them, you'll be their best friend FOREVER.)
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I found this review that seems to agree. I'm assuming performance with single-threaded applications would be the relevant review when applied to DF? The 8350 FX in single threaded apps lags behind even older generation I5's. It would probably do better than my really old I5-750 but for a comparable price for both DF and general gaming the newer generation I5's are still the way to go, or spend another $100 on an I7 and completely blow this chip away. It is worth noting that it almost matches an I7-3770 in multi threaded/multi-core apps like video encoding and such but for all around gaming and general home use the Ivy bridge seems to have it locked up still.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/57446-fx-8350-cpu-review-amds-vishera-arrives-10.html
It seems like it would be fun to develop some kind of DF specific benchmark that people could run on their rigs and post on these forums somewhere. Any thoughts on how that could be accomplished?
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The best CPU for DF is an Intel Ivy Bridge.
AMD is far behind intel in IPC (Instruction per clock) and this is what's important to DF. Choosing an AMD cpu for DF is a poor choice.
My 2600k Sandy Bridge (one generation behind Ivy) is clocked at 4.7Ghz and excel as playing DF.
To speed up DF load and save, put your DF folder in a RAM Drive.
That is, a folder in your RAM. This is an order of magnitude faster then the best SSD. You can use the free software imdisk to setup your ram drive, and automatically keep a backup.
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