Print

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

[foolx]

Hi there!
I like this Game very very much, but my notebooks breaks apart due to it. I play on a 3x3 Field (or 3x4) with all animals (but pets & War Dogs) in Cages. I have 34 Dwarfs and am playing with 14 FPS @ 100% CPU Usage.
The Notebook has 512mb DRAM, with is not really used and a 3 Ghz Intel P3 which runs at 3066mhz and has a 100% usage all the Time (it goes down when i am in the Menues).

Any Idea what i am doing wrong? It can't be true to kill my P3 with DF ...

Thx for your help, would like to play more, but with this is it hard to play...

[FlexibleDogma]

Is it faster if it's plugged into the wall?  You might be running into power management settings stepping down your CPU speed to prolong battery life.  I don't think the system does any pathfinding while you are in the menus, which would explain the decrease in usage.

Note:  Turning off your power management settings will let DF run faster, but will probably suck down your battery life like you wouldn't believe.

[Derakon]

DF is not a cheap game to run. It does a lot of calculations behind the scenes, and many of those are expensive (e.g. brute-force pathfinding).

[Deon]

Usually I have my 1 core of my 2-core laptop busy all the time I play DF (1700 Ghz cores). But this is because I use "realtime" priority. Did you try to lower the process priority for DF in its init file?

[martinuzz]

Yeah DF is very resource intensive.
By the way, do you have many animals? They slow down a lot too.
And did you turn off temperature and weather in the init file?
Check www.dwarffortresswiki.net  for various performance issues and suggestions for improvement. As well as a lot of other game help.

[foolx]

Hi again

first: WOW fast reply  

My Notebook is on the Wall all the time. The Accu. isnt the best and it has lot "desktop" components, so the accu itself would be empty within an hour.

I have around 20 animals, 15 of them in Cages, the others are pet i can't catch ;(
My Notebook is quit silly ... i turned of weather and temperure now, and i runs at around 50FPS (while running at 3066mhz).
then suddenly my second cooler started and the FPS goes down to max. 25 FPS (even in the Menu i just got 70-90 FPS). But there is no speedstap. It runs @100% @3066mhz, at 50 and 25FPS. The FPS are halfed when the second cooler runs... after a while (2-3min) in Menu the second cooler stops running and i got to 50FPS back ... some min later he runs again and i got back to 25FPS

My Notebook is a Acer Aspire 7105 SCI with 512mb Ram (420 Free)

Thanks again, hope i can play this faster then 25 FPs all the time  

[Deon]

It looks like your processor becomes overheated and your laptop auto-adjusts the perfomance.
Also what about priority question I asked?

[Emerald Hawk]

You can purchase a "cooler stand" for your laptop (like this, for example, I have no experience to recommend a specific one).  This can increase performance by keeping the processor from slowing itself down as it overheats.  If you are too cheap or are looking for a quicker fix, try propping your laptop up on some books with the bottom exposed to air, and placing a small desk fan to blow underneath it.  I've had good luck with this method myself, but be a little careful not to knock the laptop off.

[The-Moon]

quote:Originally posted by foolx:
<STRONG>Hi there!
I like this Game very very much, but my notebooks breaks apart due to it. I play on a 3x3 Field (or 3x4) with all animals (but pets & War Dogs) in Cages. I have 34 Dwarfs and am playing with 14 FPS @ 100% CPU Usage.
The Notebook has 512mb DRAM, with is not really used and a 3 Ghz Intel P3 which runs at 3066mhz and has a 100% usage all the Time (it goes down when i am in the Menues).

Any Idea what i am doing wrong? It can't be true to kill my P3 with DF ...

Thx for your help, would like to play more, but with this is it hard to play...</STRONG>

Well aside from config'in DF you can also turn off a lot of services you don't normaly need running.
http://www.blackviper.com/

On the left side of the page you will see....

 

quote:Features:

Windows Service Configurations!

Includes explanations of each service and advice on which services you can safely disable!

Right below that are guides explaining what you can safely turn off and what you can't.

Also
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Security/ProcessExplorer.mspx

This Mother F'er is great  

Beats the crap out of normal task manager. Let you see if anything is running which shouldn't be, or whats using up CPU it shouldn't be.

[ May 23, 2008: Message edited by: The-Moon ]

[i2amroy]

Something that I found helps a lot is to turn off weather in the init file. Weather doesn't really affect actual gameplay that much, and it can reduce the amount of processing like you wouldn't believe.

[foolx]

Hi Again!

well, i think i should buy such a cooler stand  

I tried to figure out which Services could be shot down, but because my Win XP is germany, any task has a absolut different name.
I chanced the init file to "below_normal", but i can't see a difference.

[Deon]

if you lower the priority in the init, the game will run slower while trying to give some resources back to system. On higher priorities the game should have more FPS but if it hangs it can hang your computer.

[Juason]

What video card do you have?  Integrated video will make DF run like crap.  Also try changing to this [G_FPS_CAP:10] in the init.txt file.  On my integrated video system I had to really crank down the graphics framerate to improve overall framerate.  Hope it helps.