Bay 12 Games Forum

*I am already smashing tons of finished goods and cloth, worth is nothing compared to metal statues and items.
* My world is covered in blood and dfhack does not seem to work with pheobus.

* Smashing extra siege stuff seems to work well (thiefs might look for the best item to take). I think the use of link lists and trees causes cache thrashing and the game performance might be more memory performance related than cpu performance.
* DFhack works fine with pheobus  version 5.2 also work with 31.19 (I have  modified /updated LNP for this version)  .You should also know that you should always pause your game when you do it and use unstuck app when the game freezes ( dfhack and other apps can cause game to halt). Some of the dfhack tools can be a major spoiler especially if you are as frustrated as me about metal scarcity.

Another thing you shouldn't do if you worry about FPS is (this is a real spoiler not an image):

I'm also overclocking  my Q6600 to 3.3Ghz( 367*9) which also improved bandwidth of 11.744GB/s instead of 8.5GB/s stock (38% improvement) I might revert to stock to see how it affects the game. I thought about OCing FSB  to 400 with a multiplier drop to 8 but I'm pretty close to my max memory bandwidth (12.8GB/s on DDR2-800Mhz).

The Intel i7/i5 series can reach much higher memory bandwidth which may explain how they manage to get higher performance on new processors:
- Nehalem 1333GT/s DDR = 32GB/s~ triple channel 21.3~GB/s dual channel
- Sandy bridge -  some of high-end processors have DDR3-1600MHz support and quad channel which can push memory bandwidth to 51.2GB/s . mainstream and low end seem to have same bandwidth as Nehalem but I've read it has better single core performance.


 

If you are looking for purist ways you can also eradicate local wildlife .  I embarked in untamed wild so i get some crazy monkeys ,wolves and sometimes pumas to  practice on . Goblin sieges are also good practice (of the deadly kind)  but you should get a bunch of armor layers preferably steel alternately bronze (shield,chain mail,breastplate,helm,gauntlets,leggings ,boots,cloaks,robe  seem to work for me) before sending your army to chop them to bits( I prefer axes) . Take some time to carefully define your own uniform rather than going with stock uniforms .

Unarmored dwarfs tend to get nerve damage or limbs choped off which is super annoying but with decent armor they should do fine . Just get enough resources ,coffers, and beds for your hospital. I usually just ask for lye (for soap) from the liaison and then kill some animal for fat on delivery (make sure you have a kitchen) .Thread and  cloth and thread I usually get from caravans .

I admit I played this game for a while before engaging anything so When i did started fighting I took some "shortcuts" . I did noticed that designating dwarfs to train in a small room they tend to do it more often but i could be wrong. I think 31.18 is a better newbie version 19 is a few levels harder . I did quiet a few embarks untill I started getting the hang of it. I'm still fairly new to this game (but I'm addicted ).

Quickly returning to the original topic: Besides CPU and cache size/speed, wouldn't RAM frequency also be an important factor for DF? Its very easy to make the DF process take more than 1 GB of memory, so the difference between DDR2 and DDR3 should be noticeable.

I think getting the fastest memory or highest bandwidth would be a good idea provided that your CPU supports it ( I saw some of Intel cpu support upto 1333 and if that's true you'll gain nothing from plugging a 1600mhz or faster ram). I'm not sure about the internals of DF but if it's a cache thrashing program that uses a lot of pointers it may benefit from a higher  memory bandwidth and low latency would also be good but as far as i remember the effect of latency on other program is marginal (but they are not dwarf fortress).

DDR3 has a lower (half) internal clock speed as DDR2 so it saves a lot of energy but it's not necessarily faster(you thinking lower clock faster?!  think in parallel  ). Due to it's lower internal clock its interface can be much faster . The latency of ddr3 may seem high but it's measured in clocks ( real clocks which are half the rating) which are usually higher in ddr3. A ddr3 1600Mhz with cas latency of 10 has the same latancy of ddr2 800mhz with cas latency of 5  and the ddr3 has lower latency overall (shorter data stage due to higher clock).

I haven't had time to measure  what affects the game the most but my guess is that it's link list driven memory processor which means it kinda kill cache performance( I could be wrong). I think your best bet is a big cache(might not help at all) and high bandwidth RAM with a predictive data prefetch on cpu (if such thing exists) . High number of operations per clock along with high clock speed may help.

Maybe sandy bridge i7 2500k or 2600k with dual channel or get one of the older one with triple channel . I do admit I didn't  look at CPU performance  for years since most games are more GPU centered .  I was generally satisfied with my 3 year old q6600 +9800gtx  until I started playing DF. Now I'm "backtracking" to Overclocking subjects. My next plan is ddr2@800Mhz fsb@400Mhz  and core@3.2GHz (using an 8X multiplier) to see .I'm currently using ddr@667 fsb@333 and core@3.3Ghz which isn't optimal(gave up memory bandwidth for FSB and cpu). I don't think my CPU can do 3.6GHz without some work and in the summer heat it would probably won't be stable.

Workstations based on server processors might be good for DF but they are usually more expensive than mainstream desktops. I am also clueless about DF performance on an AMD but I think Intel took the lead in performance per clock with their core architecture.

Yesterday I tried different things and managed to start a few games. I think this freezing bug is related to embark size. I successfully started a few embark with a "small" map but my original map which is a "smaller" map doesn't seem to work. It might be related to embark location.

Can some people try to make smaller/pocket embarks to see if they can reproduce this?  I'll try it again and send a bug report when I get home (if someone doesn't open one by then). The bug is black screen with music  playing and then the game freezes and I have to kill it .

I got a fairly developed game I can play with but overclocking my q6600 from 2.4GHz to 2.8GHz ( tried to push it father but it blue screened ) and I got from about 25 to 35 fps but I may have done more things to improve fps .

I'm fairly well versed in run times and algorithms  because I work in the field. As far as  I know a common performance killer are linked lists... Links lists are a special case of a "tree" . Anything  that looks like a tree usually rely on dynamically allocated buffers which is randomly distributed  all over the ram will cause a lot of cache misses which would force your cpu to access ram more than it should . This game probably has some tree like structures and or classic hash tables (bucketed).  Still changing some data structure may help performance but it may not be enough.

The game also based on array searches which include item search and path searches. if you are searching on a flat plain (pathing )it's basically a 2d array search which is usually O(n) algorithm at worst  but if there are pointers involved it may be costly to visit each  spot (like getting designation ).

Considering the fact this game is generally a "memory processor" you might get an advantage from higher memory bandwidth  and bigger caches combined with a smaller map. Because it's also a cpu hog you may want to get the "fastest" cpu you can get which does as many Operations per clock as possible.

Turning this game into a multithreaded (more like a multi work queue oriented ) use multi core processors better but it might not be enough to boost performance if the game relies on cache performance killers like linked lists and trees . This may explain the fact that a large number of items slow the game down. It may cause dwarfs searching for an item closest to him traverse huge unsorted lists which would perform better if they were unsorted dynamic arrays.

Well I'm still new to this game but I share FPS death problem which motivate me to think about ways to improve my PC's performance.