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Author Topic: FPS death  (Read 21544 times)

Dragoon508

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FPS death
« on: June 01, 2015, 05:16:46 am »

A question has been going around my mind for awhile now, what is the general FPS rate to abandon a fort because of FPS?

I have heard people playing at 10 fps which I think is insane, but that may be the general area that it is at
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Numeroid

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #1 on: June 01, 2015, 06:25:07 am »

Personally, I really start to get irritated with it when it starts getting lower than around 30-something. Even before then, I will tend to play less if it's lower than around 60-70, just because it's more draining when everything takes longer. For me to actually quit a fort, it probably happens when it drops consistently under 20.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #2 on: June 01, 2015, 06:31:44 am »

Try playing without the FPS counter. I'm sure the actual number is psychologically causing more player frustration than actual slowdown.

Then just stop playing when it takes to long to do anything (after checking for the usual temporary fps hits, like merchants trying to find their way out of your caverns and so on).
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Niddhoger

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #3 on: June 01, 2015, 09:05:33 am »

Try playing without the FPS counter. I'm sure the actual number is psychologically causing more player frustration than actual slowdown.

Then just stop playing when it takes to long to do anything (after checking for the usual temporary fps hits, like merchants trying to find their way out of your caverns and so on).

This.  The actual amount of FPS our eye's can perceive and our brains process varies wildly between individuals.  Fighter pilots can usually describe a single frame presented for 1/250th a second, but there are also segments of the population that struggle to differentiate much above 24 fps.  Most people generally won't notice increases over 60 or so, and it won't get choppy for them until much lower.  In fact, "fluidity of motion" for most is simply over 18 fps.  In fact, most CURRENT movies are still shot around 24-30 FPS.  The Hobbit "looked weird" to many people because it was shot at a "staggering" 48 FPS.  Another thing to seriously keep in mind: DF has really shitty graphics.  We don't need 200 FPS to see fluid pickaxe swings and the blood gushing out of a goblin's freshly decapitated body.  Quite simply put.... with the level of "animation" DF has, even 60 FPS is wasted.  We are talking about blinking ASCII characters that teleport around the screen. 

The human mind is -not- a logical construction, as weird as that sounds.  We are told that more=better, so if we pay 1000+ dollars for a new gaming computer your brain is going to MAKE itself think the extra FPS you just paid for is the bees gosh darned knees.  To do otherwise would make you feel like you wasted your money, so to protect the ego your brain trumps up the bonuses while downplaying the negatives.  Once you get used to thinking you "need" these absurd numbers, your brain will begin "snubbing" the lower ones (30! how plebian).  Its simple, if you convince yourself you need 70 fps for DF, then obviously less than half that is unbearable, right?  Its the same thing that happens with someliers (wine snobs).  Obviously this 500 dollar bottle from a 700 year old winery is in an entirely different ballpark than some philistine who just started up in California, right? You can get some rather hilarious results just swapping labels on these guys. 

When it comes right down to it, extra FPS in DF doesn't really make hte game look better (see how much better my goblin blinked into the next tile than yours!?), but simply serves as a buffer against actual FPS death.  If you sit at 100- great! Go build that magma pumpstack.  If you are sitting at 20... do you really need 100 pigs running around? Maybe you should cull them out before they hit 200.  It really is best to play without the FPS display unless you are either testing what causes FPS drop or want to check where you are at before starting a potentially crippling project. 
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conein

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #4 on: June 01, 2015, 09:26:42 am »

I think my highest fps in DF is 30, when i start a fortress.
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Rogue Yun

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #5 on: June 01, 2015, 10:02:51 am »

Playing at low FPS isn't as bad as I believe others make it out to be. I'm not very good at designing and building megaprojects, but I believe the most creative of the DF players learned to play at VERY low FPS in order to accomplish their goals. I think it is worth intentionally setting FPS as low as 20 and starting a new embark just to practice patience a little bit. Once beyond living with low FPS not much else can limit fort designs.

Dwarf fortress, in many ways, is like owning an ant farm. The dwarves do most of the work. The funnest part is just sitting back and watching... with a death-ray magnifying glass.
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Dragoon508

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #6 on: June 01, 2015, 10:10:13 am »

Yea I have no problem with mine sitting at 20 fps, I typically average at 35 with 102 dwarves and about 30 animals. I think 10 FPS may be my limit although I have never gotten that low, typically my fort dies before then.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #7 on: June 01, 2015, 10:21:06 am »

This.  The actual amount of FPS our eye's can perceive and our brains process varies wildly between individuals.  Fighter pilots can usually describe a single frame presented for 1/250th a second, but there are also segments of the population that struggle to differentiate much above 24 fps.  Most people generally won't notice increases over 60 or so, and it won't get choppy for them until much lower.

This is based upon a false assumption. 

Yes, the average viewer can't see a single frame that is going at something like 60fps, but that doesn't mean that the player can't notice when the game is moving at nearly half the speed.  Keep in mind, the typical dwarf has to wait nine out of ten frames, so even at 100 fps, they're only actually moving at 10mps (moves per second), which is well within human visible range.  Even if they weren't, you'd easily see the difference between a dwarf flying 50 tiles in a given time frame and only moving 30, or dwarves building only half a tower in the time it took them to complete an identical tower before.



Anyway, what amount of FPS a player is willing to put up with varies widely from player to player. 

Players who tend to focus upon military and players having to dynamically react to threats tend to demand higher FPS, because they want to sit there and enjoy the "action", and the "action" is very slow in coming at 10 FPS, requiring waiting 10 times as long for their dwarves to stop drinking and assemble before they can be thrown at the enemy. 

Players who focus upon megaproject construction tend to be used to an FPS of 1 to 5, anyway, because you're not getting any better than that when you have a 100z-level cavern excavated in a 5x5 embark and make all your civilian housing out of giant stalactites. Players who focus upon large designations and building tend to be able to cope with largely automated fortresses and simply designating for an hour followed by leaving the game to run itself for several hours (or even just go to sleep) without bothering to come back to the game for a long while.  They're not playing for the action, anyway, so they don't care if they "miss the action".  These players, obviously, are more likely to just wall off the cavern FBs and let the goblins fall into automated magma traps.
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Foxite

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #8 on: June 01, 2015, 11:01:49 am »

I used to sustain 4 FPS at normal fort activity for real months at 200 dwarves and 100 animals on my old PC, and I still do so with 15 FPS on my new one. Although I decided I don't need 200 dwarves and lowered the cap to 100 dwarves, so I now run at something like 23 FPS when I reach my cap. I don't care about achieving rock solid 60 FPS when you have clowns released and blocked from reaching anything that they want to target, and even if I did I wouldn't have the money to do so for another 30 years, unless I get the best job offer in history after I graduate.
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The best way to demonstrate it to him is take a save of 40 year old fortress with 150 dwarves in it on a good sized embark with a volcano that just breached the circus and install it on his gaming rig and watch it bring his rig to its knees.

NW_Kohaku

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #9 on: June 01, 2015, 12:33:40 pm »

and even if I did I wouldn't have the money to do so for another 30 years, unless I get the best job offer in history after I graduate.

There are not many things you can buy that would actually make Dwarf Fortress run significantly faster unless you bought an absolute garbage PC to start with.  My current rig is mostly made of parts that are 9 years old, and still runs a 4x4 fort with 50 dwarves at 90 FPS.  (Although I build and run my fortress on FPS-saving principles.)

Dwarf Fortress does not care how fast your CPU is and doesn't really even use a GPU at all.  Dwarf Fortress's bottlenecks are entirely in accessing memory because it is made of cache misses.  The only thing you can possibly do to speed up DF with hardware is to get a CPU with a positively giant L3/L4 cache (and I mean > 256 mb or GTFO), or else buy faster RAM.  These are, notably, entirely different things than what you are looking for in playing most other games, where the bottleneck is graphics rendering.  (Which is an absolute triviality in DF.)

If you want a faster fort, you are far better off changing your playstyle or use modding than trying to get a supercomputer that somehow runs DF faster.
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
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Dragoon508

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #10 on: June 01, 2015, 01:08:52 pm »

and even if I did I wouldn't have the money to do so for another 30 years, unless I get the best job offer in history after I graduate.

There are not many things you can buy that would actually make Dwarf Fortress run significantly faster unless you bought an absolute garbage PC to start with.  My current rig is mostly made of parts that are 9 years old, and still runs a 4x4 fort with 50 dwarves at 90 FPS.  (Although I build and run my fortress on FPS-saving principles.)

Dwarf Fortress does not care how fast your CPU is and doesn't really even use a GPU at all.  Dwarf Fortress's bottlenecks are entirely in accessing memory because it is made of cache misses.  The only thing you can possibly do to speed up DF with hardware is to get a CPU with a positively giant L3/L4 cache (and I mean > 256 mb or GTFO), or else buy faster RAM.  These are, notably, entirely different things than what you are looking for in playing most other games, where the bottleneck is graphics rendering.  (Which is an absolute triviality in DF.)

If you want a faster fort, you are far better off changing your playstyle or use modding than trying to get a supercomputer that somehow runs DF faster.

Guess I should spend 5k$ on a computer to always have 100 fps with 400 dwarves then.
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Pancakes

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #11 on: June 01, 2015, 02:29:06 pm »

I think the real problem, for at least myself, is when the FPS is inconsistent. I'd much rather have consistently 40 FPS rather than jumping from 40 to 100 and back all the time.
That being said, it might be wise to lower you maximum FPS a little bit so you don't notice the drop off for longer.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #12 on: June 02, 2015, 07:20:33 am »

My 200 dwarf fortress is slower than a fresh embark, but not unplayably so. No idea what the fps is. All I know is that it takes far too long to build a bridge these days. But then, there are 199 other Dwarves to play with while someone gets along with that.

It seems to handle big merchant visits ok too. Although the first time they decided to exit via the caverns the game slowed down to a point which I'd consider breaking point. But then they made it out, everything sped up again and in the following years they seem to have remembered the way out so there's not to much slowdown.

Playing on a cheap i5 laptop not intended for games, but has no problems with Dwarf Fortress (for now).
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angelious

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #13 on: June 02, 2015, 09:51:32 am »

Try playing without the FPS counter. I'm sure the actual number is psychologically causing more player frustration than actual slowdown.

Then just stop playing when it takes to long to do anything (after checking for the usual temporary fps hits, like merchants trying to find their way out of your caverns and so on).

This.  The actual amount of FPS our eye's can perceive and our brains process varies wildly between individuals.  Fighter pilots can usually describe a single frame presented for 1/250th a second, but there are also segments of the population that struggle to differentiate much above 24 fps.  Most people generally won't notice increases over 60 or so, and it won't get choppy for them until much lower.  In fact, "fluidity of motion" for most is simply over 18 fps.  In fact, most CURRENT movies are still shot around 24-30 FPS.  The Hobbit "looked weird" to many people because it was shot at a "staggering" 48 FPS.  Another thing to seriously keep in mind: DF has really shitty graphics.  We don't need 200 FPS to see fluid pickaxe swings and the blood gushing out of a goblin's freshly decapitated body.  Quite simply put.... with the level of "animation" DF has, even 60 FPS is wasted.  We are talking about blinking ASCII characters that teleport around the screen. 

The human mind is -not- a logical construction, as weird as that sounds.  We are told that more=better, so if we pay 1000+ dollars for a new gaming computer your brain is going to MAKE itself think the extra FPS you just paid for is the bees gosh darned knees.  To do otherwise would make you feel like you wasted your money, so to protect the ego your brain trumps up the bonuses while downplaying the negatives.  Once you get used to thinking you "need" these absurd numbers, your brain will begin "snubbing" the lower ones (30! how plebian).  Its simple, if you convince yourself you need 70 fps for DF, then obviously less than half that is unbearable, right?  Its the same thing that happens with someliers (wine snobs).  Obviously this 500 dollar bottle from a 700 year old winery is in an entirely different ballpark than some philistine who just started up in California, right? You can get some rather hilarious results just swapping labels on these guys. 

When it comes right down to it, extra FPS in DF doesn't really make hte game look better (see how much better my goblin blinked into the next tile than yours!?), but simply serves as a buffer against actual FPS death.  If you sit at 100- great! Go build that magma pumpstack.  If you are sitting at 20... do you really need 100 pigs running around? Maybe you should cull them out before they hit 200.  It really is best to play without the FPS display unless you are either testing what causes FPS drop or want to check where you are at before starting a potentially crippling project.


fii fa fom. i smell peasantry.


the difference between 60 and 40 fps is pretty easy to notice for most people. and animations are usually done in low fps because they focus more on making every part of the animation move and flow nicely to trick you into seeing it as fluid animation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZfkGUmmoJ0
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bennerman

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #14 on: June 02, 2015, 10:02:52 am »


This is based upon a false assumption. 

[/quote]

Yeah, I think he was mistaking graphical FPS to computational FPS.
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