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[angelious]

ANYGAYS.


talking about fps is pointless here since we are supposed to talk about how to make the fps go up(rather than at what level is it the most enjoyable)


you should try destroy unnecessary shit from your fort like clothing or extra piles of stone. minimize the path finding of dorfs(aka everything they need is close to each other.their housing,materials and workplace and so on)

try not to engrave too many thigns( heard that also affects fps)

and if all else fails. buy a better computer

[Dragoon508]

I got a decent one but it is about 6 years old now. quad core with 2.34 ghz. Going to upgrade soonish, had my eyes on a new alienware.

But besides the point, I am finding DF hack is something that is needed which I had tried to avoid before. If only for the clean all and the cleanowned functions. Apparently I had about 10k owned worn out items in the fortress that the dwarves did not want to give up.

[angelious]

I got a decent one but it is about 6 years old now. quad core with 2.34 ghz. Going to upgrade soonish, had my eyes on a new alienware.

But besides the point, I am finding DF hack is something that is needed which I had tried to avoid before. If only for the clean all and the cleanowned functions. Apparently I had about 10k owned worn out items in the fortress that the dwarves did not want to give up.

my comp is like a year old and costed 1350 to make. my current fort is aswell going towards fps death. it has dropped from 40 to 34 now. im trying to destroy any excess bullcrap items i have in hopes of it fixing the fps higher.

[Molly Renata]

I haven't yet reached the point of FPS death in any fort. I have, however, been forced to endure massively and constantly fluctuating FPS whenever I play 40d - it goes from as low as 12 to as high as 120 (with a cap of 200), and I can never tell where exactly it's going to go.

As a result, I've basically stopped playing 40d. It's fine when it runs at around 100, but I can't stand it when it drops to the 10-20 range.

[angelious]

I haven't yet reached the point of FPS death in any fort. I have, however, been forced to endure massively and constantly fluctuating FPS whenever I play 40d - it goes from as low as 12 to as high as 120 (with a cap of 200), and I can never tell where exactly it's going to go.

As a result, I've basically stopped playing 40d. It's fine when it runs at around 100, but I can't stand it when it drops to the 10-20 range.

i have had one fort die a fps death when i breached the hidden land of fun.

and seriously...fps death. its the worse way to go in df

[arbarbonif]

I haven't yet reached the point of FPS death in any fort. I have, however, been forced to endure massively and constantly fluctuating FPS whenever I play 40d - it goes from as low as 12 to as high as 120 (with a cap of 200), and I can never tell where exactly it's going to go.

As a result, I've basically stopped playing 40d. It's fine when it runs at around 100, but I can't stand it when it drops to the 10-20 range.

Most of the fluctuations I have seen seem to revolve around climbing and trees.  Any time dwarves decide to climb somewhere they exhaust EVERY other option first, which causes massive lag spikes.  And things falling from trees (leaves and fruit) seem to be minor lag spikes in the autumn.

[NW_Kohaku]

The following things are known lag producers:

Any necessity to climb due to being otherwise cut off.  (I had a miner trap himself in a silly channeling path choice, and it immediately dropped my FPS from what was 100 FPS even when I got double as many dwarves as I had then, down to 20 or so.  This is a brutal drop to FPS that is notable with even a single pather.)

Large numbers of existing items or creatures, dead or alive.  Dead creatures still cause lag.  (They are tested every frame for status, even after their corpse is atom-smashed, and can never be raised by a necromancer.)  Consuming or atom-smashing items reclaims most of the FPS, but not all of it.  Quantum stockpiling also reclaims a portion of FPS.

Items with detailed information, like engraved floors or decorated objects cause more lag than boulders. See Operation FPS Bomb for more information. 

Multi-tile trees.  Have you considered a nice desert, savanna, or glacier?

Moving water or magma.  Just try to drain the ocean into the caverns and see what happens to your FPS.  This makes dwarven perpetual motion devices serious FPS drains. 

Opening or closing doors by lever, or movement of drawbridges (such as atom-smashers).  These force a pathing connectivity check that tests your whole embark. 

Wide open spaces massively snarl pathfinding.  Wall off spaces you don't need anymore to prevent pathfinding through them.  Better yet, just mine less of your embark, and play on a smaller embark to start with.

Not using traffic designations as they were intended (especially not using them at all) causes more pathfinding problems.  If you aren't going to use traffic designations to paint major arteries as high traffic and paint the edge tiles of workshops as low-traffic or restricted, you should set normal traffic to 1 to cut your pathfinding time significantly. 

Using a single central up/down stairs pipe.  The game is optimized to pathfind over ramps.  Central stairways also tend to flood hallways with dead-end paths.

Leaving all the performance init options on.  Turn off temperature checks or weather to make the game go a little faster. 

A few other things I probably forgot...

[Niddhoger]

Bah, I never got horribly annoyed at FPS until it got below 10 when I started draining a lake on a mature fort.  Even if you can notice a substantial difference between 50 and 60 FPS when playing DF (its just blinking ASCII, I really don't), is that difference really game-breaking? Seriously, cult of FPS- you chase higher FPS and get annoyed by lower FPS mostly because you want those big #s!

However, a common myth is that more items=lower FPS, but this just isn't so.  Items that degrade (corpses, socks) will incur FPS penalties, but static items like logs, boulders, crafts, etc won't.  They only get updated if water or fire/magma get near them.  Here is a thread about undump QSP's where they have 10,000+ items (crafts, logs, boulders) but don't lose FPS significantly.  http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=92241.msg3276117#msg3276117

There was another thread on this forum some months ago about a guys mission to LOWER fps.  He was strip-mining layers and clear-cutting thick forests.  I believe he wound up with several thousand logs and at least that many boulders laying around, but none of this substantially lowered his FPS.

From what I picked up from these, is that its stockpile space that is the main culprit here.  Empty stockpile spaces search for items to claim, and when they find them generate a job.  That job then finds an idle dwarf with the right labor involved.  Then that dorf runs pathing calculations to find the item in question then another pathing calculation back to the stockpile.  THIS is what kills FPS.  A boulder (or crafts/logs/etc) laying around doesn't cause any computations or have any hidden counters on them.  They just sit there, doing nothing. 

[Eldin00]

FPS for me isn't about the look of it, but about the speed at which the game progresses. I cap my graphic FPS at 15 most of the time, but I really enjoy the game more when the simulation is running  in the 50-75 FPS range than when it's in the 20-30 FPS range.

And there has been evidence that extreme item counts, even of things like boulders, can cause slowdown. But most of the evidence I've seen has suggested that you need to get counts up into the hundreds of thousands for it to be significant, so I agree that item counts aren't something to worry too much about in the typical fort.

[Alfrodo]

I like big FPS and I cannot lie.

I have my cap set to 200.  And can't stand anything below 50.

The biggest FPS murderer for me are trees. (Had 50 fps, killed all trees, went back up to 190)
and merchants. Especially dwarf ones.

I also tend to play with small populations, 30-80.  Just for that extra fps and to reduce micromanagement and useless dorfs.

[NW_Kohaku]

However, a common myth is that more items=lower FPS, but this just isn't so. 

It is so.

[xaritscin]

back in .34 i started with 150-120 FPS (i cant remember) and slowly crawled down to 32-20 which was still understandable.

when .40 came out i got at most 100 FPS and still could tolerate the FPS decrease. now i dont know if you're having the same issues but with 40.24 im getting starts with 80 or if its an evil biome, i get jumped down to 40-30 FPS (or less). maybe is the tileset(phoebus) or maybe its the patch i dont really know.

i can tolerate 30 FPS when i had advanced quite long with the fortress, but starting with my FPS cut at at original 7 is too much...

[Zealord]

I've been playing for 5 years or so but actually never had any problems with FPS and never abandoned a fortress due to FPS death..
Usually just manual abandonment, but I've had 12ish year forts without problems coming to think of it.

[Niddhoger]

I did not speak clearly enough.  We can have thousands of items in the game at one time without tanking FPS, so the FPS impact of a single item is basically nil.  To gain significant FPS reduction via items would need to create tens of thousands of items.  So cleaning out 10 here 100 there is counting pennies, unless you are talking about rotting items (clothes, remains).  Did food in stockpiles reduce FPS less than food sitting on the floor rotting? In 18 pages I didn't stop to read every word >.>  It also seems like save/quit and reload is required after destroying a large batch of items to properly "reclaim" the FPS.  By and large, empty spaces, repeating bridges, and caravans were the real FPS bandits (unless you go hog-wild on item creation). 
 
If I understand your science correctly, you were creating batches of the same item.  Thus, each time you tried to do something with a goblet/stone, EVERY goblet had to have a path check for it.  In a proper fort, we don't have 10,000 of a single item- we don't even have 1000 of a single item typically (outside of stones).  Did you ever try a test where each sweatshop produced a different (non-rotting) item, but kept the overall item count the same? Would 10k goblets create the same FPS issues as 1k goblets, 1k stone, 1k logs, 1k (stacks) of bolts, 1k shields, 1k picks, 1k bags, 1k mechanisms, 1k blocks, 1k soap.  For just idling I'd doubt it would be so, but it would mean that during play limiting the total list size of any one category would be more important than total item count. 

[angelious]

well fps or not.


my fort has gone down from 40 to 32 and its declining steadily. i wish to give the fort a proper burial and punch through hell..which way is faster; mining adamantine, or just mining downwards like a madcow thinking itself a mole?