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Dwarf Fortress is more simulationist. Things are often intentionally unclear (read the wiki page on weapons for a lark - or don't, it's horrifying), and events/traits/etc are granularly contextual. Dwarf Fortress is better if you want the experience of watching the rise (and usually subsequent fall) of a fortress of little bearded schizos, who will often die because (checks notes) one was bitten by a spider, got nauseated, and accidentally stumbled into the lava because you didn't install OSHA compliant safety rails.
Though tbh they're very different games, comparing them is kinda pointless.
-Better simulation most/all(?) pawns aren't just generated at the edge of your screen just to raid you, they all have their own stories and family trees, and you might even get some random dude who inherits the kingdom @ your tarvern or something.
-Z levels, you can expand rooms and structures upwards or downwards too.
-Water/lava physics
-Bigger colonies
-Events seem more random, but they are still gated behind certain progression levels.
-The outside world is simulated as well, so you can raid settlements to steal legendary artifacts, try to turn them into tributaries, etc..
-Simulated gravity, meaning you can flink random crap at enemies with minecarts and traps.
-A much easier experience overall, if you think of this as a plus
RW:
-An actual combat system
-Better control over your pawns
-Better production/management options with stockpile priorities, production conditions, livestock management, etc..
-Several times the content of DF in terms of progression and technology
-Far more threat and raid types which require different approaches to solve
-Ideology system creating highly customizable values and morals for your colony
-One of the best, highest rated DLCs ever made was just released with vampire, significant genetics, mechlords and a much better children/family system giving you the possibility to raise kids for specific strengths and focuses for your colony.
-Much more polished/far, far, far, far, far less gamebreaking bugs.
-A much harder experience keeping you on your toes 24/7, if you think of this as a plus
-Insane modding community for every taste, from very well balanced content additions, to gamebreaking cheaty stuff some people might enjoy.
But yes, your assumption is right, remember that absolute garbage UI from Vanilla RW that most people end up fixing with mods because it doesn't really tell you anything of value when you click a pawn and requires you to go through nonsensical tabs to see their skills, needs, addictions, etc? Or how you have to click and drag over zones for every single pawn to assign them? or how the priority system is too funickly so some people use a mod to let the AI do it for them with a colony gets "big" enough with over 20 people?
Well, take all of those flaws and expand them by x10, in Dwarf Fortress you can't modify production orders at the workshops, you need to open one massive list of every production order in the entire fort, and as you'd expect, yes, it is a mess, no, it isn't sorted or organized in any way, if you want to create steel armors you have to create 30 sets of gauntlets, mails, leggings, boogs, helmets, greaves, etc... One by one, and the same idea applies to everything else in the game.
Speaking of which, yes, the game severely lacks content and there is no progression, you might expect a deep economic system (heard they tried it, didn't work, they are trying to fix it before they try it again) out of such a great simulation, but there is none, dwarves just pick anything from stockpiles, progression is basically centered around how deep you can dig to extract resources from the map, hint: You can dig all the way to the magma sea in your first 5 minutes, and after that you can just use those materials to craft low tech weapons like swords and armor, some furniture, food, clothes and that's it... There is nothing like discovering gunpowder, creating muskets, creating cannons, researching new dwarven techs to create golens, researching new power sources or magical crystals to create more powerful golems, researching magical systems and creating new spells @ your library like pyromancy, geomancy, etc.. No, nothing, just craft a few pieces of gear, furniture and open up more rooms for your new residents, that's... Pretty much the gameplay loop.
Attacks and raids are also quite samey, it's often some random giant forgotten beast/titan, maybe some ettin or w/e decided to get too close and attack everything on sight, maybe some random raids but that's it too, not that it matters because there is nothing that can break walls or drawbridges, so if ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan just isolate yourself and ignore all danger if you want.
Of course you don't need to progress to create them either, they are available @ the start and you could build one within your first 30s of gameplay, so there is no real danger besides the many, many bugs, or you messing up with lava or something.
All in all it's a fun, average colony builder, does some things better than other games, but it also has severe shortcomings.
Edit: Also, DF suffers from an identity crisis.
It is trying to be, at the same time, a game about macromanagement where you can't control your dwarves directly, you have incentives to just order wide production orders and let them sort themselves out, create large military units of 10 dwarves each and command them all as one, etc...
But, at the same time, the game demands far more micromanagement from the player than other colony builders, with very specific personality traits you should be aware of, without a proper interface to handle this, making you scroll down a list, find a dwarf, click it, go through several tabs to get to know him, close, then go back to that same list, scroll down again and repeat the entire process over and over again, it refuses to give you any information about combat, meaning that all you'll ever see is a bunch of sprites next to each other, you can't tell who's standing up, who's downed, who's dying, who's just taking a nap, or even which one is a mother and which one is a baby being carried, the game fails utterly at providing any visual information to the player, and if you want to know what's going on in combat you'll have to open a combat log, to check out what each one of the 100 units are doing to whom, one by one, then let time move forward, pause again, then check them all through logs one by one, to have a minimal idea of what's going on, this gets worse with the justice system where there are several cases to investigate, and you can interrogate hundreds of people from your fort... one by one, opening a list, scrolling down, finding a new target, clicking, then the whole thing closes and you have to open, scrool and then click the next, over and over again.
Yeah... Fun, but it has issues.
but mainly.... the massive amounts of Z levels for mining thats the main thing DF offers that rimworld does not.
It'll run the same on a 970. GPU is not what is limiting the framerate. It is the massive simulation behind the scenes, which IS linked directly to framerate.
Your videocard is meaningless. You want a proper CPU, more precisely one with a lot of memory cache. Right now that's the 5800X3D. Not just DF, any CPU intensive game loves that chip. Factorio, Paradox map painters, so on.
Remember me on page 20 :)
There's a mod, Rocketman, that seems to fix the performance issues by making the AI a little slower instead of checking actions every single tick, people have used it to make colonies with over 200 people before but I haven't tried it, they claim it runs fine with it.
with Rocketman and others you can have 20, but not more
Rimworld - There's an end game.
RimWorld is heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Dwarf Fortress has been in development for over 20 years.
If RimWorld would be given the same 20 years, I think it would equal Dwarf Fortress.
The settings are different as well, RimWorld is more futuristic while Dwarf Fortress leans on a medieval fantasy setting.
Some things in RimWorld I wish was in Dwarf Fortress, like the option to amputate or replace limbs and some things I wish was in RimWorld like how the world interacts with itself without your input and how you generate history for your world.
Both games are great, I play both, because why not.