PC Graphics Advice

[DC]

I wonder if anyone could advise a relative KSP newbie on hardware ?

I have the following PC spec.

Intel Core i5-6400 2.GHz Socket 1151 6MB L3 Cache Processor
Asus H170M-E D3 Socket 1151 VGA DVI-D HDMI 8-Channel HD Audio mATX Motherboard
8GB (2x4GB) 2400MHz DDR4 Non-ECC CL15 1.2V
 

Currently I don't have a dedicated graphics card.

The game seems to have been running fine, but I've noticed the time display at the top left turns from green to yellow and occasionally red. Am I right in thinking this is a sign that the computer is struggling ?

This occurs when I have a ship in orbit with Kerbin below, but if I shift the view so Kerbin is not in view then it turns green. (Probably not helping that I am using EVE for clouds.)

I'm thinking my lack of a video card is causing me issues rather than processor. So my question is what sort of card will be adequate ? I don't play any graphics intensive games other than KSP so I don't really want to sink money into a really good card. Can I get away with a 1GB DDR3 card ?

Thanks very much.

[Streetwind]

Huh, look at that... That's a Skylake CPU. Usually when people come by asking for buying advice, they have fairly crummy hardware, not the very latest

Unfortunately for you, that also means that the integrated GPU is fairly capable, and you won't see much of an improvement unless you spend some money. I'm not sure where you live, but over here you can get a Radeon R7 240 with 1GB DDR3 for €50. With that kind of dedicated GPU, you can expect a performance improvement of... well... about 30%. If you want to double your graphics power, you'll need to look at a R7 250 or a Geforce GT 740... with GDDR5, in both cases. That'll be €75. Honestly a better deal in every respect, but also a larger absolute sum. You'll see that repeated as you go up the card class ladder; the price-performance-sweetspot isn't until around €125. You'll need to decide for yourself how much you want to spend.

Whether or not that will solve your issues, I cannot say... the timer turning yellow is a sign that the game can't keep up with its physics ticks, which is a CPU issue, not GPU-related. Of course, freeing up the iGPU will let the CPU side appropriate more thermal budget, and lessen the strain on the memory interface as well, so... *shrug*

(Also keep in mind that there are other potential sources for slowdowns, such as mods, excessive part counts, background processes, and so on and so forth... maybe you want to try and get your thread moved to the support forum to receive general troubleshooting advice?)

Edited January 18, 2016 by Streetwind

[DC]

Thanks for the reply, very useful. I actually got the PC because I wanted to play KSP and my old PC needed replacing anyway. I'm in professional IT so I know a fair bit about PCs (or at the worst know people who do !) but I've little experience of graphics for gaming, but you've given me some useful pointers. A colleague has offered me a trial of a GTX 750 ti 2GB card, so I'll probably start with that to give me an idea. I've no objection to spending the money on a decent card if it's going to help, otherwise I'm just moving the bottleneck from one place to another.

[Brofessional]

When the time display in the upper left corner changes from green to yellow/red, it means the game is slowing down the timescale.  This is usually because the CPU can't handle the physics calculations when you have a rocket with a lot of parts, so in order to keep the framerate playable it slows down time in the simulation, allowing the CPU more time to calculate physics for each frame.

Since KSP is on Unity 4, it can only use a single thread for physics calculations, which means even modern multi-core processors struggle to keep up with KSP.  The upcoming 1.1 update is switching to Unity 5, which allows for multi-threaded physics, but to my knowledge (someone correct me if I'm wrong here) it's still limited to one thread per craft, so we'll just have to wait and see how much of an improvement it really brings.

The i5-6400 is a modern Skylake processor, but as a lower end model, the 2.7GHz the clock speed is a bit slow.  You could look into overclocking it, but the multiplier is locked on the 6400, so I'm not sure how much of an overclock you'd be able to get out of it.  You could upgrade to a higher model CPU like an i5 6600k or i7 6700k, but that's probably not worth the significant cost of those models.

There's really just no good solution, KSP started as a very simple little game and ballooned into a much more complex one. As a result it was kind of shoehorned into the Unity engine and doesn't run that well even on very high-end machines.

 

All that said, I would still recommend getting at least a mid range dedicated GPU, given that your other hardware is not too shabby. I would probably also wait for the 1.1 update and see how the game performs after the Unity 5 switch before spending any money, unless you have other games in mind.

Edited January 18, 2016 by Brofessional

[DMagic]

44 minutes ago, DC said:

Thanks for the reply, very useful. I actually got the PC because I wanted to play KSP and my old PC needed replacing anyway. I'm in professional IT so I know a fair bit about PCs (or at the worst know people who do !) but I've little experience of graphics for gaming, but you've given me some useful pointers. A colleague has offered me a trial of a GTX 750 ti 2GB card, so I'll probably start with that to give me an idea. I've no objection to spending the money on a decent card if it's going to help, otherwise I'm just moving the bottleneck from one place to another.

The 750 Ti will definitely handle KSP, I've been using for quite a while and never really encountered any significant GPU related performance problems (sometimes aero-effects on large vessels can slow things down a bit, but that's not very common); it can also handle most other games at 1080p fairly well.

It is positioned a bit weird in terms of price though (or at least it was when I bought it for around $150) because it gives by far the best performance you can find for a board powered GPU. So if you want to go a step down you'll probably still get good performance in KSP at a cheaper price, but I wouldn't go down much further.

[Streetwind]

Yeah, the 750 Ti is a great card - frugal in power draw and high performance for the price. You can also go down one step to the 750 non-Ti version, and that's kind of where I would draw the bottomline for "good" Nvidia GPUs. Anything below is generally recycleware from several generations ago, rebranded with a new number to target buyers who don't know the difference. That's not to say there are not cases where, say, a 740 GDDR5 will suffice just fine - KSP and Minecraft are certainly examples - but you should never buy in this segment if you have any sort of serious gaming ambitions.

(AMD does exactly the same by the way - for them the serious cards start in the R7-260/R7-360 area.)

[Slam_Jones]

If you prefer NVidia, you should go for a GTX 750 Ti.

If you prefer AMD, you should go for an R9 270.  Can't speak for R7 series, as I've never used them.

 

If you don't have strong feelings one way or the other, pick the one with the cooler name    (Personally I went for the R9 270)

I think the GTX will actually be a little cheaper than the R9, but (this is just my opinion here) I believe the R9 would provide adequate graphics for a longer period of time.

[Frybert]

I'm running on a 550 Ti in high settings and bottleneck at the CPU, so you're probably not going to see much improvement in KSP (other games will be a different story) with a graphics update.

[wumpus]

1 hour ago, Slam_Jones said:

If you prefer NVidia, you should go for a GTX 750 Ti.

If you prefer AMD, you should go for an R9 270.  Can't speak for R7 series, as I've never used them.

This is probably true for the states (at least after a quick check I thought so), but it looks like in the UK R9 270s are hard to find, but R7 370s run the same price as the GTX 750 TIs.  I'm pretty sure the AMD cards are a notch or two faster, but will pull something like 150W (maximum) vs. half that or so from the 750Ti.  If you don't have a lot of reserve power in your supply, the Nvidia will keep you happy.

I go here: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/  for quick and dirty price checks, especially for places outside my country (can't vouch for accuracy in the UK, but you can typically click on the US prices and get the price they are claiming.

 

[DC]

Thanks to you all for your advice. I've run a little test (albeit on an i7 processor) and the processor was running at 10% with a simple spaceship in orbit but Kerbin not in view (Four cores so I guess about 40% for single core use)

When I shifted view so Kerbin came into sight, the timer turned yellow and the CPU usage dropped to 4-5%

I'll get hold of a graphics card and see what changes this makes to the performance stats.

[dr_jt]

This reminds me of the quest to get the CPU bound MSFX flightsim running with a decent frame rate.