How is KSP on a Mac?

[cephalo]

So my nephew was visiting over Thanksgiving and fell in love with KSP. The Obvious solution would be to get it for him on Christmas! The problem is that his household is a Mac household.

What kind of specs do you need to make KSP enjoyable on a Mac? I don't want him to be disappointed if it doesn't perform like on my PC. Can you use Mods? We would need KER and Docking Alignment Indicator.

[kball]

I'm running on the 2-3 year old machine shown below and it's mostly great. Some frame dropping and slow down on a minority of launches until I get up a few kms. The real issue is when I'm working with one or more very large stations or bases with lots of vessels about. At those times the performance can drop significantly and it gets a bit frustrating. But I wouldn't say that should scare anyone away. It's manageable and, at least for me, doesn't represent the majority of my gameplay. Though I guess a kid might be less forgiving. Also, 1.2 has improved those worst case scenarios a bit, but overall the game runs a little more poorly than 1.1.3. I'm hoping that's due to some bugs I see crop up in the logs and that it will smooth out after a couple patches. I use KER and MechJeb.

I would think if they've got a newer system than I do they'll have no trouble.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)
2.3 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

 

Edited December 9, 2016 by kball

[Trann]

Run the demo first?

 

Home machine is Late 2009 27-inch iMac with 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 12GB RAM. I don't usually have ships with more than 300(?) parts (can't recall).   I don't run any hi-res mods but I do run a few visual enhancements and a number of functional mods; some include:

Chatterer, Persistent Rotation, KER, Stage Recovery, PlanetShine, SCANSat, Docking Sounds, Distant Object Enhancement, KAC, Better Burn Time, Docking Alignment Indicator

I used to absolutely need Active Texture Management to reduce the texture footprint but I can't even remember if I'm using it now because performance improved so much with 1.2.  One thing I still do to help things along out of habit is tilt the camera angle skyward so it doesn't have to render the ground when I'm pushing for orbit   I still reduce some game graphics settings because I don't care about trees or rocks; I used to set the number of debris objects to 0 but I now play with the intent of deorbiting stages.  If the game every got laggy, I'd drop that without regret.

But all in all, still very playable on this very old, minimal, stock iMac.

Edited December 9, 2016 by Trann

[Gianni1122]

Late 2013 MacBook Pro 13in here... (Basically the bare min requirements)

I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

[Spacetraindriver]

Have been using mac for EVERYTHING.

NOTHING (including KSP) is severely hindered by the fact that I'm using a mac. Nor for the fact I'm using everything else on my Mac.