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KSP fps and future CPU's


fireblade274

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I have a simple quick question. Right now I have an i5 4690k OC to 4.6ghz, and with all settings turned up, delta time set at .03, SVE (less city lights) and scatterer set to basically max settings (less the things that say "in beta/major performance hit") I'm still getting pretty low fps, around 10 in atmosphere and higher in vacuum.

I have a feeling even if you had an i7 extreme or whatnot you'd still not get much better fps then me with my current settings and set up.

My question is, is it plausible if not likely that a future CPU will be fast enough to process KSP to the point where there is basically no time dilatation/slowdown to compute things? Or are we limited more by software programming of the game rather then the speed at which current or future CPU's can process the code?

Edited by fireblade274
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I think there may be something up with your setup because I have a i7 3770K w/ 32gb of DDR3 and I usually get 30 fps. I'm rocking SVE (medium res), Gallileos planetary textures as well, Scatterer... and on and on. I have a VERY modded setup. My Delta Physics is set at .04. Running a nVidia 960 video card too.

I have to get something like 200+ parts in a vessel before my timer starts ticking to yellow, and that's just momentary (x64 KSP can multithread by vessel, so as long as you don't dock those bases into huge part monstrosities it does pretty well even with lots of parts in-scene, as long as they're not one vessel). Aero can bring it into the yellow but the game is still smooth and I think most of that is due to the re-entry and mach effect shaders, once that goes off I'm back to green land.
Now I'm wondering if I tick the physics delta to .05 if I might be green nearly all the time...

Something that KILLS your FPS regardless of the rig is lights. The more lights you have... the worse it is, and that's a per-scene issue. So if you have 16 lights on your ship, yeah  you're going to have a bad time.

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4 hours ago, fireblade274 said:

Right now I have an i5 4690k OC to 4.6ghz, and with all settings turned up, delta time set at .03, SVE (less city lights) and scatterer set to basically max settings (less the things that say "in beta/major performance hit") I'm still getting pretty low fps, around 10 in atmosphere and higher in vacuum.

Keep in mind: KSP barely ever uses the video card. EVE volumetric clouds and Scatterer, however, will definitely use the video card. In some cases they'll borderline kill it. I have a GTX 1060 6GB that, without these mods, stays below 20% with 60 fps at all times in KSP. But if I have these two mods installed, put a vessel on the launchpad and look up at the sky, the card gets maxed out and FPS drops into the 40's. Not even launching the vessel yet.

So your FPS issues may not be entirely CPU-related. Check what your video card is doing when it starts to stutter.

(By the way, there's zero advantage to physics delta 0.03, except in extreme edge cases that you actively have to provoke.)

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20 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

Keep in mind: KSP barely ever uses the video card. EVE volumetric clouds and Scatterer, however, will definitely use the video card. In some cases they'll borderline kill it. I have a GTX 1060 6GB that, without these mods, stays below 20% with 60 fps at all times in KSP. But if I have these two mods installed, put a vessel on the launchpad and look up at the sky, the card gets maxed out and FPS drops into the 40's. Not even launching the vessel yet.

Basically this. @fireblade274, you're loading up on graphics mods and don't seem to be checking whether the bottleneck is still your CPU. Consider something like MSI afterburner to see what your graphics card is up to. 

You also haven't mentioned what you're trying to launch that gives you low fps. I have a 2500k @ 4.5ghz, an nvidia 1060, and many beauty mods. I can comfortably fly 100-150 parts in atmosphere, but after that it gets a tad laggy. I don't like going above 200-250 because even in vacuum I'll probably lose the green clock.

Edited by eddiew
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16 hours ago, fireblade274 said:

I'm still getting pretty low fps, around 10 in atmosphere and higher in vacuum.

This sounds indicative of an onboard GPU, like an Intel unit. Contrary to what others say, KSP does rely on the video card heavily for certain things, most especially the terrain shader.

Are you using an onboard GPU?

E: I take that back, I see you're using Scatterer. Maybe try reducing the settings, that affects my framerate as well.

Edited by regex
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@regex I think I am good on the GPU front, I have 2 HD6950's crossfired, 2g's Vram each, I know their 2012 "old" but, correct me if im wrong, they should be more then enough for ksp graphics. Also, i know the sound they individually make when they are at 100% load; they never hit it, and are not pumping out as much heat and sound as my other games do. @eddiew I'm flying a spaceplane with 276 parts; its quite integral to the way I play, as it is the primary way I get things into orbit to do stuff is putting it up there as cargo. I have had the plane since 1.0 and have been updating and improving it ever since, always getting it to work on the next ksp version, which would usually break it. One really odd thing that stands out to me is, I swear I restarted the game yesterday--not changing a thing--and I was getting real-time-green-time on the runway with the 276 part plane, took off thinking wow this is unexpected, and next time I started it up I was back to yellow time-dilation. Am I crazy? I'm curious the fps anyone else gets with the craft; the lag is 99% of the time in atmosphere. Upon orbit the upper left time stamp is usually flickering quickly between yellow and green, basically being real time.

SVE is High Res

19 Mods, List

Scatterer settings pic

craft file

 

But still, if the problem is the game slows down to give itself more time to compute calculations, it stands to reason that a CPU which can perform more calculations per-second will, at some time, be able to render KSP time dilation obsolete. Right? @HebaruSan Regardless of clock frequency i'm sure they are still able to outperform their predecessors, and are therefore faster overall. You would want a 2007 CPU over a 2004 CPU despite the fact the earlier one has a higher clock frequency.

Does it stand to reason a 2020 CPU could possibility be preforming well enough to eliminate the time dilation?

EDIT: more accurately, I'm getting 16 fps with the craft on the runway, 11-6 fps on the initial ascent, and it gets better from there.

Edited by fireblade274
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I'm actually pretty certain that the problem will be caused by your GPU. As far as I'm aware, KSP doesn't use multi GPUs, so only one will be doing any work. I run all the same graphics mods with a GTX 950 and it maxxes out. Gpu user bechmark tells me that a 6950 is a bit behind the 950.

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13 minutes ago, fireblade274 said:

I was under the impression it does use multi gpu's, it just doesn't like them overclocked (even though I still overclock mine a bit..)

I run both CPU and GPU overclocked with no problems, maybe the Unity 5 upgrade helped?

Have you tried using a GPU monitoring program like MSI Afterburner? It'll show exactly what is going on.

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21 minutes ago, fireblade274 said:

Does it stand to reason a 2020 CPU could possibility be preforming well enough to eliminate the time dilation?

Unfortunately... not really. If you look at the last 3-4 years of CPU development, and allow for people like myself who overclock the nuts off the top end model, the total speed improvement has been in the region of 10-15%, going from Intel's Haswell up to Kabylake. Single threaded performance just hasn't changed, and that's the core of KSP performance. Until the game engine really uses threading better, possibly with an engine update for better physics processing, it will struggle. It's possible that AMD's upcoming Ryzen processors (next week as it happens) will be an improvement, but they're not going to be the 2-3x improvement you're wanting. Maybe another 15-20% at best, I suspect.

Truthfully, with a 276 part ship, I think you've just got the game engine on the edge of what it can handle on the fastest system today, or for the next few years. My advice is look into the welding mod. I regularly use it to bring large structures down to a much smaller part count. For example, the ring in this:

Spoiler

EyR8Hj8.jpg

...is something like 60 individual tank parts and nosecones. But I've welded it, and now it is just 2 parts, plus another 14 or so for antennae and engines. That's not a terrible amount of stuff to add on the front of a spaceplane, and the entire mission was done at comfortable fps, despite being a fancy looking build. Similarly this fuel barge:

Spoiler

uVssmus.jpg

...looks like an ungainly mass of mk1 tanks, an orange tank, monoprop tanks and girders - but the entire central core is one welded object. Whole ship is about 40 parts, and has the bonus of being able to transfer all its fuel in one click. This is currently the best way to really drive up performance in KSP, and will give you a much bigger benefit than any hardware upgrade.

In addition, 2gb of vram (regardless of crossfire, it's 2gb) is almost certainly not enough for KSP with graphics mods. You're loading a lot of extra textures in there and the KSP engine is annoying in that it feels a need to keep them all active all the time. Get hold of MSI afterburner and watch vram and gpu usage during play. When in doubt, just remove them for a day and you'll soon know where the bottleneck is :) 

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Thanks @eddiew, thats alot of good information. Ill check out that MSI afterburner youve been talking about for sure. Thanks for your input, I really thought my Vram was adequate; I'll also keep saving up for that 1080ti lol.

I'm curious about the part welding; i have been aware of it. So, will it mess up the lifting points on my plane, and its aerodynamics/handling? Also, the drop-tanks I have under the wings for the craft, i have to close the liquid fuel to them and some other tanks on the plane so the rapiers wont draw from them in air breathing mode. Would the part welding not let me open and close these individually? Not to go off on a tangent here, but do you know of a mod that will let you action group fuel tanks oxy and liquid fuel valves? it would be a lot simpler to operate the craft if I could toggle the fuel tanks open rather then pin all 21 tank UI's to the screen and open them up right before switching the rapiers to rocket mode

After using afterburner, I can tell you one thing: KSP does not use crossfire. 

Edited by fireblade274
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11 minutes ago, fireblade274 said:

Thanks @eddiew, thats alot of good information. Ill check out that MSI afterburner youve been talking about for sure. Thanks for your input, I really thought my Vram was adequate; I'll also keep saving up for that 1080ti lol.

My 950 has 2Gb and it's mostly just enough, does do a memory dump every now and then.

1080ti is way overkill, my plan is to wait till the 1080ti and AMD Vega cards are released then see if i can pick up a cheap second hand card in the rx 480/GTX 1060 range.

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19 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

I thought CPUs weren't getting faster anymore, in terms of (individual core) clock speed.

image02.png

Instead, they have been adding cores, making the caches bigger, etc. Most of which doesn't help KSP.

By "faster" the OP isn't referring to Mhz, but speed in an architectural sense i.e. a modern CPU at 3.2Ghz will make a CPU from 2009 at the same 3.2Ghz look slow...

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