FPS drop from >100 to <10 at lowest settings with big ships

[ekstrj]

Hi all,

I've got a fairly strong gaming desktop, and I can get >100 FPS on average even running a few mods (KER, MJ, KIS, and KAS) on my main career save. The problem is that I'm now reaching the point where I want to launch large ships (All-in-one Stations, Motherships, etc.), and my FPS is dropping to literally 7 FPS on average starting from pre-launch and continuing into orbit. 

I'm running:

• Intel Core i7 6850K (not overclocked other than the standard native OCing that happens under load to about 4GHz)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
• 16GB RAM
• SSD
• 1920x1080 Fullscreen 

I've dropped all settings to the lowest, uninstalled all mods, and started a new Sandbox. I've set the Process priority to Realtime via Task manager. I've confirmed that nothing is running that should strongly affect performance.

During launch, I monitored CPU and GPU utilization - my GPU is only reaching maybe 20-30% utilization, and most Processor cores are sitting between 10-30% Utilization with one core reaching at most 60% utilization. Temperatures are low. 

I can't seem to find any bottlenecks based on utilization and temperature. I don't really know what else I can tweak here, and I'd really like to be able to start using larger ships and larger part counts. I don't understand why my machine is struggling this much given that normal ships sit well above 100FPS on average. I can understand it dipping to 30-60 FPS, and I'd be perfectly fine with that performance drop. I'm getting literally 7 FPS, however, and I'm getting periodic FPS drops even below that to the point where the screen appears to lock up/stutter. It doesn't make sense, especially since I reverted to Vanilla with the lowest settings. 

 

The ship I used as a benchmark is the first (smaller) of Mark Thrimm's Single Launch Space Stations shown at the start of this video: 

I found other topics that were from years ago, and trying their suggestions didn't make any significant difference.

I really appreciate in advance any tips or suggestions you can provide.

Edited April 7, 2017 by ekstrj

[Ultimate Steve]

Frame rate generally gets lower as your part count gets higher. This is generally unavoidable unless you use the Part Welding mod to combine parts together.

If you're against another mod, try and build lower part count vessels in general. Knowing the part count of your vessel (that and a screenshot of it) would help.

[ekstrj]

13 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Frame rate generally gets lower as your part count gets higher. This is generally unavoidable unless you use the Part Welding mod to combine parts together.

If you're against another mod, try and build lower part count vessels in general. Knowing the part count of your vessel (that and a screenshot of it) would help.

Thanks for the quick reply. So even with more processing power, the part count will always cause that significant of a drop (100 FPS down to 7 FPS)? The ship I'm using is shown in the video I linked in my post, and it has a part count of 408. It's the first space station Mark Thrimm lists in his video I linked. 

I'd be fine with using another mod so long as it doesn't break other mods (I haven't starting using KIS and KAS, but from the sound of it, part welding may conflict with their functionality). I just want to understand why the FPS drop is this significant even with fairly high end hardware, especially since I'm not seeing the hardware even reaching 100% utilization under load. It really makes me think I'm missing something, and that there's a setting or two (either within KSP or through Nvidia's software) I'm unaware of that might resolve this. Or perhaps the bottleneck is elsewhere, and my monitoring isn't actually capturing what the bottleneck really is.

Edited April 7, 2017 by ekstrj

[KerbalKore]

Two numbers and a word

 

 

 

 

64 bit.

[ekstrj]

3 minutes ago, Bill the Kerbal said:

Two numbers and a word

 

 

 

 

64 bit.

I tried both the x86 and x64 clients, and both produced the same results. I thought the same, that it might be a memory issue. It sadly didn't make a difference.

[steve_v]

4 hours ago, ekstrj said:

The problem is that I'm now reaching the point where I want to launch large ships (All-in-one Stations, Motherships, etc.), and my FPS is dropping to literally 7 FPS on average starting from pre-launch and continuing into orbit. 

The problem is the ancient (and lacking GPU acceleration) physx in Unity. As usual. Changing graphics settings (or running the x64 player) will make little to no difference.
CPU speed is everything, but you have a 6850K already, so you're pretty much SOL there unless you want to play with liquid nitrogen and insane overclocking.

KSP performance scales extremely poorly with part count, due to the physics engine. There's pretty much nothing you can do about it except reduce part count (or the same through part-welding mods).
Once you've been playing for a while, part-count minimisation becomes the primary design criteria for any craft. Forget about mass efficiency, redundancy or price. Reduce part count at all costs. Fun isn't it?
This game starts running like a gut-shot pig, even on a top-of-the-line PC, once you get over 250 or so parts on a single vessel. IMO this makes the 255 -> unlimited parts upgrade for the VAB/SPH something of a bad joke.

GPU physx please Squad, or more intelligence in the "part centric" physics model. Rigid joints, for example, don't need to be calculated every frame and could be considered a single part below a set force threshold.
Something needs to be done here, horrible framerates are too high a price to pay for rockets that bend like wet noodles.  Even after the "turbo charged" (yeah, right) update, performance is still appallingly bad.

Edited April 7, 2017 by steve_v
Link some graphs, now that imgur is done playing silly buggers.

[ekstrj]

1 hour ago, steve_v said:

The problem is the ancient (and lacking GPU acceleration) physx in Unity. As usual. Changing graphics settings (or running the x64 player) will make little to no difference.
CPU speed is everything, but you have a 6850K already, so you're pretty much SOL there unless you want to play with liquid nitrogen and insane overclocking.

KSP performance scales extremely poorly with part count, due to the physics engine. There's pretty much nothing you can do about it except reduce part count (or the same through part-welding mods).
Once you've been playing for a while, part-count minimisation becomes the primary design criteria for any craft. Forget about mass efficiency, redundancy or price. Reduce part count at all costs. Fun isn't it?
This game starts running like a gut-shot pig, even on a top-of-the-line PC, once you get over 250 or so parts on a single vessel. IMO this makes the 255 -> unlimited parts upgrade for the VAB/SPH something of a bad joke.

GPU physx please Squad, or more intelligence in the "part centric" physics model. Rigid joints, for example, don't need to be calculated every frame and could be considered a single part below a set force threshold.
Something needs to be done here, horrible framerates are too high a price to pay for rockets that bend like wet noodles.  Even after the "turbo charged" (yeah, right) update, performance is still appallingly bad.

Fair enough. Thank you for confirming what the other Steve said and elaborating a bit more. I tried setting Nvidia Settings to use GPU based PhysX, but I'm guessing based on your response that that didn't do much. Either way, I reinstalled my mods and set the graphics settings back up to relatively high. 

I attempted to launch only the Launcher part of Mark's (smaller) massive space station, and sitting around 118 parts without the actual space station, I was sitting at a constant 70 or so FPS the entire launch. I'm guessing I could tweak some graphics settings to get that back up further.

I then attempted the 408 part count Launcher+Station mammoth, and was able to keep a constant 10-15 FPS throughout the launch. 

Looking at some of the comments on Mark's video, Mark even mentioned he struggled with FPS issues (especially with his larger design) and that the smoothness of the video came from editing, not from high in game FPS.

Guess I'll have to wait until Squad optimizes the game for high part counts. In the meantime I'll work on keeping part counts small like you both mentioned and also look into the Part Welding mod now that I'm ready to start designing my own large ships. I was excited to finally reach the point where I could design my own when I decided to check out Mark Thrimm's design first for inspiration. Little did I know it would cripple my system and temporarily let the wind out of my sails a bit motivation-wise. I've recovered a bit now that I understand the limitations a bit more.

Thanks again for the quick, informative responses.

Edited April 7, 2017 by ekstrj

[steve_v]

12 minutes ago, ekstrj said:

Guess I'll have to wait until Squad optimizes the game for high part counts.

Squad appears to be utterly disinterested in getting their hands dirty in (or swapping out) the physics engine, or anything else that's not "out of the box" Unity. They also appear to be committed to this "part based" rigid-body physics, which runs like ..... in unity's "out of the box" physics engine.
Therefore we are stuck with this shoddy performance until Unity sorts out their game engine, if they ever do.

Don't hold your breath for a Unity fix either, Unity was designed to be cheap and easy to work with, and most games that use it are FPS or RPGs with minimal physics requirements. Abusing the physics engine like KSP does is not a priority.

Edited April 7, 2017 by steve_v

[LoSBoL]

Maybe you should take a look at your Windows 'energy savings settings', make sure its not in the battery saving or standard mode, for me it made a huge difference in performance on my gaming rig.
And I also found that you should make use of the 'K' capability of youre processor, squeezing out every mhz you can find to ramp up single core performance. (you payed for the K capabilities, use em!)

You may also ramp up youre visual settings again, it does not make a single difference if you run low or high settings with the card you have there, same goes for screenresolution. (found no difference in framerate between 1920x1080 to 4440x1024)

Getting Mark Thrimm's smaller 'science station' of the pad I'm running 20 to 25 fps on a 4790K @ 4,8 GHZ, 16 GB@2400mhz and a GTX970.

Mark's bigger Cassiopea is a real challenge, and settles between 4  and 10 when ascending.

 

You've got a mighty rig, and unlike with about every other game, it's will botleneck KSP on single thread performance...

[ekstrj]

Yeah I'm currently sitting on the default (Balanced) Power Options where my minimum processor state is 5%. I know I could kick the state up to 100% to allow for the natural OCing to occur at all times rather than under load. I was planning on doing that as a test until I watched HWMonitor during my initial tests. No core was ever reaching 100% utilization, and only one ever really peaked at 60%. This made me think that any additional processor tweaking (Like running at max GHz at all times, Overclocking it manually, etc.) wouldn't make a significant difference. Maybe that was an incorrect assumption. I'll give it a shot and see.

I already bumped up the visual settings back to high - I agree that they didn't make any significant difference in the tests I was running with high part counts. Screen resolution is limited by my monitor for now which is why I'm still running at 1920x1080. 

I'll definitely see whether pushing my processor will make a difference and report back. Thank you for testing it out on your rig, LoSBoL, as it's close enough to my setup to show that I should be getting higher FPS in my tests. 

[Edit]

Wow - Setting my power options to 100% minimum processor state made all the difference in the world. Also, I saw in HWMonitor that one core did in fact jump to 100% utilized. I successfully launched Mark Thrimm's smaller space station into LKO without dropping below 20 FPS the entire time. And, I was averaging 30 FPS the majority of the launch. Once I finished the orbit but before detaching the launcher, I was sitting at 40 FPS. I guess I will go ahead and do some minor OCing of my processor as well and see how high I can get it! 

Thank you for the suggestion, LoSBoL!

Edited April 8, 2017 by ekstrj

[ekstrj]

Further playing around with things got me to a constant 45 FPS launching Mark Thrimm's smaller space station:

• Deleting all mods
• Installing the MemGraph mod and triggering its functionality to reduce the frequency of Garbage Collections 
  • I had no idea all my stutters were caused by this. With Mark's station and all my mods, garbage collection occurred every 2-3 seconds which obviously caused massive stuttering and severely affected my FPS each time they occurred (between -5 and -10 FPS briefly each time they occurred)
• Enabled TurboBoost on my processor to 4.2GHz within my X99 Extreme4 Motherboard BIOS
• Set Power options to keep processor state at 100% and thus keep processor speed at 4.2GHz at all times
• Note: I use Kaspersky Antivirus, and disabling it made no significant difference to performance which was surprising.

Now to reenable my mods one by one and see how badly each contributed to Garbage Collection frequency. Hopefully I'll still be able to at the very least run KER without worry about frequent stuttering. It's the only mod I'd prefer to not have to live without. [Edit] So far KER isn't severely affecting anything and the MemGraph mod is easily able to reduce Garbage Collection frequency to the point where they aren't major distractions anymore.

One more update - I'm able to get a stable 9-10 FPS when trying to launch Mark Thrimm's larger space station "Cassiopeia", and that's with the KER mod installed. Given that's what Mark himself was achieving as well, I think I'll happily call it a day and move forward with building my own ships now. 

Thanks again everyone!

Edited April 8, 2017 by ekstrj

[LoSBoL]

14 hours ago, ekstrj said:

[Edit]

Wow - Setting my power options to 100% minimum processor state made all the difference in the world. Also, I saw in HWMonitor that one core did in fact jump to 100% utilized. I successfully launched Mark Thrimm's smaller space station into LKO without dropping below 20 FPS the entire time. And, I was averaging 30 FPS the majority of the launch. Once I finished the orbit but before detaching the launcher, I was sitting at 40 FPS. I guess I will go ahead and do some minor OCing of my processor as well and see how high I can get it! 

Thank you for the suggestion, LoSBoL!

That's great!  Now launch Cassiopeia!!

[ekstrj]

7 hours ago, LoSBoL said:

That's great!  Now launch Cassiopeia!!

I did! See my last post where I gave it a shot (Knowing full well that beast was meant to break machines). I got the same performance Mark Thrimm got, which was perfectly acceptable given I could fly it fine (with patience).

Once I resolved the stuttering issue, 9-10 FPS wasn't a big deal at all. Before I made this topic, I thought the stuttering was just another part of the performance drop from 100 to 10 FPS. I didn't know it was due to all the Garbage collection happening like every 3 seconds. Thanks to Padishar's MemGraph mod, I was able to reduce the frequency significantly. 

Stuttering every 3 seconds at 9 FPS meant the game was virtually unplayable (for me). Stuttering every 30-60 seconds at 9 FPS is way more manageable.

Edited April 9, 2017 by ekstrj

[LoSBoL]

Ah, missed that, read the post yesterday evening and didn't read the edit

9-10 FPS sounds great for a 1000+ part ascend