Speeding up KSP?

[something]

Before I had a VGA, I used onboard graphics as well. On certain planets, I ran into huge FPS issues, so I asked a question similar to yours. Somebody - no idea who - told me to try this one:

 

In your KSP directory, there's a file named "settings.cfg". You can open that file and search for the line

UNSUPPORTED_LEGACY_SHADER_TERRAIN = False

Change the value to "True" and save the file. Do not forget to backup before saving.

 

Activating the unsupported shaders, gave me quite some FPS while it didn't look as pretty as the supported shaders. My game went from "not playable" to "slideshow" on Moho and Duna, so yeah, it might be worth a try.

 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

20 minutes ago, dundun93 said:

Way too professional. You said it as if you were writing a letter to someone.

Well, he is a moderator lol.

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Well, he is a moderator lol.

LOL!

Hes sooo funny!!!

[Kerbal101]

1 hour ago, Geonovast said:

I currently have an i5-7500 @ 3.4 ghz.  I've been contemplating going up to an i7.  Are you saying it's not really worth it, since my computer's primary mission is to explore the Kerbin system?

Well, I'd like to clarify that I am not a Squad employee and not a developer. Its all coming from my own experiences and experiments as a player.   Its all under YMMV and "every system differs" excuse.
You need to compare the single core performance to determine which system might give you more reserves, but this won't prevent other caveats I specified. The geometry bottleneck won't give limitless freedom even on fastest CPU.

I can see  the dependency between that and fps, so this is an observed dependency right now at least on my system (and not in the point in the future when its fixed, if its fixable, given the various conditions).
What I can recommend is a smarter approach instead - the part count reduction, part detail reduction, part capacity increase or technology change.
The Ubozur welding mod didn't help me ressolve the issue, because it would require also geometry merging that is currently not possible with it - and it introduces own limitations and quirks.

As an example of smarter choice, say if you need a lot of energy during long nights - go with fuel cells, NUK, higher capacity batteries(mods), tweakscaling the battery(mod) or nuclear reactors (mods) instead of packing 2000 batteries.

[Kerbal101]

1 hour ago, dundun92 said:

Is DirectX any better?

I heard that DX9 had the same bottlenecking draw calls as OpenGL4.x.
Then I heard that DX11 and OpenGL4.5 have multicore support, and Vulkan / DX12 are far better here.
Plus there is nuances how Unity actually renders that under various systems - and own caveats of these systems, like disabled DMA on some video cards due to bugs in hardware, for example.

TL;DR I am sorry, I don't know. I recommend to test-out and bissect each case manually on individual system to see if it improves the situation.

[Guest]

Forget 30fps. More like 10. I was confused as to how fast 30 FPS was.

[GenjoKoan]

Someone mentioned x-science as a cpu-cycles consumer.  And there are many other mods like this that want cpu attention constantly.  When in career mode, I am happy to give all the cpu cycles any science mod wants.  But for aerial combat, who is looking to measure magnetic flux or temperatures?  Assuming you have not already done so, duplicate your happy, working KSP install and then savagely rip out every mod not fundamental to combat.  You may even trim loads of parts, like Mk-3 do dahs in your plane parts mods.  Unless you are doing combat with shuttles?   I have been experimenting with memory and cpu cycle black holes a lot because often I would rather play on my late 2012 Mac Mini with its 2.3 GHz Core i7 and HD Graphics 4000 than clear off the desk and wake up my Windows PC.  My other, biggest problem is that I consider about 100 mods to be *essential*, if you know what I mean.

[Ty Tan Tu]

On 1/7/2018 at 12:10 PM, dundun92 said:

I have a Win 7 Intel I5 laptop with an NVS 5200M and 8gb ram. I also have a old desktop with 4gb ram, and a VIIV processor plus integrated intel graphics. I am looking to process 700 parts at 10-15FPS in FAR and AJE. What free or under 20$ softwares/hardware mod/KSP settings change could significantly speed up KSP on the laptop? And how much would it cost to upgrade the desktop to similar standards?

One one the biggest bottle necks with the Viiv is I think they are running a 32 bit operating system. That will kill you. Maybe consider loading a 64 bit version of Linux? It is free so well with in the $20 budget.

From my own experience from upgrading an older computer, RAM is the biggest bang for the buck. I had a single 8 gig stick and adding a second 8 gig stick gave me duel channel RAM, this helps on board graphics a lot. The CPU may not benefit much from the faster duel channel RAM much, but the GPU will . 4 gigs of RAM is just enough to run the operating system. If you have two RAM slots and a single 4 gig stick installed, add another 4 gigs of RAM. That alone will probably give you about  30% performance increase.  I added a Nvidia GT 1030 (case and power supply limitations), but if you could add a GTX 1050 or 1060, I think you might be close to your goal - or at least a lot closer.

That being said, I still maintain that a system based on the Pentium G4560 and a GTX 1050 is a viable gaming computer, and can be built for around $500 including the big bite of buying Windows 10 64.

Edited January 13, 2018 by Ty Tan Tu
I typed byte instead of bite,

[Guest]

18 hours ago, GenjoKoan said:

My other, biggest problem is that I consider about 100 mods to be *essential*, if you know what I mean.

Ah yes, I understand. I used to have that many mods.

[Galileo]

Wait, there is a @dundun92 and a @dundun93 here? Something smells fishy.

Edited January 13, 2018 by Galileo

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Galileo said:

Wait, there is a @dundun92 and a @dundun93 here? Something smells fishy.

Brothers...

[Galileo]

5 minutes ago, dundun92 said:

Brothers...

Sweet! 

[Guest]

26 minutes ago, Galileo said:

Sweet! 

Yeah...

[Guest]

On 1/8/2018 at 3:04 PM, something said:

Before I had a VGA, I used onboard graphics as well. On certain planets, I ran into huge FPS issues, so I asked a question similar to yours. Somebody - no idea who - told me to try this one:

 

In your KSP directory, there's a file named "settings.cfg". You can open that file and search for the line

UNSUPPORTED_LEGACY_SHADER_TERRAIN = False

Change the value to "True" and save the file. Do not forget to backup before saving.

 

Activating the unsupported shaders, gave me quite some FPS while it didn't look as pretty as the supported shaders. My game went from "not playable" to "slideshow" on Moho and Duna, so yeah, it might be worth a try.

 

Wow. Thanks! I tried it yesterday, and it seriously boosted my FPS. In the space center and when processing 1 airplane, the FPS doubled from 20-30FPS to 50+FPS. In a 400 part count dogfight, I got about ~20 FPS. And I haven't even messed with the Physics Delta yet, or the ocean tesselation.

[Archgeek]

Wait a minute, a 700 part behmoth is one thing, but shouldn't the game run a lot better with 10 70-part craft?  'Last I checked the big nasty on part count was the unparallelizable part-tree force vector calculations, which become emminently candidate for multi-thread shenanigans when you slice up those 700 parts into 10 separate trees.  The main game thread'll still be the bottleneck, as it's got plenty of tracking, organizing and display duties to attend to, but with say 4 cores to go around, you can have 3 cores handle 3 craft each, and one core handle 1 craft and the rest for some surprisingly decent parallelization gains.  That's still a good 210 parts a core (probably in two threads because hyperthreading, so 140 and 70), which is likely still yellowclock territory when there are 10 things to supervise and mediate weapons collisions between, but it should be a lot peppier than the 700-part monster scenario, which would probably be redclocked if it were doing much.

[Corona688]

3 hours ago, Archgeek said:

Wait a minute, a 700 part behmoth is one thing, but shouldn't the game run a lot better with 10 70-part craft?

Some better some worse.  It can parallelize some of it, but still has to force them to move in lock-step with each other, which loses some of the benefit.  It also has a lot of ship-ship collisions to watch for, which is very expensive.

Edited January 19, 2018 by Corona688

[LoSBoL]

[snip]

There is another setting which makes a night and day difference, especially for laptops.

Most if not all laptops running Windows run in 'energy saving' or 'balanced' battery modes as standard energy setting (even when connected to a power source), which massively puts a strain on Kerbal Space Programs ability to do calculations.  It makes good practice to set the energy settings to 'high performance'.  You may want to add that in your speed up guide.

Edited March 23, 2018 by Vanamonde

[MechBFP]

2 hours ago, sachinkhanna32 said:

There are many ways by which you can increase your laptop or pc performace.

But I would highly recommend to use a new RAM.

But Alternatively you can read this speed up laptop guide. By following the steps mentioned in this guide you can easily speed up by 30%.

That guide is garbage, just so you know. That might speed up boot times, but will do liquid all to other performance unless your PC is a malware infested bot box. 

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

53 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:

There is another setting which makes a night and day difference, especially for laptops.

Most if not all laptops running Windows run in 'energy saving' or 'balanced' battery modes as standard energy setting (even when connected to a power source), which massively puts a strain on Kerbal Space Programs ability to do calculations.  It makes good practice to set the energy settings to 'high performance'.  You may want to add that in your speed up guide.

Always run in high performance and just leave it plugged in. It'll cook your crotch, but I've already got 4 kids; so who cares?

[LoSBoL]

5 hours ago, Cpt Kerbalkrunch said:

Always run in high performance and just leave it plugged in. It'll cook your crotch, but I've already got 4 kids; so who cares?

I'm rather fond on keeping stuff in working condition. 

Although my laptop could run KSP, I always stream KSP to my laptop and let the computer upstairs take all the heat.

[invision]

the only way for certain to get the game running better is to buy a new CPU (cant do that for laptops)

my old AMD fx-8120@ 4ghz ran kerbal pretty badly once you got to over 50 parts or so, but it ran most other games smooth 60 fps but kerbal would start at 60 fps and slowly drop to 30 or less and stay there. then i built a new pc and used a AMD Ryzen 5 [email protected] and my fps went from 30-60 to over 100 fps and will stay around there for the entire play session.

300 part craft using the FX-8120 net me 10 fps

300 part using Ryzen 5 net 40+ fps

thats pretty good considering you can buy Ryzen CPU's starting at 99.99

[Geonovast]

2 hours ago, invision said:

buy a new CPU (cant do that for laptops)

A bit generalized.  I'm sure that's the case for some, but I've had three Dell laptops, and every single one had a replaceable processor.

[invision]

1 hour ago, Geonovast said:

A bit generalized.  I'm sure that's the case for some, but I've had three Dell laptops, and every single one had a replaceable processor.

ah good to know. i havent looked into how laptop hardware is recently configured and assumed they are still soldered to the board

[Aeroboi]

I got a overclocked I7 8800k to 5.1 Gigahertz on a Corsair H150I cooling unit while running in Windows 10 having shut down about a gazillion of unused background apps and services to limit single core/thread cpu performance to a minimum and a 700 part ship will make me run for the hills.

Also take note that many movie makers on youtube use slowmotion techniques just for the sake of capturing their monstrosities on video with reasonable framerate.
The FPS seen in videos is not the FPS experience during the actual recording.

I call it movie making sorcery  

[LoSBoL]

2 hours ago, Aeroboi said:

I got a overclocked I7 8800k to 5.1 Gigahertz on a Corsair H150I cooling unit while running in Windows 10 having shut down about a gazillion of unused background apps and services to limit single core/thread cpu performance to a minimum and a 700 part ship will make me run for the hills.

Also take note that many movie makers on youtube use slowmotion techniques just for the sake of capturing their monstrosities on video with reasonable framerate.
The FPS seen in videos is not the FPS experience during the actual recording.

I call it movie making sorcery  

They don't come any faster than that. It's pretty telling that we've basically hit the physical limitation of progression concerning KSP's performance.
The last couple of years there is little to no gain in single thread performance due to hitting the ceiling of what is physically possible. The focus by Intel and AMD to gain performance is shifted to expanding the number of cores per processor.
Many games profit from multicore usage, KSP however is a completely different beast and although  progressing in multicore usage has been made, we will always be limited by single thread performance for the physics calculations.
We need a miracle in technical discoveries to advance single thread performance before we can fly 700+ part vehicles with descent framerates. 

Edited March 23, 2018 by LoSBoL