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Is KSP effected by the Meltdown performance patch?


Technical Ben

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I did not do a benchmark yet, but the Ingame performance should not be affected enough to make the influence recognizable.
The slowdown is only caused when a program wants to use functions from the system. There are not going to be many calls for system functions while playing. What will be affected howevery is the loading time, KSP needs to call one or more system functions for each and every file that it loads and saves, which will be a lot. Especially with multiple mods. 

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Not sure whether each draw call to graphics drivers would be affected.  I'm pretty sure that in the past graphics drivers ran in ring 0 and were effectively part of the kernel.  That had security implications, so it might have been changed since then. 

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1 hour ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

My computer has all the latest Windows updates.

Haven't noticed any difference is there is one?

Well......  I dug through a lot of that thread @Dfthu linked and my very inexpert impression is that the Meltdown fix increases the time needed for disk I/O and such things, so doesn't really impact game FPS.  However, it would increase the time needed for initial loading, auto- and quicksaving, and final exit.  I've already noticed this, especially with the autosaves and quicksaves.  Those tend to freeze the game for a couple of seconds.  With quicksaves, it's no biggie as you generally are at a natural pause in the gameplay, such as having just finished circularizing an orbit, or landing, or whatever.  It's more annoying with the autosaves because they just happen on their own, often while you're trying to do something.

In general, Meltdown doesn't seem to be a real issue for desktop users.  Gaming, browsing, and socializing don't do much of the things that the fix slows down.  What's really being killed by the Meltdown fix are servers of all kinds, because their whole job is doing the types of things that the Meltdown fix makes take longer.

Then there's Spectre.  I'm even less sure about this than the above.

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13 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

 However, it would increase the time needed for initial loading, auto- and quicksaving, and final exit.  I've already noticed this, especially with the autosaves and quicksaves.  Those tend to freeze the game for a couple of seconds. 

I've noticed the same thing, when i quicksave it takes 3-5 seconds. Which is slower then i remember. 

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2 hours ago, Dfthu said:

I've noticed the same thing, when i quicksave it takes 3-5 seconds. Which is slower then i remember. 

Don't discount a psychosomatic cause.  These exploits have been around for a long time.  They're not going to start affecting your computer just because the media made a circus about it, and you're now aware of it from a bunch of hype.

 

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The short answer is Yes. Anything that involves memory access that could occur at the same time as a system call could potentially be slowed by the “patch”, depending on your chosen OS and processor vendor and how either of those decided to “patch” the problem. 

The long answer is go study microelectronics and computer engineering for a half dozen years and then come back and I might be able to explain why in such a way that it might make sense. (Actually, Meltdown is rather simple to explain once you get past the idea that Intel processors are non-Scalar (or SuperScalar or whatever trademarked buzzword).)

 

[Edit: As for benchmarks, that’s going to depend on so many different variables that everybody will end up with a different number. The exact impact of the “patch” will depend on what you do, what you do it with, the current phase of the moon, etc.]

Edited by Cydonian Monk
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7 hours ago, Geonovast said:

Don't discount a psychosomatic cause.

 

6 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

[Edit: As for benchmarks, that’s going to depend on so many different variables that everybody will end up with a different number. The exact impact of the “patch” will depend on what you do, what you do it with, the current phase of the moon, etc.]

Ah yes...   Here's my psychosomatic benchmark....

Early this morning, it being my day off, I got up with the intention of reading this forum and then doing a lot of KSP.  While reading this forum, I first became aware of the whole Meltdown/Spectre thing.  So I spent a few hours reading up on that, just out of curiosity because, after all, I have Windows Update set on daily autopilot and this whole story is a week old, so I should already be covered already, right?  After reading all this stuff, I decided to open Windows Update and look at my update history to be sure I already had the "patch".  And it turned out, Windows had not updated since 14 Dec 17.  WHAT?!?!?!?  Thus, any perceived increase in save and load times I reported above were entirely psychosomatic.

So I hit the "Check for Updates" button and it looked for 20 minutes but never found anything.  Meanwhile, I had a great connection for other stuff.  This made me dig some more and I came across the issue with various anti-virus blocking the "patch".  Turns out mine doesn't, but I updated it anyway, rebooted, and still couldn't get Windows Update to find the "patch".

Then I went to the Microsoft page and tried various diagnostics to fix the problem.  None of them worked.  Windows Update still refused to find anything.

At this point, I told the Microsoft Virtual Agent that I wanted to talk to a real person.  After waiting on hold for about 2 minutes, I got an operator who put me on hold for about an hour to talk to somebody who might be able to fix my problem.  And it took the combined efforts of this guy, 2 or 3 of his buddies, and myself, over the course of 8 hours, to solve the problem that was keeping Windows Update from working.  Seems to have been some weird Win7 issue.  But we finally got it solved and I still have Win7 instead of the hated Win10, so there's that, at least.

Anyway, now that I can affirmatively say that I do in fact have the Meltdown "patch" installed, I really don't notice any performance hit, although the game crashes a lot more.

 

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AMD Ryzen user here,  pretty sure my Windows 10 OS is fully updated and I haven't noticed any difference in performance. KSP actually seems to run a bit smoother than when I just build this latest system, might just be wishful thinking though.

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