Scatterer killing frame rate.

[Turbo Ben]

Hi guys and gals, new to the forum, so be gentle

I've got about 200 hours of gameplay under my belt and still loving the game. I wanted to start a new career now I have a better idea how the game works, and thought it would be a good opportunity to install some mods. Ive got quite a few installed but I found that I was having trouble with frame rate. I have a pretty good system that I put together myself a year or so ago,  running an i7 overclocked to 5GHz, and had no trouble at all in the stock game. I only ever saw the clock flicker yellow at 3x speed in atmosphere. However, with the mods installed it was solid yellow on the launchpad with a 3 part craft. I had installed EVE and scatterer and suspected that was the issue, so I first removed EVE with no improvement. Then I removed scatterer and boom, back to (almost) stock performance. I then removed all mods other than scatterer, and back to constant yellow clock, solid red at only 2x time acceleration. I'd really like to have scatterer and EVE installed as I'm giving The World Beyond a go, and would like to experience it with all the visuals intact.

A few specs and things I've tried:

Intel i7-7700K running 5gHz (delidded with liquid metal thermal compound and water cooled. Runs to 70C tops with all 4 cores being stress tested)

16GB DDR4 RAM

NVIDIA GTX 1050 Graphics running the game on 3 monitors. (Possibly the weak spot in the setup, but stock game had no issues whatsoever running accross all 3 monitors)

Samsung evo SSD

Power settings set to performance - made no difference.

running -force-d3d11 made no difference other than to introduce some glitches.

Running 64bit KSP 1.5.1 - Scatterer installed using CKAN so should be up to date.

 

 

Please bear in mind I'm new to modding PC games, in fact I haven't been this involved in a game in years!

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!

 

 

Edited December 14, 2018 by Turbo Ben
Adding further info

[Beetlecat]

So -- nobody responded at the time - but the question is still pertinent; how do we tweak/appease scatterer?

It could just be: "Unity isn't ideal for this kind of sim with hi-quality graphics" --and that would be fine, but KSP is a funny beast, and usually it's the physics simulations running on a single core that are what brings the game to its knees. Scatterer isn't necessarily about the part count, but the interaction of the whole system can still be sluggish even on the biggest rigs. Your 3-monitor setup may be what's causing you grief, since you otherwise have a really robust sounding system (even with "only" 16GB of ram...).

It's been noted on the main thread that lots of terrain scatter visible actually has a huge detrimental effect, as scatterer (coincidentally named in this case) seems to be applying effects to each bit of terrain scatter in real time and at all visible distances, essentially doing a lot of "work" for probably no gain.

If you're still playing Kerbal, and want to see if Terrain scatter adjustments make any difference, that could add to some potential troubleshooting or configuration ideas.

[HebaruSan]

Scatterer could probably use some optimization. I remember seeing a lot of LINQ in it, which supposedly causes extra garbage generation*.

 

* Maybe only with certain compilers? Not sure, just noting what I saw.

[Turbo Ben]

I found the problem. A GTX 1050 isn't up to the job of scatterer on 3 screens. An RTX 2070 however is It seems that the physics suffers if the GPU isn't man enough. With the RTX 2070, I get a solid 60FPS (limited in the settings) in most situations, dropping to maybe 40 on re-entry. I only ever get a yellow clock now at 3x or 4x acceleration on re-entry.