1.7.3 frame rates

[Jimbodiah]

Always played 1.3.1 with RSS and a ton of mods, updated to 1.6.1 when RSS support came out but never really played it as new versions just kept on piling on top and mods nod keeping up, now decided to try 1.7.3.    I have a fresh install, unmodded, and am getting like 3fps at the same high settings I've used on the fully modded installs.  Anyone have similar issues with 1.7.x? Any ideas?

PC is definitely not a potato so is not the limiting factor. As stated: fresh vanilla install.

[Lisias]

It's a wild guess, but something that happened to me is that KSP on 1.7 series are more VRAM hungry.

My MacPotato has about 384Mb of VRAM, and it was enough for 1.4. I was using texture quality at 1x. By installing Add'Ons, demanding more VRAM, I ended up settling with 2x.

With 1.7, I'm using 4x and almost considering going to 8x.

What happens is that when you exhaust your VRAM, the GPU starts to fetch textures from the CPU's RAM through the PCIe bus, and this is way slower than fetching them from the GPU's VRAM. It's like loading files from the USB's pendrive and not from your hard disk - you end up loading the file, but gosh.. It's slower.

Edited August 10, 2019 by Lisias
propper post.

[Loskene]

I did notice the stock game is a lot more susceptible to runaway RAM usage or something as well, or I assume since it's my current bottleneck at 8GB DDR3. I've been getting a lot of crashes when switching scenes and loading a craft at the same time, such as reverting to VAB/SPH (reverting to launch and recovering is fine, returning to KSC and entering the building before loading up the craft file is fine, but nothing that combines those actions). I've had to cut down my part count and actively avoid crash triggers because of it, and the only explanations I've found for the symptoms online are RAM limitations. I haven't got framerate drops like you describe though, even with all the visual mods (I've had to remove most of the part mods but scripts and shaders are good), because I have a midrange 4GB GPU and don't run into the problems Lisias mentioned. It wouldn't surprise me to learn the new additions and DLC have raised the minimum system specs across the board.

[Jimbodiah]

Running a 1080Ti with 11Gb, should be enough, KSP has always been more load on the CPU than anything. Running a 8086K (binned 8700K) at 4.8Ghz on all cores in a Z390 board, 32GB ram, Evo Plus M.2 SSDs.

KSP has always been low fps even with memgraph to remove the stuttering, never reached anything over 60fps (3440x1440 on 120Hz monitor), and that was fully modded. I can try forcing DX11/12 in the command line to see if that helps, will need it for SSTU anyway.

[cantab]

Known bug with Kopernicus. Disabling both terrain scatter and Breaking Ground surface features may mitigate it. Otherwise rollback to KSP 1.7.1 until Kopernicus is updated.

EDIT: I didn't read. But double-check that Kopernicus isn't still in GameData by mistake. Even if no planet mods are present, Kopernicus alone causes the issue.

Edited August 11, 2019 by cantab

[Vanamonde]

Technical question moved to the Technical subforum. 

[gsantos9489]

I'm with the same problem... But my laptop is running it on 20 fps at max settings, no MODs, fresh install.

On version 1.5, everything was running fine, with about 100 MODS. 

Already tried A LOT of approaches to solve it but no one gave me a solution, even the official support team gave up claiming it was something particular on my laptop.

Really don't know what to do. It is really frustating.

[pmborg]

From my experience in KSP FPS there are 3 things that we should always keep an eye on it:

• Don't let memory used by process go above 10GB in a 16GB Computer, will kill all performance. (means that the number of mods/ texture details are too high)
• After using CTRL-Z to undo something, a using a ship with more than 200 or 300 parts, there are some kind of bug that kill half FPS, they drop half and so on, seams a bug around it, that will kill performance. (I need to avoid using crtl-z)
• Keep an eye on KSP.log because there are mods there are a killer of the log, KOS for example in some situations of fly-by-wire throw more than 100 lines per second, this is crazy... after a log file bigger than 600MB better is to close the KSP and open it again. (I need to avoid mods that fill all log with trash and exceptions mostly)