KSP v.18 - hopes and dreams for the big performance update

[jpinard]

I can't believe there's not a huge thread for this already.

 

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Celestial Body Visual Improvements 

If you’ve been following KSP on social media, you might have already learned that new high-quality texture maps & graphic shaders are being implemented for various celestial bodies. In update 1.8 you’ll find high quality texture maps for Mun, Duna and a few other Celestial Bodies that will be revealed along the way. 

If there are any concerns that the update might hinder the game’s performance on your computers, rest easy knowing you’ll be able to select the celestial bodies’ shader quality in the settings to low (legacy), medium or high. Even for the legacy option, you can expect texture stretching errors to be vastly improved.  With the high-quality option, pixel density will be maintained regardless of camera distance to the celestial body, as well as a lack of tiling problems. All in all, celestial bodies will look sharper and more realistic. Take a look for yourself:

Unity Upgrade

Update 1.8 brings an improvement that Squad has wanted to introduce for some time now - an upgrade to the underlying engine of the game to Unity 2019.2

With this upgrade there are some long-desired performance and graphic improvements, some of which come out of the box, and some which will allow further enhancements down the road.  

These include:

• KSP will now run under DX11 on the Windows platform (DX9 will no longer be supported) which allows many graphical improvements, such as those on the planetary textures.
• A new PhysX version with the associated performance and precision improvements.
• GPU instancing to improve rendering performance.
• Incremental garbage collection to reduce frame rate stutters, particularly in modded installs.

And many others.

While this version will have a larger impact on many mods, more than 1.6 or 1.7, the process has been tested and is relatively fast.  Still, there will be several changes, due to the introduction of the Roslyn compiler, which brings full C#7 support and moving to full .NET 4.x API (.NET 3.5 support is deprecated). There will be continued efforts to reduce significant impact for Modders, but the belief is this time around the benefits of this upgrade far outweigh the drawbacks. 

 

 

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This is exactly the kind of thing I've wanted to see for years and has the potential to make a dramatic difference in the game.  I just wonder what month they are targeting this release for?

 

[KerbolExplorer]

That's nice to hear

I have been having bad performance in the recent versions so this is nice to hear!

 

[RedKraken]

this is going to be good.

[klgraham1013]

I'll wait for the chickens to hatch before launching them into space.