I upgraded my computer and KSP loads and runs so much faster now

[zit]

I at first had a processor from 7 years ago and a SATA HDD. Stock KSP would take 2-3 minutes to load, and with heavy mods like Kopernicus and a planet pack it would take upwards of 10 or even 15.

Now I have a much newer CPU and that enabled me to get an NVMe SSD. The GPU is the same (Hoping to swap it out), but now loading times have been cut to 30 seconds and the game doesn't lag on startup.

The jump to a massively more recent CPU and a much faster storage unit has paid well off.

I won't get into specifics because then it'll seem like I'm advertising.

[Francois424]

Heh, turning off terrain scatter really helps TONS with lag (albeit planetary lag only).
If you make a large lander or a large rover, and your clock turns yellow, just reduce or turn off the scatter.  nifty trick.
Deleting all parts you do not use (including those in squad folders) will give you quite a speed boost on startup as well, not to mention freeing a few 100k's of memory.

Gratz, and Good Luck !

[moguy16]

What cpu did you have, and what did you upgrade to?

i have ab i5 4th gen and it takes me a bit over 20 minites to start and another minute for the text to be clickable

maybe moving it to my ssd will be better

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 12/8/2019 at 8:40 PM, zit said:

I at first had a processor from 7 years ago and a SATA HDD. Stock KSP would take 2-3 minutes to load, and with heavy mods like Kopernicus and a planet pack it would take upwards of 10 or even 15.

Now I have a much newer CPU and that enabled me to get an NVMe SSD. The GPU is the same (Hoping to swap it out), but now loading times have been cut to 30 seconds and the game doesn't lag on startup.

The jump to a massively more recent CPU and a much faster storage unit has paid well off.

I won't get into specifics because then it'll seem like I'm advertising.

I'm almost certain your main contributer here is the NVME drive; even older intel CPU's are just now starting to bottleneck in games. With the degree of it being how GPU heavy the game is, and KSP doesn't beat up the GPU at all without mods using silly huge textures.

If you moved to a new platform (Z170-Z370/X370-X570) then i also wonder what role DDR4 would be playing. 2133 is the default speed for DDR4, and would be noticeable.

All of this i'm saying is because i run KSP from a HDD and load times are in the minute range with about 30-50 mods installed and 16,000 MM patches.

[Warmachine]

Loading bottlenecks are 95% of the time hard drive related. Your NVMe drive is what is dropping your load times--it has blazing fast access speed with the NVMe protocol.

The processor helps, but more for physics calculations than loading files. As a rule of thumb, I look at the processor when it's gameplay calculations slowing things down, the GPU when it is texture rendering slowing things down, and the hard drive for loading times.

[DeadJohn]

On 12/8/2019 at 9:40 PM, zit said:

...SSD...

The SSD helps loading time compared to a hard drive. You didn't mention how much RAM you had in your old vs new PC; RAM helps prevent stuttering during game play especially if you use many mods.

My best startup tip is don't start the game often; use Windows sleep. (Windows 10, earlier versions might not behave so well). When I'm done playing I quick save in case of a crash then put the PC to sleep instead of quitting KSP. Game restarts are still occasionally needed because of memory leaks and slowdowns after many hours of play.

 

[zit]

On 2/10/2020 at 3:29 AM, moguy16 said:

What cpu did you have, and what did you upgrade to?

i have ab i5 4th gen and it takes me a bit over 20 minites to start and another minute for the text to be clickable

maybe moving it to my ssd will be better

AMD FX-8320 to Ryzen 7 2700X. Difference is night and day.

Dangit I just realized there's a necroposting rule.

Edited April 11, 2020 by zit

[xendelaar]

that's funny. I went from an 

I5- 4590- GTX970- SSD - 16 gb DDR3

to an

3700x- RTX2080 super - m.2 SSD - 16 gb DDR4 3200 MHz

and hardly noticed any difference in loading times. Perhaps the delta is too small to notice any difference? in any case.. I was a bit underwhelmed.. 

On 12/9/2019 at 6:57 AM, Francois424 said:

Deleting all parts you do not use (including those in squad folders) will give you quite a speed boost on startup as well, not to mention freeing a few 100k's of memory.

WOW... never thought about this little trick. which parts did you throw away? I'm afraid that maybe those useless parts come in handy at some point...

 

[Stone Blue]

21 minutes ago, xendelaar said:

WOW... never thought about this little trick. which parts did you throw away? I'm afraid that maybe those useless parts come in handy at some point...

You can basically delete the *whole* Squad/Parts folder...
*HOWEVER*... be aware, any mods that rely on stock parts, stock cfgs, or stock models/textures, of course, will have issues.

But the game *does* start, with absolutely NO parts...
I only suggest such extreme pruning, to people who are very familiar with manually installing mods, and *how* parts are made and used in KSP.

Edited April 15, 2020 by Stone Blue

[Francois424]

14 hours ago, xendelaar said:

WOW... never thought about this little trick. which parts did you throw away? I'm afraid that maybe those useless parts come in handy at some point...

It was a while ago, but I remember gettingrid of almost all the tiny parts.  Like the toroidal tank, the gold doughnut one, most of the engines I never ever use, half the beams, some plates (tho these days I've started using them to "Armor" my rover; makes them more heavy but they can sure take a beating).
Then if you do not ever do space planes/planes, or use stock rotors, you get rid of like 20 parts, just like that.  When you get into modding, there's even more parts you can remove as you replace them by those of your mod.
Of course any early-game rovers/craft that use said parts wont be able to be used, and if any are in orbit somewhere, they get deleted outright when the game loads.  So make backups just in case.

Good luck !