Frame rate

[Leopard]

Installed today, 1.9.1, it looks very nice

refresh rate with the defaults is treacle

went to 1024 x 768 with everything I can find cranked down and it’s much better but obviously less pretty

Q: which settings hammer the frame rate more than others?

 

machine is old but:

i5, 3.1GHz

8GB ram

integrated video

[Lisias]

36 minutes ago, Leopard said:

 

integrated video

This is your weak point. You have a dispute between GPU and CPU for the RAM bus.

Set the maximum FPS to 60. This will lessen a bit that dispute, and so you can raise something else a bit and get prettier (or less ugly!) Graphics.

[Curveball Anders]

9 hours ago, Leopard said:

i5, 3.1GHz
8GB ram
integrated video

Check.
Check.
Ouch...

While KSP is CPU heavy (and ridiculously RAM hungry) it has issue with most versions of integrated video.

I assume that it's a laptop (otherwise, just get a GPU almost any will be better).

What I have done when forced to play on some old lappie (vacations or travel) is to turn all graphic settings down to minimum, not just resolution.

Then I tweak them up one by one until I get to a point when it's playable.

The thing is the GPU bottlenecks differ between different designs.

PS.
I played on one quite similar to what you describe and it ran quite well, so long it didn't have to render and form of ground surface...
So I had to change the camera view all the time to avoid rendering the ground, even at launch.
It was fine in space but a horror driving rovers...
DS.

[Leopard]

did wonder about the graphics card, didn't occur to me that a bus conflict would be the issue.. ta for the heads up.

its a desktop actually, just an older one - Dell Optiplex 790 SFF, would like to upgrade the graphics card anyway but its been about 15 years since I was mucking about with computers so not sure what will be:

 

- cheap

- will physically fit in the small case

- not need the power supply upgrading

 

will have a try tweaking the frame rate stuff though 

[Leopard]

frame rate set to 60, display size at something a bit larger, 1440 x 900 and its playable.

 

the tip on avoiding the ground being in shot, or not much of it seriously helps as well, its now playable

 

had a look round on graphics cards, there are a few in a reasonable price range, and plenty of lunatics suggesting ones that cost three times what the whole machine cost - limit to what I want to spend upgrading this as outside KSP it basically does what I want it to for now, pondering 16GB ram though (all the board will take) but figure a 2GB graphics card may be worth it

[Lisias]

42 minutes ago, Leopard said:

had a look round on graphics cards, there are a few in a reasonable price range, and plenty of lunatics suggesting ones that cost three times what the whole machine cost - limit to what I want to spend upgrading this as outside KSP it basically does what I want it to for now, pondering 16GB ram though (all the board will take) but figure a 2GB graphics card may be worth it

On a personal opinion, I would prefer a 4GB GPU card if you are willing to shove the newer Add'Ons with the new shining textures. These beasts are eating a lot of VRAM (not only RAM), and since the VRAM needs to feed not only the textures, but also the framebuffer for the video mode (usually two or three framebuffers, to allow smooth animation), you will find that 2GB will be not enough - when this happens, the videodriver usually allocates some RAM to act as texture RAM, and we have that dispute between GPU and CPU on the RAM bus again (but, granted, a bit less harsh).

By the same reason, you will probably enjoy having 16G RAM on the machine too - on KSP, textures are loaded into CPU memory anyway, and fed into the GPU's VRAM on demand.

[Leopard]

thats worth knowing...

most 4GB graphics cards though seem to either eat more power than this box will have, or cost more than it did, or both...

will have to have a think on that, to be honest with the graphics turned right down it looks fine to me anyway, aware it could look better though

main RAM upgrade is likely useful anyway

[KrisKelvin]

I was wondering about which are the hungriest settings too. I have an i7 CPU with 32GB RAM on board and a Nvidia GeForce Titan X (12GB) graphics card.

I am running it at 1920x1080 and it's a little laggy. Are there some settings I should lower first before I choose a lower screen res?

Thanks

[Leopard]

1 hour ago, KrisKelvin said:

I was wondering about which are the hungriest settings too. I have an i7 CPU with 32GB RAM on board and a Nvidia GeForce Titan X (12GB) graphics card.

I am running it at 1920x1080 and it's a little laggy. Are there some settings I should lower first before I choose a lower screen res?

Thanks

I think I just started to cry...

[Lisias]

18 hours ago, KrisKelvin said:

I was wondering about which are the hungriest settings too. I have an i7 CPU with 32GB RAM on board and a Nvidia GeForce Titan X (12GB) graphics card.

I am running it at 1920x1080 and it's a little laggy. Are there some settings I should lower first before I choose a lower screen res?

Thanks

With a hell of a machine like that, I really doubt your problem is the GPU or VRAM.

Let's try a trouble shooting. Create a completely new (and disposable) savegame.

1) Fly a pretty simple craft - 5 parts maximum. Check how things are going.

2) Fly a part with about 100 parts minimum. Check how things are going.

If the number 1 is laggy already, then you had abused the EVE settings to a whole new level  or you have something borking relentlessly on your system. Some Add'Ons can bork on a pretty special place called Update (or, worst, on the FixedUpdated) that are code that runs a really lot of times per second. If something goes wrong on that code, a error message is logged on the KSP.log file - and having this file being written tens or even hundred times a second can put the best of the computers crying on its knees. Check the size of the KSP.log, when this happens you have a really huge file (hundreds of megabytes, once I reached 1G).

If the item 1 runs OK, and the 2 goes bad, try a 50 part craft and compare it with the option 1 and 2.

This will help me to guess what's going on (different Add'Ons induces heavy computations in different ways - if you don't feel a difference between 50 and 100 parts, then it's probably something related to the simulator itself. If 50 feels better than 100, then it's probably too much add'ons installed, and you will need to profile them to choose who will leave).

 

17 hours ago, Leopard said:

I think I just started to cry...

Do you have some sparing paper tissue to loan?

Edited June 28, 2020 by Lisias
Tyops! Surprised?

[KrisKelvin]

10 hours ago, Lisias said:

With a hell of a machine like that, I really doubt your problem is the GPU or VRAM.

Let's try a trouble shooting. Create a completely new (and disposable) savegame.

1) Fly a pretty simple craft - 5 parts maximum. Check how things are going.

2) Fly a part with about 100 parts minimum. Check how things are going.

If the number 1 is laggy already, then you had abused the EVE settings to a whole new level  or you have something borking relentlessly on your system. Some Add'Ons can bork on a pretty special place called Update (or, worst, on the FixedUpdated) that are code that runs a really lot of times per second. If something goes wrong on that code, a error message is logged on the KSP.log file - and having this file being written tens or even hundred times a second can put the best of the computers crying on its knees. Check the size of the KSP.log, when this happens you have a really huge file (hundreds of megabytes, once I reached 1G).

If the item 1 runs OK, and the 2 goes bad, try a 50 part craft and compare it with the option 1 and 2.

This will help me to guess what's going on (different Add'Ons induces heavy computations in different ways - if you don't feel a difference between 50 and 100 parts, then it's probably something related to the simulator itself. If 50 feels better than 100, then it's probably too much add'ons installed, and you will need to profile them to choose who will leave).

 

Do you have some sparing paper tissue to lean?

Ok, thanks. I just tried what you suggested and I am not really seeing any glitchiness even with big craft. So i think I must have had something else running last time. Thanks anyway.

[Leopard]

I suspect more tissue is required, and possibly a mop & bucket...

 

[KrisKelvin]

On 6/28/2020 at 1:23 PM, Leopard said:

I suspect more tissue is required, and possibly a mop & bucket...

 

It's a pretty old machine to be honest! I don't think you guys need all that much tissue. I somehow doubt you're all struggling with 486s and 16MB of RAM....

[Leopard]

On 7/2/2020 at 10:46 AM, KrisKelvin said:

It's a pretty old machine to be honest! I don't think you guys need all that much tissue. I somehow doubt you're all struggling with 486s and 16MB of RAM....

16MB of ram... the 486 I had could only dream of that much, 8 I think it had.. and the 16Mhz Atari Falcon sitting next to it blew the things socks off when it came to doing most things

 

this machines not bad, just a refurbished office one