Jump to content

Let's Speculate on Minimum and Recommended System Requirements


Wubslin

Recommended Posts

Well I've got to admit it. From the pre-release gameplay footage we've seen so far, yonder sequel to everybody's favorite green space frog falling simulator looks good. Really good. Like, worryingly good. The first and only time I've ever built my own PC was back in 2015, and as the years crawled by it has slowly begun showing its age.

When I install graphics mods and build ships approaching what looks to be the norm for the sequel in KSP 1, I'll often consider it a huge win to be getting above 15 frames at any time - even while running the game at 1080p. A lot of the time I'll point my camera away from Kerbin or whatever and my frames will immediately triple. Point is, my PC sucks.

With that said, I'm a huge enough space nerd that I will use this game as a reason to build a new PC. I currently have friends trying to buy parts for builds right now, and from what I've overheard from them it seems that paying fair prices for certain components can be a ride on the struggle bus right now as due to the Current Situation™. 

So I must ask, what do we think the minimum and recommended specs are going to be for this game? I want a rock solid experience, but I'm also not trying to break the bank.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

At least 8 Gigs (that's absolute minimum for building a PC these days so)more likely 16, memory is super cheap anyway, 4 core/thread 3ghz CPU, and a decent GPU, let's say equivalent of gtx 960 so it can keep up with all reflections and stuff. I'm not worried though, my PC from 2016 (after few upgrades, but also before) runs the game smoothly with a set of mods, but even if base requirements for the new one will be higher, the overall performance should be better. Know what I mean? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, The Aziz said:

At least 8 Gigs (that's absolute minimum for building a PC these days so)more likely 16, memory is super cheap anyway, 4 core/thread 3ghz CPU, and a decent GPU, let's say equivalent of gtx 960 so it can keep up with all reflections and stuff. I'm not worried though, my PC from 2016 (after few upgrades, but also before) runs the game smoothly with a set of mods, but even if base requirements for the new one will be higher, the overall performance should be better. Know what I mean? 

I have a 970, but my CPU bottlenecks everything else. I tell you, I do NOT have a time trying to do ambitious things in KSP either in terms of building ships or running graphics mods

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, The Doodling Astronaut said:

CPU is what bottlenecks me

Well then that's what I maybe need to focus on. I've got an i5 3330 that I pulled from a wal-mart family all-in-one. Getting a better CPU though means moving off of that particular socket though which means a new motherboard, and at that point I might as well get newer RAM and a better GPU.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Wubslin said:

Well then that's what I maybe need to focus on. I've got an i5 3330 that I pulled from a wal-mart family all-in-one. Getting a better CPU though means moving off of that particular socket though which means a new motherboard, and at that point I might as well get newer RAM and a better GPU.

Oh yeah, totally. Few months ago I upgraded to i7-4790, which is I think one of the best of its generation, but then again it's ancient tech. So to do any more upgrades I will have to replace whole Mobo and everything that comes with it, because half of my hardware won't be compatible. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

99.9% chance the limiter will be CPU speed for KSP2. I spent several thousand dollars building a computer for KSP since I got tired of suffering with modded install load times and rubbish physics performance. Current setup is 8700K @ 5.0ghz, 32Gb 3600mhz DDR4, 2080ti, and several Samsung 970 series M.2 SSD.

It doesn't look like graphics will be too stressing for a modern GPU of mid-grade, I'm guessing a 1050ti or 1060 6gb is the target for "suggested" GPU. RAM will likely depend on mod count, I had to upgrade from 16 to 32 for KSP1 since I ran into the upper limit of 16Gb a number of times. The real killer for KSP is single core CPU speed. That's probably where you'd want to spend your dollars if you build a rig just for KSP/KSP2. The best single core performance CPU you can afford and overclock the heck out of it. I had a 1060 in there before the 2080ti, and it did fine. 

For KSP1, an M.2 SSD is a lifesaver, but I'm guessing (hoping) the dev team will fix whatever made my modded KSP1 take 25 minutes to load on HDD, so it might not be as critical for KSP2.

Most performance per dollar for physics based games is going to be single core CPU performance, almost certainly. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

33 minutes ago, TLTay said:

99.9% chance the limiter will be CPU speed for KSP2. I spent several thousand dollars building a computer for KSP since I got tired of suffering with modded install load times and rubbish physics performance. Current setup is 8700K @ 5.0ghz, 32Gb 3600mhz DDR4, 2080ti, and several Samsung 970 series M.2 SSD.

It doesn't look like graphics will be too stressing for a modern GPU of mid-grade, I'm guessing a 1050ti or 1060 6gb is the target for "suggested" GPU. RAM will likely depend on mod count, I had to upgrade from 16 to 32 for KSP1 since I ran into the upper limit of 16Gb a number of times. The real killer for KSP is single core CPU speed. That's probably where you'd want to spend your dollars if you build a rig just for KSP/KSP2. The best single core performance CPU you can afford and overclock the heck out of it. I had a 1060 in there before the 2080ti, and it did fine. 

For KSP1, an M.2 SSD is a lifesaver, but I'm guessing (hoping) the dev team will fix whatever made my modded KSP1 take 25 minutes to load on HDD, so it might not be as critical for KSP2.

Most performance per dollar for physics based games is going to be single core CPU performance, almost certainly. 

Yep, this is what people really need to realize.

KSP2 looks good, but it's no Cyberpunk or Crysis 3 graphically. It's going to hammer a single thread, because the developers haven't gone away from rigid-body arrays.

They are optimizing around it, so the performance will likely be much better than KSP. But still, Ryzen 3000/5000 or Intel i5/i7 8000 series and up is really what you want. Ideally ofc, you could probably get away with something like a i3 OC'd to the limit (I forget which one was Overclockable tbh). But why do that except for the lels

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I still think they'll try to get the game running on PS4 and XB1, at least the pro/X versions, but for good proxy to PC spec, I would look at the gen 9 consoles, PS5 and XBSX. Both of these have 8 core (16 logical core) Zen 2 CPUs. PS5 is a bit underclocked at 3.5GHz, while XBSX goes to 3.6GHz with SMT according to specs. There are some differences in cache, but otherwise, this is very close to the specs of Ryzen 7 3700X.

On the Intel side, you get similar performance from something like Core i7 10700K. It does a little worse under multi-threaded load, but slightly better on single thread due to better turbo clocks, and overall performs similar, if just a hair better than the 3700X in most games.

Both of these are well over $300, with Ryzen being the less expensive option at $330, so I really hope we're talking closer to recommended spec here, and you can get away with less for min spec. On the other hand, we still have a year and a half at the minimum until the game releases, so that might not look as intimidating by the time the game ships.

Still, if you are building the computer right now and want to make sure you'll be in a good place when KSP2 comes out, I would look at these specs as a minimum you should shoot for.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, K^2 said:

if you are building the computer right now

I wouldn't do it right now, considering current situation on the market, availability and prices that go with it. It's safer for a wallet to wait until later this year/next year.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

39 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

I wouldn't do it right now, considering current situation on the market, availability and prices that go with it. It's safer for a wallet to wait until later this year/next year.

Oh, yeah, totally. If you can delay, you should delay. CPU situation is bad - you can get Intel chips at reasonable prices, but you would be able to do a lot better with AMD if their latest CPUs were actually available at MSRP, and you really just can't get these at MSRP. GPU situation is just abysmal - between the RTX 30xx / RX 6xxx shortage and the new crypto boom, the prices on the GTX 10xx generation are a highway robbery, let alone anything newer. And the RAM situation, well, it's not the worst, but it's been better.

Some other components have been going on sales due to the above, though. Like, you can get really good prices on AMD AM4 motherboards, so if you know you are going to pick up something like R7 5800X once the price comes down, you might be able to catch a great deal on the motherboard sometime before then while you're waiting. Likewise, PSUs and cases go on some great sales every once in a while. If you are planning a build, might as well set up some alerts for these.

On the other hand, I do know that some work places are offering their employees money towards updating home offices while a lot of people are working remote, so it's possible that for some people right now is the time to build the new machine despite unfavorable market. And if you're getting even partial reimbursement, you can get a decent build for basically everything but GPU despite the shortages.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wouldn't do it right now either. If you've been 5 years since the last PC, 5 1/2 years will be okay too.

Its a bit "crystal ball" looking ahead, but in theory the current generation of graphics cards ought to become more available; and something like a 3060 would be a good call (if/when they actually become available for normal people to buy).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The physics LoD system they're implementing ought to clear up the CPU bottleneck nicely. I don't expect the system requirements to be all that onerous, even a regular business laptop ought to be able to run it just fine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I built a new system in November. AMD Ryzen 5900x, 32GB RAM G.Skill 3600Mhz,  512 Samsung 980 Pro. And I kept my older Nvidia 970 because the new graphic cards are extremely expensive and not worth to spend a fortune especially if you don't play killing games that use advanced graphics like raytracing.
System is blazing fast. When I boot up it takes seconds. When it comes to KSP things are not so good because of the mods. It takes more than a minute to load and takes about 17GB RAM probably more sometimes. It crashes often and even Chrome in the background freezes because system is out of memory. Sometimes things go so bad I have to restart because system freezes entirelly.

The best system you can buy won't  give you a perfect experience. Of course you can skip mods or use very few.
Apparently KSP2 will have many things that we have with mods today so we will need less mods for sometime anyway....
So mods factor will be most important and RAM the more you have the better, 32GB is absolutelly minimum in this kind of games that load so many stuff also a fast SSD helps with paging file.

Edited by alphaprior
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, paul_c said:

I wouldn't do it right now either. If you've been 5 years since the last PC, 5 1/2 years will be okay too.

Its a bit "crystal ball" looking ahead, but in theory the current generation of graphics cards ought to become more available; and something like a 3060 would be a good call (if/when they actually become available for normal people to buy).

Yeah, that seems to be the message I'm gathering from all of this. Wait and see, wait and see.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, alphaprior said:

AMD Ryzen 5900x [...]512 Samsung 980 Pro [...] System is blazing fast. When I boot up it takes seconds. When it comes to KSP things are not so good [...] takes more than a minute to load

Mods certainly make the bad situation worse, but part of the problem is with KSP itself. It's exceptionally bad at utilizing threads both at loading time and runtime. You are clearly not I/O bound on loading. I'm in the same boat, running KSP from an M.2 Samsung EVO, and it barely makes a dent over loading from HDD. I don't know for certain what it's actually doing, but it seems to be doing some CPU-intensive work while loading assets, it's all loaded upfront, and (nearly?) all the processing seems to happen on a single thread. Situation doesn't improve greatly when the game is running, as older versions of Unity KSP was based on aren't great at multithreading to begin with, and KSP hasn't really done anything to improve on that. So again, most of the workload tends to be on the main thread. Which, when you have a CPU with 20+ logical cores, just isn't a great use of hardware.

It sounds like KSP2 should be in a better spot for all that. Newer versions of Unity do make better use of threads and also provide you with a job system that lets you push a lot of additional work out to threads. Given that gen 9 consoles are going to be running with 16 logical cores, I can't imagine Intercept getting away with not optimizing the game for multithreading this time around. Might still not be great at using all 24 logical cores of 5900X, but 2/3 utilization would be a good start.

Mods will still be mods, though. Crashes will still happen and if there are memory leaks, a mod will eventually eat through any amount of RAM you're likely to throw at it. That said, impact on loading times can be greatly reduced. And with better performance, faster loading, cleaner API, and more features in core games, there are fewer reasons for modders to do anything unconventional, which should improve overall stability for a lot of mods. Hopefully. All in all, KSP2 should be a better experience if Intercept makes reasonable choices along the way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My speculation:

Minimal:

64bit system (Win, possibly Mac and Linux)

AMD Ryzen 1600 or Intel Core i5 9400

8GB RAM

Nvidia GTX 1060 or AMD RX 570 (must be compatibile with directX 12, i think there also will be options to use dX11 instead, but not lower)

20-30 GB of disk space

Broadband internet connection (multiplayer)

Recommended:

64bit system (Win, possibly Mac and Linux)

AMD Ryzen 3500x/3600 or Intel analogue

16 GB of RAM (scaled accordingly for higher res textures)

Nvidia GTX 1660ti or AMD rx 5500xt (must be compatibile with directX 12, i think there also will be options to use dX11 instead, but not lower)

20-30GB for the base game, 15-30 for possible DLC's (don't know how many will be made)

Broadband internet connection (multiplayer)

Raytracing, or very large resolutions, like 4k:

64bit system (Win, possibly Mac and Linux)

Any CPU with matching performance of the recommended specs CPU's, or higher

16GB RAM (I have a feeling, that this number will be higher, but, I'm not sure, so I am writing recommended specs instead)

Raytracing cards for optimal performance ( some older cards also have Raytracing capabilities added via drivers, but they are not taken into account)

Disk space as above

Internet Connection as above

 

What do y'all think ?

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm still playing in my old rig from 2012, plus a 4 year old Nvidia 970, with about 130 mods install :D :

I5 3570k@3900//16GB Ripjaws//CrucialSSD//Corsair HX850W

And yeah, at the current prices, I'll wait. I guess I'll just replace the MoBo, the CPU(fan too if it is not compatible with the new socket) and the RAM on first stage, keeping the case, the PSU, the 970 and the SSD for a while. Hopefully in a year the prices would have dropped a bit.

My guess (based on Intel/NVidia as I have 0 experience with AMD CPU/GFX since many many years ago):

  • i5-9gen minimum, i7-10gen (or newer) recommended
  • 16GB minimum, 32GB recommended
  • 20-25GB HDD minimum, 20-25GB SSD recommended (plus what you need for mods, etc)
  • GTX1060 (or GTX1660, hopefully not) minimum, GTX 3xxx recommended (whatever is in the market in that moment)

Build a rig from scratch with all those components... well, right now it would be a pain in the wallet, wouldn't it?  :/ 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, MrFancyPL said:

Minimal:

AMD Ryzen 1600 or Intel Core i5 9400

Recommended:

AMD Ryzen 3500x/3600 or Intel analogue

I don't think that's going to cut it for either category. Game is quite CPU-hungry and gen 9 consoles (PS5, XBSX) have better CPU specs than what you have in "recommended" as far as what KSP will care about.

7 hours ago, MrFancyPL said:

Raytracing

I somewhat doubt we'll see any. Vaguely speaking, unless you go full RT, which nobody does, with hybrid approaches, there are three things you do with RT: soft shadows, global illumination (GI), and reflections.

Shadows in space tend to be hard, because Sun is quite far away, and simulating it as a point source is usually good enough. Writing RT shaders for just the few cases where it isn't seems like a waste.

We don't have enough interior environments for GI to be worth it either, and on planetary surfaces, good sky illumination shader does the trick just fine, and that will have to be written for non-RT cards anyways.

Finally reflections. For planetside, combination of sky map and screen space (SSR) will cover pretty much every case where you'll see something reflected in the shiny. And in space, you already have starscape in the cube map. Just render nearby planets to the same cube map, and you basically have perfect reflections for free.

KSP2 is just not a good use case for RT. In a few more years, I suspect there won't be enough non-RT cards left to bother with, and then it might make sense to make everything hybrid RT simply because some of the shaders are easier to write than non-RT versions, but right now you still have to do both. So if RT doesn't get you enough shiny you don't bother with it.

That said, the framework for RT is there in Unity. So if some bored rendering engineer at intercept ends up implementing it, it might actually happen. That's how a lot of, "Not strictly necessary, but wouldn't it be cool?" features happen in games.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Whatever the minimum requirements are there is no point upgrading now if you only care about KSP2. In 1 year from now the market will be different. 

6 hours ago, JorgeCS said:

I'm still playing in my old rig from 2012, plus a 4 year old Nvidia 970, with about 130 mods install :D :

I5 3570k@3900//16GB Ripjaws//CrucialSSD//Corsair HX850W

And yeah, at the current prices, I'll wait. I guess I'll just replace the MoBo, the CPU(fan too if it is not compatible with the new socket) and the RAM on first stage, keeping the case, the PSU, the 970 and the SSD for a while. Hopefully in a year the prices would have dropped a bit.

My guess (based on Intel/NVidia as I have 0 experience with AMD CPU/GFX since many many years ago):

  • i5-9gen minimum, i7-10gen (or newer) recommended
  • 16GB minimum, 32GB recommended
  • 20-25GB HDD minimum, 20-25GB SSD recommended (plus what you need for mods, etc)
  • GTX1060 (or GTX1660, hopefully not) minimum, GTX 3xxx recommended (whatever is in the market in that moment)

Build a rig from scratch with all those components... well, right now it would be a pain in the wallet, wouldn't it?  :/ 

I do not think you should bother if you're not changing gpu. I upgraded from a 4770k 970 to a 10700k and 3080. I tested the 10700k with the 970 out of curiosity and the performance boost wasn't really worth it because I was bottlenecking the 970 with all the mods. With the 3080 I can take advantage of all the performance of the 10700k. Maybe the performance difference from a 3570k makes it worthwhile but you need to wait for rocket Lake at least or wait for the 12th gen. I wanted to upgrade 1 year ago to the 2000series gpu. I forgot the name unfortunately but someone on these forums told me to wait for the 3000 series. Best advice ever. I have no idea how they knew the 3000 series would have that much umpf. 

To bad I didn't do a more detailed benchmark and post the results. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, alphaprior said:

I built a new system in November. AMD Ryzen 5900x, 32GB RAM G.Skill 3600Mhz,  512 Samsung 980 Pro. And I kept my older Nvidia 970 because the new graphic cards are extremely expensive and not worth to spend a fortune especially if you don't play killing games that use advanced graphics like raytracing.
System is blazing fast. When I boot up it takes seconds. When it comes to KSP things are not so good because of the mods. It takes more than a minute to load and takes about 17GB RAM probably more sometimes. It crashes often and even Chrome in the background freezes because system is out of memory. Sometimes things go so bad I have to restart because system freezes entirelly.

The best system you can buy won't  give you a perfect experience. Of course you can skip mods or use very few.
Apparently KSP2 will have many things that we have with mods today so we will need less mods for sometime anyway....
So mods factor will be most important and RAM the more you have the better, 32GB is absolutelly minimum in this kind of games that load so many stuff also a fast SSD helps with paging file.

I have 130 mods and the game almost never crashes. When it does its compatiblity problems and not memory related. I just upgraded from 16 to 32 and it had 0 impact. I think for you it's specific mods causing issues and not the amount. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...