KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread

[FasterThanFlourite]

Now that the first wave of reviews for the new AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D are out, can our programming gurus like @linuxgurugamer, @Nertea and @Gameslinx tell us whether Kerbal Space Program would benefit from the extra cache?

 

I know that KSP is single-core bound, but does it benefit from extra cache?

[Br0wnie007]

i built a ksp cappeble computer out of a motherboard and cpu found in the trash

[Stewcumber]

I build project PCs ranging from 80MHz 486DX2 CPUs through to my main PC (a 3700X, 16GB RAM, 6800XT). Today I am messing around with a 2006 intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (overclocked to 3GHz), 8GB DDR3 1333 RAM and a 2009 Nvidia GTX285 1GB.

Kerbal ran surprisingly OK on a mix of medium / high graphics considering I was using a fairly large ship. I had 17fps on ascent with the mission timer staying yellow, and in space it was running all green locked to 37fps (half-rate vsync on my 75Hz monitor).  I can probably keep playing like this tbh!

I am however eying up the 5800X3D as a end-of-platform upgrade for my 3700X. I could upgrade now and get 4 years from it or upgrade in 2 years time for much cheaper and get 2 years from it 

[Nuke]

On 4/14/2022 at 8:33 AM, FasterThanFlourite said:

Now that the first wave of reviews for the new AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D are out, can our programming gurus like @linuxgurugamer, @Nertea and @Gameslinx tell us whether Kerbal Space Program would benefit from the extra cache?

 

I know that KSP is single-core bound, but does it benefit from extra cache?

ksp runs pretty well on the 5800x, the old one without the fancy cache.  its going to be better than that seeing as kerbal is cpu limited, but i cant imagine it being that much of an improvement. 

Edited April 24, 2022 by Nuke

[FasterThanFlourite]

6 hours ago, Nuke said:

 but i cant imagine it being that much of an improvement. 

Well, it turns out it does!

3440x1440 with all the graphic mods: AVP + TUFX + Distant Object Enhancements + Planetshine + RealPlume + Engine Lighting Relit + Parallax and the Saturn V replica (~266 parts):

 

With 5600x, 32 GB RAM and RX 6800 on : 40 FPS at launchpad lpad -> 50 FPS at lift-off -> 40 FPS going straight up // 30 FPS if turning east and staying close to water [RX 6800 running only at 40 - 70%]

 

WIth 5800X3D: 60 FPS at launchpad-> 70 FPS at lift-off -> 50 FPS going straight up // 40 FPS if turning east and staying close to water

 

 

 

[Nuke]

1 hour ago, FasterThanFlourite said:

Well, it turns out it does!

3440x1440 with all the graphic mods: AVP + TUFX + Distant Object Enhancements + Planetshine + RealPlume + Engine Lighting Relit + Parallax and the Saturn V replica (~266 parts):

 

With 5600x, 32 GB RAM and RX 6800 on : 40 FPS at launchpad lpad -> 50 FPS at lift-off -> 40 FPS going straight up // 30 FPS if turning east and staying close to water [RX 6800 running only at 40 - 70%]

 

WIth 5800X3D: 60 FPS at launchpad-> 70 FPS at lift-off -> 50 FPS going straight up // 40 FPS if turning east and staying close to water

 

 

 

im just saying that original 5800x is pretty good already.  ive thrown some absurd spacecraft at it and it barely slowed down at all, and my mods list fills a page.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Nuke

[FasterThanFlourite]

You can see my settings, craft and mods used for the test above. Playing at 3440x1440 with AVP, Parallax and the likes wrecks the FPS, since so much terrain and so many atmospheric effects need to be calculated all the time. With the 5600x I got 100 FPS on launchpad with the 266 parts Saturn V replica, but only had 40 FPS with all the visual mods installed, while the graphic card was still idling.

[Hoozemans]

(Edit: I see that there might be more appropriate subforums for this question. Does anyone know how to move a post?)

Hello humans.

So I've just spent a whole wad of cash on a new system to replace my old fileserver, and turn it into a virtualization platform.

The core of it is a ASUS Prime X570-P mainboard, 64G of DDR4-3200 and an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5750G. There's an old NVIDIA GT710 graphics card in it, primarily because I couldn't get it to boot otherwise.

Now this system wasn't primarily meant for gaming. However, since the specs of this CPU are somewhat better - from clock speed to IPC - than the old Macbook I've been playing KSP on, I thought I'd try and see how it performed as a KSP platform, and build the virtualization on top of that with KVM.

So I installed Xubuntu 20.04 on the system, and booted up KSP. The results were a bit disappointing: it doesn't even perform as well as my old Macbook.

The cause could be anything: I may need to completely redo the firmware settings in my mainboard; I may be missing drivers to use the GPU in my APU (in fact, I'm quite sure of it); I may need to apply Feng Shui ...

What I wanted to ask is: is anyone here using a similar system as their KSP platform, and can they give me some pointers - what to look at, which firmware/software settings to tweak, which drivers to install, what overpriced hardware to buy, or whether I should just give up because this combination of hardware is entirely unsuited for something like KSP?

Thanks!

Gr,

H.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Hoozemans

[Stamp20]

The GPU is probably the limiting factor, it's not well suited for gaming. The CPU and RAM should be fine, but if you want to run KSP (or any game), you need a good GPU.

[Geonovast]

@Hoozemans, I've merged your question into the master thread we have for this sort of stuff.

FYI, in the future, if you believe you've posted in the wrong place, you can use the "report post" button under the three dot menu on the post to let us know it needs to be moved.

 

To answer your question, I'm not sure any "tuning" is needed or necessarily even possible.  While KSP doesn't need a "good" GPU by any stretch of the imagination, the GT710 is such an obnoxiously bad piece of garbage that it's hard to fathom why it even exists.  The integrated graphics in your Ryzen 5750G is going to be better... vastly.  I see you said it couldn't boot with it, though.  Do you have any idea why?  The motherboard you listed appears to have video out.

[Hoozemans]

8 hours ago, Geonovast said:

Do you have any idea why?  The motherboard you listed appears to have video out.

Thanks for moving the post! And no, I need to explore the options of this mainboard a little more. The only real reason I chose this combo was that it offered, within my budget, the best performing support of ECC DDR4. Theoretically, this machine should be able to do decent KSP, but if I can't get it to work, it's going into the basement as a virtualization platform, as I originally intended, and I'll keep saving for a real gaming rig.

[Hoozemans]

15 hours ago, Hoozemans said:

The core of it is a ASUS Prime X570-P mainboard, 64G of DDR4-3200 and an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5750G. There's an old NVIDIA GT710 graphics card in it, primarily because I couldn't get it to boot otherwise.

Bingo. I found a mainboard setting that allows me to choose the BIOS output device, and all of a sudden power consumption of the machine doubled, and it's handling the interplanetary vessel I was constructing near my main orbital station, total part count more than 800, with - well, relative - ease. No need for additional drivers or tweaks. And it's running TrueNAS in KVM on top of that. Yay!

[Nuke]

On 4/24/2022 at 7:54 AM, FasterThanFlourite said:

You can see my settings, craft and mods used for the test above. Playing at 3440x1440 with AVP, Parallax and the likes wrecks the FPS, since so much terrain and so many atmospheric effects need to be calculated all the time. With the 5600x I got 100 FPS on launchpad with the 266 parts Saturn V replica, but only had 40 FPS with all the visual mods installed, while the graphic card was still idling.

yea but thats hitting your gpu, not your processor. 

[Shpaget]

Not a building/buying question, but I figure this is still the best place to ask.

I have an ancient Win XP machine (about 15+ years old) that seems to be perfect (free) for what I need it to do - run a small CNC desktop milling machine. The software that runs the machine is perfectly happy to run on XP and refuses to run on anything 64 bit. The problem is that I need to be able to transfer files to that machine from a more modern one (potentially two) computers (Win 10). This transfer will be happening multiple times per day, so I'd like a convenient solution. The new one is hooked up to the internet (obviously), but I'm hesitant to connect the old XP one as well and put it on the same network. My concern is that I'd like to keep the XP machine as lite as possible with no unnecessary software (to improve the stability of the system) meaning little to no protection against malware.

What would be a good way to go about this? Ideally I'd like a functionality similar to a shared folder on XP machine into which I could just push the files, and/or shared folder on the win 10 machines from which I could pull them. Files in question are small txt files.

[Geonovast]

Will the CNC software run on Linux?

If yes, you could put a very, very lightweight 32bit Linux distro on it and not worry about getting it on the network as it'll be a modern, updated OS.

[Shpaget]

@Geonovast

Nope. The list of supported OSs is:

32-bit version of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7

It's Mach3

https://www.machsupport.com/software/mach3/

[Nuke]

On 6/25/2022 at 1:20 AM, Shpaget said:

Not a building/buying question, but I figure this is still the best place to ask.

I have an ancient Win XP machine (about 15+ years old) that seems to be perfect (free) for what I need it to do - run a small CNC desktop milling machine. The software that runs the machine is perfectly happy to run on XP and refuses to run on anything 64 bit. The problem is that I need to be able to transfer files to that machine from a more modern one (potentially two) computers (Win 10). This transfer will be happening multiple times per day, so I'd like a convenient solution. The new one is hooked up to the internet (obviously), but I'm hesitant to connect the old XP one as well and put it on the same network. My concern is that I'd like to keep the XP machine as lite as possible with no unnecessary software (to improve the stability of the system) meaning little to no protection against malware.

What would be a good way to go about this? Ideally I'd like a functionality similar to a shared folder on XP machine into which I could just push the files, and/or shared folder on the win 10 machines from which I could pull them. Files in question are small txt files.

just use windows file sharing. put all machines on the same workgroup and share whatever folders you need access to, be sure you give yourself permissions and log on with that account. you might also consider upgrading the os on the old computer, 7 would be a lot less fiddly than xp. i routinely share with my win7 3d printing rig and ive been able to get at it with windows versions all the way up to 11, ive also been able to talk to xp virtual machines this way. there are probibly tutorials on youtube or whatever that could explain it better than i could. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Not a build question:

What are the dangers of 'sandboxing'?  

I went looking at a very popular mod for a different game I'm playing, and discovered the mod maker's page included some kind of sandboxing 'feature' that was likely borrowing processes for cryptomining (pure guesswork on my part; why else do others need to use your system resources???)

So - is there a danger (mind you, not of downloading malware) of merely visiting a modder's site when they include browser sandboxing as a way to 'support' their work?

Edited July 6, 2022 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Pixophir]

On 7/6/2022 at 3:37 AM, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

What are the dangers of 'sandboxing'? 

Well, if this refers to this type of sandboxing there are no imminent dangers per so connected to sandboxing as is. It is fancy word for "separation" or for creating an environment in which OS functionality is available but damage to the OS can not be done. For instance, by replacing the system libraries for file manipulation etc. with ones that have the same interface to the user, but have only harmless consequences at the back end.

OS Kernels use "sandboxing". A virtual machine can be a sandbox. Or even a dedicated PC not connected to a network which, when infected, will be completely wiped.

But it depends how exactly the feature is implemented, the border between sandbox and root kit is narrow. A bad example is/was Google's chrome sandbox that needed SUID bit set on Linux, a no-go for any third party executable, specifically from a known data kraken. The feature is deprecated meanwhile.

Every browser I know has some sort of sandboxing implemented, mostly "sold" as a security feature.  On Linux, this is not necessarily necessary for browsing as one can always create a user with extremely low rights whose account would be expendable in case of an attack.  But then again, not everyone is aware of the capabilities of a true multi user OS and thus relies on 3rd party products to protect them.

If you want to be reasonable safe from any kind of malware, the best way is not to download any untrusted software (for me that is software that is not in my OS's repositories, with only very few exceptions of which I am sure they are harmless), always check downloads, e.g. verify keys and checksums, not to open mails of unknown origin, and not to browse too colourful websites. And ofc use an up-to-date browser with appropriate settings, even if that means that certain websites don't load any more. There was nothing interesting there anyway :-)

 

Edited July 9, 2022 by Pixophir

[bkeremm]

i have i3 10100f with RTX3050 8GB. how many fps in RSS with these parts?

[James Kerman]

Welcome to the forum @bkeremm, your question has been moved from Tech Support to this thread as the members here give great advice on PC specs and KSP.

[Nightside]

On 7/24/2022 at 10:20 AM, bkeremm said:

i have i3 10100f with RTX3050 8GB. how many fps in RSS with these parts?

I think that is a question only you can answer… so what is it?

[Kerbalsaurus]

Can RSS+RO run of my 8GB, Core i3 processor laptop? Or will something more like this happen.

[Superluminal Gremlin]

Not a chance. You would need 16gb and a better core.

[AVaughan]

On 8/12/2022 at 5:08 AM, Kerbalsaurus said:

Can RSS+RO run of my 8GB, Core i3 processor laptop? Or will something more like this happen.

Up until a few years ago I played RP-1 on an old I7-860 with 12GB RAM.  

A modern laptop i3 probably has better single threaded performance. 

8GB RAM will be really tight.  You will probably end up paging heavily, to the extent the game might be unplayable.  (If you try I suggest closing all other programs, using minimum graphics settings and not installing any extra part mods).