Bej Kerman

This wording is terribly suboptimal.

Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to ask. Isn't the question somewhat self-explanatory? That's not the point. It's not about what your rig can do, it's about how quickly the developers can put together the things they've built, over the course of EA.

Well I heard RAM prices are dropping so getting more RAM should be the least problematic part of an impulse-bought KSP 2 machine.

Okay, but then you did make the choice to buy hardware before knowing what KSP 2 would need. You can blame Intercept for being anxious to say "We use different builds, EA does not grant access to a complete and optimised product, etc" (or it's possible you could blame T2 for forcing them to avoid using words the two-year-olds they are marketing to couldn't understand, and I'm not sure which possibility is worse), but then again, it's never a smart idea to buy stuff solely for a product whose performance details are a complete mystery. You can take solace in the fact that the game's requirements will probably drop a significant amount when full-time optimisation commences.

You mean, why haven't the devs yet integrated scatter into a gameplay-optimised build of the game that they're already being pressured to get out for "EA" because the T2 execs need the money to run their green baths?

To reiterate again: It's in development. Stuff runs horribly in development then is optimised for release. KSP 2 isn't releasing, it's being shoved out of the door into a VIP preview state (because EA implies consumer friendliness).

Have you already played KSP2? Is the game stable there? No bugs? Is it well optimized? I've played KSP 1 enough to see how hopeless the devs would need to be to make a game with worse optimisation, and I know enough about development to know that the requirements will be a lot lower when KSP 2 is closer to being a product the devs would have been comfortable sharing. This does line up with their goals of making a more approachable game. They're still making it and the time you spend making it is a bad time to be optimising it.

Oh, now that's a point. If Squad was more open about how the game plays, let's say for example, with a massive nuclear vessel that has to be built almost entirely out of stupid tiny MkI tanks, maximising its part count because the devs weren't bothered in the slightest doing fuel switching so that NERVAs could effectively use bigger tanks, and you based the minimum requirements on what CPUs were like in 2015 and the fact that the physics is horribly underoptimised, then we might have seen similar complaints about KSP 1's CPU needs. And was that with a proper vessel or did you employ part minimising techniques, not for the sake of tacking an engineering challenge, but for the sake of getting it to run well on the codebase Squad dumped?

Darn right! KSP 1 only looks mildly polished compared to how it looked in, say, 0.18. KSP 2's improvements have been more in line with what I expect from a game made by paid developers. Average framerate?

If you think KSP 2's minimum requirements were egregious, well, this image speaks for itself. "Performance" and "KSP 1" do not belong in the same advertisement. If KSP 2 devs are to be shamed for asking that you run their pre-optimisation code on a 2060, then why didn't anyone talk about Squad downplaying how restrictive KSP 1's issues are? "You aren't playing the game properly!!!!! You aren't meant to be making stupid big rockets!!!!! Optimize your part count!!!!!!!" Shut up, hypothetical person. It's right there in the advertisement that Squad wanted you to do with KSP 1 what they very well knew would slow it down to a crawl.

All the people playing on potato PCs never got to play the game beyond planting a flag on the Mun because of the horrible anti-optimisation (patented by, and a trademark of, Squad). I wouldn't say it's as inclusive as it's touted as when the exponential physics strain puts the Kraken Ceiling for mid and high range devices very close together.

Er... Squad? Also, do understand that games during their development stages have always been demanding. This is what development is. Developers need good hardware so they can build their features then work on refining them so that it'll run better on consumer hardware. These aren't KSP 2's release requirements (which will look better than the current requirements), these are the requirements needed to run pre-optimisation code for a product that is not yet ready for the public, a product that is being forced through its EA period by Take Two because they've been funding development for the better part of a decade and haven't yet seen returns on their investment. The Enrichment Center reminds you that although circumstances may appear bleak, you are not alone. All Aperture Science personality constructs will remain functional in apocalyptic, low power environments of as few as 1.1 volts.

Oh, great. More of the "it's just KSP 1 modded!" misconception. Can't wait to not hear that when people get their hands on the game and see that no matter how bad development has been going, it will be a million times better than the unstable poorly-planned janky Sibelius-grade bug-overrun heap of smeggy spaghetti we've been trying to mod into something playable for the past ten years. Just to avoid repeating myself, I will quote myself, again. (sorry Kerbart, for overrunning your notifications panel, but it needs saying - however, I'm not rephrasing myself for every Joe that undermines KSP 2 and puts KSP 1 on a pedestal). All this should be considered - the vast list of fundamental changes to the game, the UX, the background processes - not just how the gameplay looks on the surface and all the roadmap features you hoped to be using 3 years ago

It wasn't releasing in the first place? This isn't a release. It's a window into the game's development that T2 is selling to see returns, and, spoiler alert, optimisation happens after features have been added.

I mean, I'm not a developer, but I did get to closely follow the development of SE's general relativity update, watching dev streams now and then, and I got to watch the relativistic geodesic ray-tracing go from looking extremely pixelated (low ray-count I bet) and choking a desktop 3090, to running decently on my own hardware as well as looking pretty, even with volumetric and relativistic metric quality all the way down. Safe to say KSP 2 will do basically the same.

"Good Job Intercept"? Seriously? This is just how development goes. The minimum requirements will get better. What you are seeing is an Early Access product. Features then optimisation. As far as things go, KSP 2 EA is more a VIP ticket to see development work first-hand, which T2 is doing to see returns after years of dev, than it is a game. In fact, that's exactly what it is. Things that are in-dev need dev-grade hardware to be used properly. KSP was a very special case - developers don't usually try to juggle features and optimisation, and that could be credited as one of the reasons KSP 1 suffered heavy technical debt and performance issues.

Is the discord still looking like it was a good idea?

That does make me wonder what the 2060 has that the 1070 doesn't, and why KSP 2 absolutely needs something of the 2000 series when there are 1000 series cards that compare.

Remember that it's an Early Access title. Yes, it's surprising, but seeing how SpaceEngine's latest major update evolved from borderline unplayable during the early development stages to passable on release, it makes perfect sense. The minimum specs won't always be like this, nor are they a slap to anyone familiar with development.

KSP 2 is now getting attention from Subreddit Drama, and...

Any reason I shouldn't be surprised that KSP 2 has higher minimum specs than a program that renders this in real time on an old card? Okay, to be fair, I was around to see the development of relativistic geodesics, and it certainly was way heftier on the GPU in mid-2022 than when the developers considered it release-worthy 2 months and 1 day ago, so it isn't like I'm not familiar with how development will pan out as the graphics receive optimisations. Still, consider me caught off-guard.

Can we just talk about all the BUT Big Ugly Tabs here? Another point for KSP 2, with lots of features that were once mods being properly integrated into the game, you should expect to never have to fill your screen with tabs in order to get roughly the same info.

We weren't waiting for a definitively higher framerate, we were waiting for a game where the framerate you get with a massive vessel isn't much lower than the framerate you start with, at least compared to KSP 1.

A gaming laptop? The laptop variant of the 3070-Ti is above the minimum, so yeah. On a budget? Probably not.