Lowest Possible Settings?

[Wingman703]

Anyone know what the bare minimum graphical settings are for KSP? My (very old and never strong to start with) machine has laggy issues when trying to play for extended periods, so I like to keep its workload as low as possible. I've done the obvious stuff like lowering terrain detail, persistent debris, building simple rockets, ect, but what are some of those other options? V-sync? anti-atlasing? What on earth do they do, and what should I set them all at for minimum load?

[musicpenguin]

Set them all as low as you can. AA? 0. VSYNC? Off. These are all fancier things. VSYNC helps prevent screen tearing at the cost of computer resources and AA is for smoother edges.

[Fel]

Anyone know what the bare minimum graphical settings are for KSP? My (very old and never strong to start with) machine has laggy issues when trying to play for extended periods, so I like to keep its workload as low as possible. I've done the obvious stuff like lowering terrain detail, persistent debris, building simple rockets, ect, but what are some of those other options? V-sync? anti-atlasing? What on earth do they do, and what should I set them all at for minimum load?

The biggest improvement is actually to NOT look down. KSP does good in that it clips (to an extent at least) graphics that aren't actually visible. There's a few problems with this (move the sun to the edge of the screen to see what I mean) but it's a good balance.

V-Sync is a zero resource consuming improvement... but it requires you to have an FPS faster than your monitor can display it; turning it on otherwise causes FPS to drop as it only passes frame data at some multiple (I think it's multiples of 15).

Anti-Aliasing may have a bug if you turn it off, but it effectively renders the same scene twice, with a minor variation in the camera location. This allows it to blend the two (or xn) images to remove the "aliasing" around edges, often caused when the model data is larger than the screen resolution.

Texture Quality is memory consuming, but minimal cpu / gpu consuming improvement. Textures only matter when going into the GPU, but processing them isn't too intensive.

Screen Resolution is actually a bigger deal than people realize, especially with how many pixel shaders the game uses, and the high DPI monitors of late, going to lower resolutions can drastically improve your framerate.

Fallback shaders likely is something like a Shader 2.0 implementation, for older cards. (Only use if you have problems, not a speed enhancement and likely will produce bugs)

Terrain Scatters is said to be bugged, 1.0 is said to have fixed problems with them... idk.

Shadow / Point Light deal with the shaders some how.

Edited April 30, 2015 by Fel

[KatzOhki]

I believe there's an "ultra low graphics" texture pack out there somewhere if you search for it.

[Wingman703]

The biggest improvement is actually to NOT look down. KSP does good in that it clips (to an extent at least) graphics that aren't actually visible. There's a few problems with this (move the sun to the edge of the screen to see what I mean) but it's a good balance.

Texture Quality is memory consuming, but minimal cpu / gpu consuming improvement. Textures only matter when going into the GPU, but processing them isn't too intensive.

Screen Resolution is actually a bigger deal than people realize, especially with how many pixel shaders the game uses, and the high DPI monitors of late, going to lower resolutions can drastically improve your framerate.

I can do the first one extensively I do notice that in map mode, I'm pretty lag free, but in ship or IVA mode is when the lag hits.

I didn't even think about the resolution... I think I jacked mine up as high as possible. Thank you! I'll ajust my settings accordingly.

[Herr Rictus Bingo]

When my game data is full of mods I use Active texture manager It's a plugin who reduces the quality of textures ingame you can take two versions the basic or aggressive. I think it's a good solution more info here : http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/59005-1-0-Release-5-0-April-28-2015-Active-Texture-Management-Save-RAM!