Will more RAM help framerate or is it only a GPU/CPU thing?

[Aerindel]

Forgive me if this is a stupid question or its in the wrong spot. Kerbal is the only game that I play on my computer as I never really wanted to spend all the time and money to be a PC gamer, usually I just play games on consoles.

But, kerbal is good enough to put up with it.

My question is, will doubling my ram from 4 gigs to 8 noticeable improve performance on my 2.5 mhz Macbook pro? or is it something I can only improve with a new computer?

Just thought I would ask before I dropped a hundred and fifty bucks on more ram.

[komodo]

I don't believe it will aid your FPS particularly much, but someone can correct me if they know for certain. Have you tried lowering your render quality down? I get FPS slowdowns due to the water shaders on anything higher than "Good" if I recall, (and that's even on an imac core i7 >< )

I haven't tried on my MBP mid 2010 in a while, though. With the summer coming up, I may try it again, but hopefully you won't wait on me!

And yes, KSP is totally worth it, isn't it?

[Aerindel]

And yes, KSP is totally worth it, isn't it?

Absolutely.

[Murph]

If you really push the limits inside KSP, with mods, huge numbers of ships, or hugely complex ships, going from 4GB to 8GB RAM may help a little. KSP is still 32 bit on OS X, so can't actually use more than 4GB, but having 8GB means that KSP can get the full 4GB if it needs it, without fighting against the 0.5GB-ish used by the OS itself, and typical 0.5GB-ish for random desktop toys and small apps, and typical 1GB-ish for Safari with a bunch of tabs open.

If you don't do heavy stuff with mods and complexity inside KSP, and don't run lots of apps in parallel with KSP, you won't see much benefit from extra RAM.

[kithylin]

It really depends. Check to see if you are running out of ram or not. I'm not a mac user but there should be some sort of system resource monitor program you can run to watch your physical ram usage. If you're running out and paging to swap space / hard drive / swap partition, then yes ram would benefit you.

But if you're not running out of ram, then it's going to be a newer system.

I will tell you that (if you figure out you need a newer system) there's been extensive testing done and KSP runs fastest on the latest intel CPU's, so a haswell mobile i5 or the new broadwell mobile i5 chips would probably best your best bet if you were looking for a system upgrade (and you need to remain in the portable world)

[Murph]

It really depends. Check to see if you are running out of ram or not. I'm not a mac user but there should be some sort of system resource monitor program you can run to watch your physical ram usage. If you're running out and paging to swap space / hard drive / swap partition, then yes ram would benefit you.

/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app

It will tell you everything you need to know about how much pressure the system's RAM is under. If you're not familiar with that utility, try not to catch the computer equivalent of hypochondria. It can be like reading a medical web site, and convincing yourself that you've got swine flu, ebola, and the bubonic plague, all at the same time, instead of simple food poisoning. Some considered interpretation is required, but it's a very useful and high quality tool.

But if you're not running out of ram, then it's going to be a newer system.

Not really. KSP runs very nicely on older Macs, if they were high spec at the time. I've tried it on a 2007 iMac which was the very top model Apple produced at the time, and it runs quite nicely. Core 2 Extreme 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256MB, 24" 1080p widescreen. All that's needed is to turn the graphics down, and KSP is very playable and enjoyable on it. (And, obviously, make sure that it's not competing for system resources with something else in the background.)

MacBook Pros are all fairly high spec for whatever era they come from, so it's most likely just a case of needing to match the graphics options to the hardware, rather than needing to buy a new machine, unless it's older than about 2010 vintage.

[Aerindel]

This is a 2012 mac.Where would you start making cuts when it comes to settings?

System specs are 2.5 Ghz intel i5, graphics Intel HD 4000 1024 MB

[Murph]

This is a 2012 mac.Where would you start making cuts when it comes to settings?

System specs are 2.5 Ghz intel i5, graphics Intel HD 4000 1024 MB

Half res textures can make a huge difference, as it's a quarter of the texture data (e.g. 300x300dpi is a quarter of 600x600dpi).

Basically turn everything down/off, and see how it performs. If the result is good in terms of speed, carefully think about the options and slowly turn up the ones that feel most important, until it starts to get too slow again. You might find particular options have a big performance penalty, while others don't seem to slow it down much at all. With a bit of patience and trial and error, you should hopefully find a sweet spot that balances performance and quality.