graphics card recommended for ksp

[Camacha]

well I plan on playing ksp at highest settings with visual mods, and that should be able to play any games fine enough for me

Could you please answer the rest of the questions too?

[Feradose]

Could you please answer the rest of the questions too?

Alright, my max budget would be 300$

my psu, I'll have to upen up the case for that I suppose.

Do I want to play any other games? I already do and they are at moderate graphics too with 30 fps.

[Redjoker]

At the $300 dollar price range, your best options if your power supply can handle them is the gtx 960 at $200, r9 290x at $300, gtx 770 at $270 and r9 280x at $200. If you need a new power supply then that is about $40-50 which leaves the 960 and the 280x unless you can get a good deal on the other two. You may want to wait, because it is likely that in a week or two AMD will release the 300 series cards which should drop the 200 series prices and give you more options. Also what resolution is your monitor?

[Camacha]

Alright, my max budget would be 300$

my psu, I'll have to upen up the case for that I suppose.

Do I want to play any other games? I already do and they are at moderate graphics too with 30 fps.

Do you want to spend all your money? I guess it really rather depends on the PSU you have. If that is usable, you can spend your whole budget on a very nice card. If you need a PSU too, you still have some rather decent options. A 270X, 280 or 280X comes to mind in the red camp, and a GTX 960 or GTX 770 in the green camp. Though it should be noted that a new AMD generation of cards is about to be released (expect news within two weeks or so), so it might be worth waiting just a little while, as current cards will likely drop in price, and new cards will become available. Normally waiting is not a good strategy, but in this case it would be silly not to.

Oh, before I forget: what CPU do you have exactly? If you want to go with the faster cards, it will need to be reasonably quick too. If it is an i3 or AMD X4, your GPU is most likely going to be bored. No use spending lots of money on a quick card that will only run at half speed thanks to the processor.

[Feradose]

the resolution is 1366x768 max

Oh, before I forget: what CPU do you have exactly? If you want to go with the faster cards, it will need to be reasonably quick too. If it is an i3 or AMD X4, your GPU is most likely going to be bored.

Intel i5-3340 @ 3.1 Ghz, and its fairly enough for me

[Camacha]

Intel i5-3340 @ 3.1 Ghz, and its fairly enough for me

That is an excellent chip, it is very unlikely to bottleneck anything. Buying the fastest card within your budget will certainly yield very good results, as long as your PSU is up to par. Like I said, it might be wise to hold out a week or two. Even if you do not buy a new generation card, the older ones will likely drop in price or get dumped cheaply.

KSP will run on much slower cards, so if you wish you could save some money. Spending it all and being able to play pretty much every game you wish at high or maxed out settings is the other option, as your resolution is not that high.

Edited June 14, 2015 by Camacha

[Redjoker]

the resolution is 1366x768 max

Intel i5-3340 @ 3.1 Ghz, and its fairly enough for me

Unless you plan on getting a new monitor in the next year or two, the 960 and the r9 280x are the only ones that I mentioned that make sense. If you want to save money you may want to look at the r9 270x also.

[Camacha]

Unless you plan on getting a new monitor in the next year or two, the 960 and the r9 280x are the only ones that I mentioned that make sense. If you want to save money you may want to look at the r9 270x also.

Though I am slightly biased, the 270X is already quite a nippy card. It plays games well at much, much higher resolutions - in fact, almost (or even over) three times the pixels of 1366x768. Unless you are very demanding, I cannot imagine you need much more at those resolutions. Going for an equivalent Nvidia is also an option, of course. Those tend to be a bit cooler, but more expensive when if comes to performance per dollar.

In fact, reviews provide quite a good indication. If you find benchmarks of test run at 1920x1080 pixels, you can almost perfectly double that and you will have a fair guesstimation of how the 270X will fare (providing it does not get bottlenecked by the CPU, of course).

Edited June 14, 2015 by Camacha

[Feradose]

I dont plan on getting higher resolutions because it (really) hurts my eyes as much as 800x600 does, I found the balance on this resolution, I might go to a higher resolution, but thats years away.

[Eric S]

You aren't maxing out any of the cores, so it does look like your bottleneck is your gt 420.

While I'll agree that that video card is quite likely the bottleneck, window's tendency to move a single thread between CPU cores, even when that thread is running at 100% utilization, makes that a bit harder to determine. A 100% utilization thread can look like a 25% load on each of four cores.

[Camacha]

While I'll agree that that video card is quite likely the bottleneck, window's tendency to move a single thread between CPU cores, even when that thread is running at 100% utilization, makes that a bit harder to determine. A 100% utilization thread can look like a 25% load on each of four cores.

That is very true, you have to watch out for that, though these results are quite conclusive and empirical evidence also shows this chip will certainly not bottleneck KSP with any reasonable craft. I thought I was complicating things enough already

[Feradose]

That is very true, you have to watch out for that, though these results are quite conclusive and empirical evidence also shows this chip will certainly not bottleneck KSP with any reasonable craft. I thought I was complicating things enough already

I came to that conclusion after noticing the beauty of big craft, then finding out they dont drop my fps more than smaller craft and I thought, "thats harsher on processing, why is this still same?"

then I realised it might be my GPU.

Edit- I wish I had made the thread when I realised that. It would have saved me money and time.

Edited June 14, 2015 by Feradose

[Camacha]

I came to that conclusion after noticing the beauty of big craft, then finding out they dont drop my fps more than smaller craft and I thought, "thats harsher on processing, why is this still same?"

then I realised it might be my GPU.

That is quite a reasonable approach and conclusion, but I have seen weird things happen before. Better be sure

[DeeJayDemon]

its ok dude, i have issues with 2 planes at same time, like i used BDArmory's AI pilot control that flys plane for u, and i like do dogfight the plane. when i go to put 2 planes out in the game i get like 10 FPS. i do have a Fuel trucker as well but its only roughly a 92 part model. and i have a Nvidia GeForce GT720 as well as a i5 processor with 3.8GHz. its ksp itself because of all the physics it runs in-game and most upgrades wont help too much. but a Nvidia GeForce GT720 will get you arounf 30 - 50fps in orbit looking at a planet but it costs around $320

[technicalfool]

its ok dude, i have issues with 2 planes at same time, like i used BDArmory's AI pilot control that flys plane for u, and i like do dogfight the plane. when i go to put 2 planes out in the game i get like 10 FPS. i do have a Fuel trucker as well but its only roughly a 92 part model. and i have a Nvidia GeForce GT720 as well as a i5 processor with 3.8GHz. its ksp itself because of all the physics it runs in-game and most upgrades wont help too much. but a Nvidia GeForce GT720 will get you arounf 30 - 50fps in orbit looking at a planet but it costs around $320

Do note that a graphics card won't make a huge difference there. I have an old Nvidia GTX650, and it laughs at KSP's graphics.

My CPU on the other hand, is an old AMD Athlon II X4 640, and it quivers in fear every time I load a craft. Much beyond a couple of hundred parts, and just NOPE. Nope, nope, nope.