How long is your initial load time ?

[Josson K.]

I'm interested in how long is your initial load time, ie how long does it take from clicking on the KSP icon until the main menu appears ?

For me it is 4m18s with 105 mods (1.4GB on disk) installed. RAM usage sits at 5.6GB at the main menu. Of course I'm on Linux x64.

Does the load time deter you from just firing up the game for a shorter session sometimes ? I love the game, but often I catch myself not wanting to play just because it won't be worth it to start the game for 30 minutes or so.

If there is ONE thing that I'd really want improved in KSP it is the overall performance of the game (Load times and frame rate drop at increased complexity). Of course,as everyone I'm hoping on Unity5 regarding this issue, but is there any statement on SQUADS behalf that they see a possibility for bigger improvements in performance (especially load times) apart from that ?

[rofltehcat]

1 Min 5 Sec

Mods: 400 MB including the stock parts (Toobar, BetterBouyo, CrowdSorucedScience, KAS, KIS, KerbalAlarmclock, KER, Mechjeb, ModFlightInt, RCSBuildaid, SCANSAT, ScienceAlert, Squad, StockBugfixModules, WaypointManager)

System: Win7 64 bit (but running 32 bit, opengl)

CPU: [email protected] Ghz 3.30 Ghz <- No idea why that has two frequencies

GPU: Radeon R280x

Memory: 10 GB

Edit: This is a 4.5 years old "sensible budget" gaming PC (I think €550-600 at the time). It changed a little over time when my RAM (and end of last year) my GPU broke but the new GPU isn't that much better than what was in it to begin with.

To be honest I'm more concerned about the game slowing down whenever I fly something over ~80 t with extreme slow downs above ~120 t...

Edited June 28, 2015 by rofltehcat

[Mikki]

"Exactly" 15 secs... . no (Part-) mods, Quad core i7 4770 3.6gh (4.0gh max), 2x AMD R9 graphics in crossfiremode, 250Gb SSD. Intel liquid cooled CPUs. Windows 8.1.

Module manager loads some 122 patches, Joint reinforcement, engineer redux and raster prop monitor, nothing more.

Sometimes the loading time is way less, nearly 10 secs as i assumed first, dont know why?

Edited June 28, 2015 by Mikki
measured the time exactly, more details

[Mipe]

SSD does make a difference when it comes to loading times.

[Josson K.]

@Mikki

I wish that were the time needed with all my mods But even unmodded wasn't this fast before IIRC. It sped up considerably for the release version when they changed to DXT textures. Does anybody know if most mod authors also switched for their textures ?

I have my system on SSD. Unfortunately the home folder and therefore my steam library still sits on spinning platters. Maybe I should cop my KSP directory over to the SSD

[rofltehcat]

Hm... I'll check out how it changes when I copy my KSP to my SSD instead. I used to have my current "main game" (especially useful for MMOs etc. with loading screens between areas) on my SSD but I hadn't expected to play so much KSP when I installed it.

[Deutherius]

55 seconds, vanilla game. I am on a laptop however, so the 5700 RPM HDD is the real bottleneck.

But no, the loading time does not and would not deter me from playing shorter sessions. It's more the fact that my playstyle would not allow me to do much more than design and maybe test one craft in those 30 minutes, with no actual quality playtime left to enjoy my horrible creations. Not that I mind, the engineering part of the game is as much fun (if not more) for me as the actual flying.

[Space.exe]

SSD's do make loading faster.

Edited June 28, 2015 by Space.exe

[Reactordrone]

Stock game, 28 seconds. Intel i5 3350P processor and 8G DDR3 memory, Windows 8.1.

[Goddess Bhavani]

55 seconds, vanilla game. I am on a laptop however, so the 5700 RPM HDD is the real bottleneck.

But no, the loading time does not and would not deter me from playing shorter sessions. It's more the fact that my playstyle would not allow me to do much more than design and maybe test one craft in those 30 minutes, with no actual quality playtime left to enjoy my horrible creations. Not that I mind, the engineering part of the game is as much fun (if not more) for me as the actual flying.

I am a fellow laptop user and my play time is horribly convoluted and drawn out because I like arranging all my little subsystems to minute precision and spam early career space with dozens of cute little spacecraft that go nowhere before a major KSP update comes and forces me to start anew.

So yeah, I just savor a cup of coffee and amuse myself with cat related literature for 5 minutes before Jeb's merry gang appears on the screen with that nice welcome music on the menu

[hellion13]

120gb 840evo SSD, 3.4ghz i5. Loads in less than 20 seconds with a couple of gui mods.

[katateochi]

i7 3.07Ghz, 16GB RAM, GTX-760

Mods: MJ, QuickScroll, StockBugFixes

Load times (average over two loads):

27 seconds when starting it of an SSD

26 seconds when starting it of a Western Digital Raptor (10,000 rpm)

25 seconds when starting it of a Western Digital Caviar Black (7,200 rpm)

erm what? it was fastest starting of the slowest HD?! ok so some errors in my timing could account for ~ a second difference, and my OS is also on the SSD so that may be why that is slower.

I don't think there is a significance between the results, which means the bottleneck in boot times is not the HD, it's the CPU.

Actually I'm not surprised, a while ago (before the texture optimizations) I did the same test and had the same results; using a faster HD does nothing to improve KSP load times and given that the game packs everything into RAM on load, it won't make much difference during runtime either (maybe loading craft in editors might be a teeny bit faster, but again I expect CPU is the major factor there too).

[Scarecrow88]

1m 26s on a 4 year old PC and a handful of mods.

[Mikki]

Hi Josson

SSD makes loading faster... and texture load from partmods does break down any 32 bit system, narrow pipes.

I wait for a eventual 64 bit release, and then i grab again some nice partmods from necrobones and others...

[Voculus]

It takes me 1m 57s to see the main menu from the time I double-click the icon. During the first 33 seconds of that, there's no loading screen at all. Just the desktop, with a very jittery and laggy mouse. Weird stuff.

[diomedea]

My main KSP gaming install (1.0.4, build 861) with 89 add-ons loads in 152 s.

My barebone KSP test install (same as a build 861) loads in 19 s.

Windows 8.0 64bit, 3.4 i7 CPU, KSP installed on a 1TB 840 EVO SSD.

[StormKat]

36 seconds from double-clicking the desktop icon until the menu comes up. That includes loading Steam.

Intel Core i7-5820K with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo. SSDs rock!

[SAI Peregrinus]

130 mods, 92s to load. On a spinning rust drive.

[SkyRender]

1m33s for a cold boot. About 40s of that is just the program hanging before the splash screen. It goes down to closer to 1m exactly on later runs of the program. I have around 7 or 8 mods installed, one of them (EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements) being very unoptimized since it dates back to 0.24 and still has no equivalent available that's properly up to date.

[Finnan]

3m44s for me.

[tater]

29.28 seconds (with 4 mods) on my i7 iMac.

[*Aqua*]

0:00 starting KSP in Steam

0:11 loading screen appears

1:03 main menu appears

240 MB mods (585 MB GameData), KSP memory usage ~2.6-2.7 GB

AMD Phenom II X4 955

8 GB RAM

1.5 TB HDD @ 5.400 rpm

Windows 8.1 Pro x64

[annallia]

Never actually timed it...

Completely stock = under a minute.

With my usual mods = less time than it takes me to go to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and come back.

[boxman]

SSD does make a difference when it comes to loading times.

The difference is very slim to the point where it is hardly noticeable. Might be the case if you are running on a slow drive that is at same time used as system drive, but otherwise in my experience mechanical drives are only slightly slower. Since I have 16gigs of ram i even tried to make a ram disk and run KSP entirely from ram and yet it took nearly as long. So it seems like there is something about the loading process that limits how fast it can load.

[mdkendall]

Seventeen seconds. Only one mod (KER). Intel 4690K, 16GB RAM, SSD, GTX 960.