Extremely low FPS on large crafts

[mark-o-solo]

Hello,

I am having trouble with my KSP 1.05 with large crafts. I have pretty much all the popular mods installed like KW rocketry, B9 aerospace, Kolonization system, KAS, TAC life support, EVE, etc., all up to date. And I therefore play with the 64 bit version of the game from unity (otherwise, the 2 ridiculous GB  ram of windows do not suffise). The game works just fine, only from time to time do I get a crash. My problem is just that with large crafts, it gets horribly laggy, I get about 1 FPS with a big station, or launching a big craft even less.  It cannot be a hardware problem, I have:

I7 3970x

16GB RAM DD3 CL8 2666Mhz

GTX780 Ti

For my station, this leads to a big relative motion of the different docked components which then wiggle dangerously. I thought, this might actually be the cause, so I reinforced all with KAS struts in a tedious 1 FPS EVA game, no help. I dont think, this stuff is much too difficult to calculate for the PC, but I suspect, the problem lies with the memory chunks to be transferred between RAM and CPU, once again the FSB or CPU caches being the bottleneck. I also have the feeling, the lagging only comes about when the kolonization system is used, ie. combining all modules necessary for a self sustainable craft...

Can anyone help me here ? Do you know some trick to make it playable again ?

Tanks

PS: here is a pic of my latest base rising on its way to the mun, less than 1FPS: base

Edited January 3, 2016 by mark-o-solo

[Ericwi]

The   Dynamic Texture Loader that was listed last Monday might help. What is your part count?

 

[mark-o-solo]

Alright, Ill check it out, thanks for the help.

The part count of the base on the picture is about 800, but Id like to launch some even bigger crafts...

Alright, I tried it, same goes for the active texture management. I get from 5 GB of RAM usage to about 4GB, but that does not seem to be the problem. Also, the problem persists in space, so no smoke, clouds or other textures. It does not seem to be memory related, but the CPU spikes up to about 100% load.

Any ideas

Edited January 4, 2016 by mark-o-solo
tried suggestion

[steve_v]

3 hours ago, mark-o-solo said:

Any ideas

Not really: Wait and see what improvements v1.1 brings, ruthlessly prune part count on your designs, OC your CPU, or try a welding mod.

The physics engine KSP uses is old, slow, single-threaded and CPU only. As such, it'll only ever utilise one core, and lag increases almost exponentially with part count.
If you haven't already, reducing the physics delta T slider in the settings to minimum might help a little - it'll make the physics run slower than realtime, but may help framerate.

I've said it before, and I'll say it once again: This games performance is abysmal, even on high-end hardware.
I've long since given up on building anything >500 parts, 800+ is slideshow territory on my machine (I7 @4.3GHz), entirely due to the shoddy CPU-bound physics engine.

Unfortunately, Squad seems utterly uninterested in using anything but the physics engine built into Unity, and any performance concerns become "Unity issue, can't fix".

The upcoming (1.1) port to Unity 5 may improve this, but I'm pretty sceptical. It's supposedly faster, but AFAIK rigid-body physics is still single-threaded and CPU only.

Edited January 4, 2016 by steve_v

[mark-o-solo]

Alright, I tried the welding mod but it doesnt work at all for me, its extremely buggy.

Ok, so steve_v, you claim, the issue is mostly due to the physics and the crappy thread distribution, right ? Thats quite a shame, since there really is no fix in sight... In that case, I really hope, they switch away from unity or distribute the load otherwise.

Although I must say, that in the task manager several threads light up, could it possibly be different for the 64bit version ?

[Spilled Vial]

Yeah that's just a limitation within the game. So many parts to load all at once is not very friendly. As mark-o-solo said, if you can find a working version of the welding mod, you can make multiple parts into one and massively reduce part count. That always helps with lag.

[steve_v]

On 4/01/2016 at 11:26 AM, mark-o-solo said:

Although I must say, that in the task manager several threads light up, could it possibly be different for the 64bit version ?

KSP is multithreaded... but the physics engine isn't, and that's where the bulk of the computation is. AFAIK x64 is the same.

[Boris-Barboris]

38 minutes ago, steve_v said:

KSP is multithreaded

Nah, barely.

[steve_v]

5 minutes ago, Boris-Barboris said:

Nah, barely.

True, but even "barely" e.g. running audio decoding in a separate thread, technically counts as "multithreading" . It's just not multithreaded where it would help performance in any meaningful way.