Poor performance, but low system resource usage?

[XOIIO]

Hello, so this is an interesting issue which I can't seem to figure out. When I got a new computer (used to playing on a core 2 quad) I was looking forward to being able to make much larger vehicles and space stations without dropping down to a slideshow in their vicinity, however, on my new machine, I have not had much more luck at all.

I had a vessel with only 345 parts, a ship that made a trip to ike, launched and met with a lander, and made it back to kerbin to rendezvous with a crew retrieval craft successfully. However for even longer missions that would require many more parts.

The issue is that it dropped me from the usual 60 fps I get (seems locked) on smaller vehicles, to below 10 fps when launching. What's strange is that my CPU usage is at around 25%, 47% ram usage (27% being used normally and when I have a web browser and a couple tasks open), and only around 30% of my gpu.

I know that the brunt of ksp's resource needs are for processing the physics, so it would be cpu side, but that begs the question as to why ksp isn't pushing my system harder. It won't have any issues with cooling, even though it's a laptop, and has run things much more system intensive and taken it like a champ.

I'm going to back up my saves and reinstall the game now to see if that changes anything, but I am wondering why KSP isn't using my system to it's potential.

System info:

Asus ROG G751jt
CPU = Core i7 4710HQ 2.5ghz (turbo boost to 3.5ghz)
Ram = 16gb 800 mh/z
GPU = Geforce GTX 970m -3gb ram - 103 mh/z

Edited January 4, 2016 by XOIIO

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Could be using the integrated card instead?

Is the laptop plugged in/in power saving mode?

Also, KSP can't use more than 4Gb of ram currently or make use of multiple cores as far as I know. This will be changing in the next major patch.

Edited January 4, 2016 by Rocket In My Pocket

[steve_v]

10 minutes ago, XOIIO said:

What's strange is that my CPU usage is at around 25%

Not overly strange, that's a quad-core CPU, and KSPs physics are mostly single-threaded. One thread can only use one core, 100% of one core = 25% total CPU.

[XOIIO]

KSP is still single threaded? I thought they were going to multi threading as part of the full release? That 25% usage shows across all cores, I figured it was by now.

And it's definitely on the proper graphics card, this computer actually only has the 970m (no cruddy intel cpu graphics thank god, as far as I can tell). I'm also only running the game at 1080p

I still find it odd though as you see people build ridiculously massive ships, things that I have attempted only to get a couple fps on my previous system. I was hoping to be able to finally build some  800 part monsters or giant stations but at this rate I still won't be able to, which doesn't make much sense unless those people are running KSP on nasa's computers.

Is there any sort of timeframe on the next patch?
 

Edited January 4, 2016 by XOIIO

[Speadge]

soon!

about the performance: try ubio welding mod for massive ships.

@Rocket In My Pocket sorry, but u r absolutely wrong, get your homework done.Not only that KSp is a 32bit process and therefor is limited to 4GB, RAM is NOT a performance killer!
additionally: a 300p ship does not consume more ram in flight mode than a 100p ship.
EDIT: LOL.. he changed his wrong postings to content that was posted by others later D'oh....
 

 

=> its the cpu / single threaded physics engine of unity beeing the bottleneck. And as Notebook CPUs are not compareable to their desktop counterparts - u r hitting a very high limit with 350p here.
 

Edited January 4, 2016 by Speadge

[steve_v]

7 minutes ago, XOIIO said:

KSP is still single threaded? I thought they were going to multi threading as part of the full release?

KSP is multithreaded, but the physics engine isn't. It's a fine distinction, but since most of the work is in in the physics thread it's an important one.

7 minutes ago, XOIIO said:

I still find it odd though as you see people build ridiculously massive ships, things that I have attempted only to get a couple fps on my previous system.

I too wonder about this, I suspect some people have a high tolerance for low framerates. Personally, <30FPS = not really playable.

Edited January 4, 2016 by steve_v
I swear there's some wonky autocorrect going on in this editor.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

7 minutes ago, XOIIO said:

KSP is still single threaded? I thought they were going to multi threading as part of the full release? That 25% usage shows across all cores, I figured it was by now.

And it's definitely on the proper graphics card, this computer actually only has the 970m (no cruddy intel cpu graphics thank god, as far as I can tell). I'm also only running the game at 1080p

I still find it odd though as you see people build ridiculously massive ships, things that I have attempted only to get a couple fps on my previous system. I was hoping to be able to finally build some  800 part monsters or giant stations but at this rate I still won't be able to, which doesn't make much sense unless those people are running KSP on nasa's computers.

Is there any sort of timeframe on the next patch?
 

Squad doesn't usually give out any info concerning release dates, but I'd wager a few months?

I've had some success using a program called Large Address Aware to force games into using more ram so try it out if you like.

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/large-address-aware.112556/

[Speadge]

52 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

I've had some success using a program called Large Address Aware to force games into using more ram so try it out if you like.

again - no performance impact due to more RAM. He will run into same problems with the 64bit version of KSP!

[XOIIO]

No luck with large address aware, didn't change anything. Same with turning off vsync to possible give it a bit more wiggle room, unfortunately it wasn't that simple.

It's extremely frustrating though, I just don't get how people make ships with 800+ parts and not using a weld mod when I can't even get to 400 without severe framerate issues. It's also pretty disappointing that unless someone chimes in with some magic solution it seems, I'd have to use a mod to be able to do this.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

5 minutes ago, XOIIO said:

No luck with large address aware, didn't change anything. Same with turning off vsync to possible give it a bit more wiggle room, unfortunately it wasn't that simple.

It's extremely frustrating though, I just don't get how people make ships with 800+ parts and not using a weld mod when I can't even get to 400 without severe framerate issues. It's also pretty disappointing that unless someone chimes in with some magic solution it seems, I'd have to use a mod to be able to do this.

Was worth a shot, Looks like your just gonna have to wait for the new version, hopefully it isn't to far off! Once it's out your computer should run it like a beast. 

Edited January 4, 2016 by Rocket In My Pocket

[XOIIO]

This thread is full of people with massive ships, how the hell are they getting to 1600 parts when I can't even get above 10fps with 345 parts, and my system is barely being used? (multithreading or not)

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/83863-when-have-you-over-done-it-with-the-part-count/

[XOIIO]

8 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Was worth a shot, Looks like your just gonna have to wait for the new version, hopefully it isn't to far off! Once it's out your computer should run it like a beast. 

Yeah, it's just incredibly disappointing that it can't as it is right now.

[steve_v]

12 minutes ago, XOIIO said:

This thread is full of people with massive ships, how the hell are they getting to 1600 parts when I can't even get above 10fps with 345 parts

It may be worth mentioning that most of the posts in that thread are from previous game versions... IME part-count performance has gone steadily downhill since the beta.
Also, while some claim 1000+ part ships, that'll be with single digit framerates and physics time delta set at minimum, possibly even lower than what the slider allows.

[XOIIO]

Oh really? I figured part count performance would have increased if anything.

[steve_v]

23 minutes ago, XOIIO said:

Oh really?

Not mine, nicked from here:

Framerate increases as ship drops parts through staging, dip @150s is aero/heating effects kicking in.

My experiences are pretty similar.
 

Edited January 5, 2016 by steve_v

[Guest]

If you have any spot or flood lights on the ship, try turning them on and off to see if the framerates go up and down with the lights. If so, you may need to fiddle with the pixel light count or shadow cascade settings. Also, the Render Quality Level can have a significant impact on framerates. Finally, it looks like this is a laptop? Ensure that you are running the game with the high performance video card and not the integrated chip, and that the laptop is in "high performance" power mode and not the power saver mode.

edit : just saw the post about the video card and integrated chip, so that's probably not the problem, but you still need to make sure the laptop is not slipping into a power saver mode.

 

Edited January 5, 2016 by Otis

[XOIIO]

28 minutes ago, Otis said:

If you have any spot or flood lights on the ship, try turning them on and off to see if the framerates go up and down with the lights. If so, you may need to fiddle with the pixel light count or shadow cascade settings. Also, the Render Quality Level can have a significant impact on framerates. Finally, it looks like this is a laptop? Ensure that you are running the game with the high performance video card and not the integrated chip, and that the laptop is in "high performance" power mode and not the power saver mode.

edit : just saw the post about the video card and integrated chip, so that's probably not the problem, but you still need to make sure the laptop is not slipping into a power saver mode.

 

Yeah, I have the laptop set for high performance all the time, and plugged in 90% of the time, I can run much more cpu intensive games and high framerates, I guess ksp is just limited by the physics engine for now.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Another suggestion that may or may not help, have you ever used Nvidia inspector?

It's like the Nvidia control panel but way more powerful. It'll tell you a lot more details about what your card is/isn't doing as well as letting you fiddle with some deeper settings, displaying heat levels, and it typically has some pre-loaded settings for each game to optimize it a bit. It can also let you over clock your card, but often laptops aren't capable of this.

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5077-nvidia-inspector.html

 

[Kaezan]

You can change the physics delta time in the settings.cfg and that's the most you can do.

someone already said, laptops are never like their desktop siblings, even if the specs are the same.

Besides, the game is single threaded until KSP 1.1

my laptop has a i5-2.5GHz (3.1turbo), 6GB RAM and a radeon HD7670 and shows a 300p plus space station at some spectacular 4 FPS

[steve_v]

36 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Another suggestion that may or may not help, have you ever used Nvidia inspector?

Egads man, just like the LAA flag (and no, "force games into using more ram" is not what it does), or the "2GB limit" (you said it, not me) that's got nothing to do with it.

4 hours ago, XOIIO said:

...only around 30% of my gpu.

Since the GPU is twiddling it's thumbs at ~30% waiting for something to do, buggering about with hidden GPU driver settings will do absolutely squat.

It's pretty obvious it's the usual single-core performance bottleneck at work here: Physics delta, CPU OC, part-welding or wait.

 

22 minutes ago, Kaezan said:

laptops are never like their desktop siblings, even if the specs are the same.

Yes, and no. Thermal management strategies aside, a CPU is a CPU... but you have to look closely at the specs, as laptops often have slightly different versions of the same chip, usually with lower clock limits or more aggressive power management.

Edited January 5, 2016 by steve_v

[XOIIO]

22 minutes ago, Kaezan said:

You can change the physics delta time in the settings.cfg and that's the most you can do.

someone already said, laptops are never like their desktop siblings, even if the specs are the same.

Besides, the game is single threaded until KSP 1.1

my laptop has a i5-2.5GHz (3.1turbo), 6GB RAM and a radeon HD7670 and shows a 300p plus space station at some spectacular 4 FPS

Yeah, I would have much preferred a desktop, I've always stood by the fact that if you take the cost of a laptop you can build a better desktop, but the way I got this meant that I needed to get a laptop (and they originally quoted a business oriented one worth about $500 with $1500 worth of software that would have been utterly useless)

I think this thing's cooling system could handle overclocking quite easily, but I'm not sure if many people have overclocked these. I guess I'll have to use a parts welder if my next station attempts will be problematic, though I'd much rather not use the mod.

My main issue with mods like that is that if they don't get updated or development stops, it could cause issues, the stations or ships might end up corrupted or something, I'm not sure how they go about it, but it seems merging the parts together would mean it's critical for the mod to always be there from that point.

[steve_v]

21 minutes ago, XOIIO said:

I think this thing's cooling system could handle overclocking quite easily

Considering that KSP is only utilising one core, and modern cpus can do individual core clocking (AKA turbo only works on one core), cooling shouldn't be a huge issue... the bigger problem is likely going to be the lack of support for overclocking of any kind in most laptops.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

40 minutes ago, steve_v said:

Egads man, just like the LAA flag (and no, "force games into using more ram" is not what it does), or the "2GB limit" (you said it, not me) that's got nothing to do with it.

 

1 hour ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Another suggestion that may or may not help, have you ever used Nvidia inspector?

I think you missed a part... 

[steve_v]

25 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

I think you missed a part... 

No, I did see that, but it doesn't make it any more relevant.
If you're aware that it has nothing to do with the issue at hand why bother suggesting it in the first place?

First, identify the problem (in this case, clearly a CPU bottleneck). Then suggest solutions based on that... i.e. not mucking about with RAM or GPU. Or providing incorrect information and editing it later, for that matter.

 

55 minutes ago, XOIIO said:

My main issue with mods like that is that if they don't get updated or development stops, it could cause issues

Indeed, and that particular mod did do a disappearing act not long ago. It's back now, but you can't count on it working in 1.1. It's fairly invasive too, and will probably break craft if it goes away... then again I wouldn't count on craft surviving the transition to 1.1 anyway, I know Squad promised to try not breaking saves, but it's a big change.

Edited January 5, 2016 by steve_v
More answers, less misinformation moan.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

11 minutes ago, steve_v said:

No, I did see that, but it doesn't make it any more relevant.
If you're aware that it has nothing to do with the issue at hand why bother suggesting it in the first place?

First, identify the problem (in this case, clearly a CPU bottleneck). Then suggest solutions based on that... i.e. not mucking about with RAM or GPU. Or providing incorrect information and editing it later, for that matter.

Just throwing ideas out there for the guy, nothing wrong with that.The programs I recommended could possibly help him diagnose his problem, I wasn't offering an explicit solution but rather the tools to maybe help him figure out what was going on. Sure, I changed it to 4Gb after someone pointed out that was the correct number...what's wrong with that lol?

Perhaps you'd be better off just offering your own advice and leaving it at that instead of nitpicking others? You need to watch Bambi again and pay special attention to Thumper's golden rule:

If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all. 

Edited January 5, 2016 by Rocket In My Pocket