Low FPS on gaming computer

[nickexists]

I haven't played since 1.0 first came out but everything ran fine then. I just started up again with 1.0.5 and I get 8-10 fps pretty much no matter what, even with small ships. 

 

I have an i5 running at up to 4.2 ghz and a msi gtx 970 and 8gigs of ram. None of these resources show much usage during play but I still am only getting very low fps regardless of any graphics settings that I have tried. What could be causing this?

[Sanic]

  By no means am I a technical expert, but I certainly know some basic stuff. There are 2 things here that COULD be causing the problem.

1. Only 1 of those cores you have is actually performing physics calculations, meaning your extra cores are essentially useless. This will be fixed in 1.1.

2. KSP is still 32 bit, which means you can't utilize that extra memory. This will also be fixed in 1.1.

 

Edited January 7, 2016 by Sanic

[sDaZe]

Are you using mods? 

[nickexists]

20 minutes ago, DaZeInBok said:

Are you using mods? 

My first install had mods. Since then I have done a fresh vanilla install using the installer and just using the normal download, but the problem has persisted. Neither of the 4 cores appear to have particularly high usage. The memory usage for ksp is around 2.5 gigs, I still have nearly 4 gigs free.

[ratchet freak]

The OS will change which core the physics thread runs on to spread the load/heat generation

This will result in all core's load being 100/number of cores percent.

Edited January 8, 2016 by ratchet freak

[Gaarst]

There's definitely an issue other than KSP's 32bits here. Because U4 doesn't support multithreading and KSP uses your CPU a lot, performance relies mostly on single-thread performance, ie: clock speed.

An i5 at 4.2GHz should have no problem running KSP so this is not the cause of your poor framerate. But I'm afraid I am not going to be able to help you any further.

Also, know that due to 32bit, KSP cannot use more than 4GB of RAM before crashing, no matter what you do (actually closer to 3.7GB).

[sDaZe]

6 hours ago, nickexists said:

My first install had mods. Since then I have done a fresh vanilla install using the installer and just using the normal download, but the problem has persisted. Neither of the 4 cores appear to have particularly high usage. The memory usage for ksp is around 2.5 gigs, I still have nearly 4 gigs free.

Have you downloaded your latest Nvidia drivers and made sure everything is up to date? Also make sure you're not playing on a res like 2560x1440 or 3840x2160 unless you have a 2k or 4k monitor. Other than that, im not sure. 

[nickexists]

I updated drivers and did some more testing and here is what I found. The issue is completely unrelated to graphics settings and resolution but it is highly affected by part number. Using CPU-Z I monitored my cpu frequency and found that in KSP my CPU frequency doesn't scale up, it just sits at the minimum multiplier of 8 which corresponds a frequency of 800mhz. Using other applications it easily scales up to 4.2Ghz. I'm pretty sure this is the cause of the issue but I have no idea how to fix it.

[nickexists]

Problem solved. Looks like my computer somehow got set to power saver mode.