What type of CPU processing dose KSP use

[Jeb Coleman]

Would a higher floating point benchmark, or a higher integer benchmark score be better for the Physics calculations in KSP?

[Snark]

5 minutes ago, Jeb Coleman said:

Would a higher floating point benchmark, or a higher integer benchmark score be better for the Physics calculations in KSP?

I would assume floating point, but it's really up to the Unity engine more than any code Squad writes.  If you're googling for information on the topic, you'd probably do best to focus on Unity rather than KSP itself.

[StarManta]

Definitely floating point. Literally everything KSP spends any appreciable amount of time on is float-based. Physics, rails physics, graphics, trajectories.... oh yeah and physics again for good measure. Hell, even the UI uses floats (because it's built on the same position data structures as the rest of the game engine).

The big question you should ask in CPU benchmarks for KSP, though, is single-core performance. If you have an 8-core processor, 7 of those cores are going to be idle most of the time. The physics is all single-threaded, and nothing else in the game comes close to the amount of CPU that physics uses. (This is likely to be somewhat improved in 1.1 since the upgrade to Unity 5 brings with it an upgrade to PhysX 3, which supports multiple cores - but my understanding is that any single craft will probably still need to be on the same thread, and so a single thread of physics is likely to continue to be the main performance bottleneck.) My advice is probably to get the dual (or more) core chip with the best single-core benchmark you can find.

[numerobis]

I doubt floating point matters that much. Before you do that floating point operation you need to load the memory, do some branches, interpret some .net opcodes, maybe run the JIT -- most of that is integer or memory. Even the part that's running in the PhysX engine is going to have a lot of branching and integer operations.