Reccomended Graphics Card

[Table]

Hello! Can anyone help me with finding a new graphics card? I'm always experiencing low FPS, so can anyone reccommend me a graphics card? I'm trying to find one that has at least 2GB and the price range is $100-250.

 

I swear every time I fly something at high speeds I get like 2FPS.

I'm sick of it.

 

Thanks,

Table

 

[SalehRam]

I think it is not about the graphics card... it is about the processor.

The game uses 1 thread only, which means you are not really utilizing your CPU...

I recently got a laptop with an i7-6700HQ, which has 4 cores, and I am still having some major FPS drops when I get into large crafts. I have another PC with Core2Quad 2.8GHZ and I got slightly better when I used the i7... so I guess until Unity5, we will have to be patient and maybe change the Max Physics Delta-Time per Frame setting for now.

 

You can set the aerodynamics effects to lowest, and the rendering quality to lowest as well, that will help significantly, as I play KSP on my work PC sometimes, which has an i5 with 2 cores and an Intel HD graphics, but I can s till get some decent FPS on it with things set on lowest.

Edited March 3, 2016 by SalehRam

[Streetwind]

@SalehRam The video card can have some influence, particularly if it's an integrated solution. Not only does that take thermal budget away from the CPU and makes it clock lower, therefore hindering the physics engine, but it is also limited by memory and raw throughput. A common "feature" of playing on an iGPU is PQS lag when looking at planet surfaces during suborbital flight (particularly Kerbin's ocean).

@Table What is your current video card anyways? It won't make sense spending a hundred bucks if you're only getting a 10% performance upgrade over your existing card. Therefore telling us what your existing card is (if any) helps making recommendations.

[Geschosskopf]

9 hours ago, Table said:

Hello! Can anyone help me with finding a new graphics card? I'm always experiencing low FPS, so can anyone reccommend me a graphics card? I'm trying to find one that has at least 2GB and the price range is $100-250.

Before you spend any money, you might want to see how KSP 1.1 works on your existing system.  As others have said, the main bottleneck probably isn't your vidcard, it's the fact that at present, KSP is a 32-bit, 2GB RAM-using, 1-thread thing, which is the major bottleneck for most performance issues with the game.  KSP 1.1, however, is supposed to change all that.

And lucky for you, Squad just announced that 1.1 will have an opt-in "open beta" period starting very soon.  This means you can get 1.1 a couple weeks before the public release.  So I recommend that hold your fire on buying a vidcard and opt into the 1.1 open beta.

[Table]

15 hours ago, Streetwind said:

@SalehRam The video card can have some influence, particularly if it's an integrated solution. Not only does that take thermal budget away from the CPU and makes it clock lower, therefore hindering the physics engine, but it is also limited by memory and raw throughput. A common "feature" of playing on an iGPU is PQS lag when looking at planet surfaces during suborbital flight (particularly Kerbin's ocean).

@Table What is your current video card anyways? It won't make sense spending a hundred bucks if you're only getting a 10% performance upgrade over your existing card. Therefore telling us what your existing card is (if any) helps making recommendations.

I have an R7 250, I'm on a low budget :(, my CPU is an AMD FX-8350. It has 8 cores, and I would love Squad to make use of all 8 cores instead of just one, I also have 1600MHZ 16GB Corsair Vengeance.

I'm only running a 1TB Seagate Hard Drive.

Overall it's a pretty decent computer.

8 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Before you spend any money, you might want to see how KSP 1.1 works on your existing system.  As others have said, the main bottleneck probably isn't your vidcard, it's the fact that at present, KSP is a 32-bit, 2GB RAM-using, 1-thread thing, which is the major bottleneck for most performance issues with the game.  KSP 1.1, however, is supposed to change all that.

And lucky for you, Squad just announced that 1.1 will have an opt-in "open beta" period starting very soon.  This means you can get 1.1 a couple weeks before the public release.  So I recommend that hold your fire on buying a vidcard and opt into the 1.1 open beta.

Hmm, thanks for letting me know about KSP 1.1 I haven't really been keeping up with the news.

[Streetwind]

8 hours ago, Table said:

I have an R7 250, I'm on a low budget :(, my CPU is an AMD FX-8350. It has 8 cores, and I would love Squad to make use of all 8 cores instead of just one, I also have 1600MHZ 16GB Corsair Vengeance.

Yeah, that video card is seriously underpowered for a system like that. I'd say that, for gaming, you'd want at minimum an R7 370 (non-X) or a GTX 950. They're about equally matched in performance, both sport 2GB memory, and both should be around $150 or €140 (or your regional equivalent). The Radeon may sell a few bucks cheaper, depending on your local market conditions. In the end, it probably comes down to your preferrence in GPU manufacturer.

Such an upgrade would more than double your system's raw theoretical graphics power. Now, I can't say how much precisely KSP will benefit from it, since I've never experienced it with an R7 250, but between the physics engine improvements in 1.1 and the greatly increased graphics processing resources, I would be seriously surprised if you saw FPS dips with typical vessel sizes anymore.

(For reference: I have an R9 270X, which is about ~15% faster than the cards I recommended here. The only time I experienced severe FPS drops due to graphics was when I installed RealPlume and it came preconfigured with like ten times the particle emission values for SRBs that would have been sensible. Of course i can still make the game crawl with a 500 part space station, but that has other causes )

Edited March 4, 2016 by Streetwind

[Table]

15 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Yeah, that video card is seriously underpowered for a system like that. I'd say that, for gaming, you'd want at minimum an R7 370 (non-X) or a GTX 950. They're about equally matched in performance, both sport 2GB memory, and both should be around $150 or €140 (or your regional equivalent). The Radeon may sell a few bucks cheaper, depending on your local market conditions. In the end, it probably comes down to your preferrence in GPU manufacturer.

Such an upgrade would more than double your system's raw theoretical graphics power. Now, I can't say how much precisely KSP will benefit from it, since I've never experienced it with an R7 250, but between the physics engine improvements in 1.1 and the greatly increased graphics processing resources, I would be seriously surprised if you saw FPS dips with typical vessel sizes anymore.

(For reference: I have an R9 270X, which is about ~15% faster than the cards I recommended here. The only time I experienced severe FPS drops due to graphics was when I installed RealPlume and it came preconfigured with like ten times the particle emission values for SRBs that would have been sensible. Of course i can still make the game crawl with a 500 part space station, but that has other causes )

Thanks a lot for helping me mate. I'll think about getting a R9 270X.

[Vanamonde]

Thread moved to the Lounge, since it's not about the game itself. 

[kenbobo]

I suggest a GTX 950.

Solid performance on the dollar.

[Camacha]

On 03/03/2016 at 0:36 AM, Table said:

I have an R7 250, I'm on a low budget :(, my CPU is an AMD FX-8350. It has 8 cores, and I would love Squad to make use of all 8 cores instead of just one, I also have 1600MHZ 16GB Corsair Vengeance.

I'm only running a 1TB Seagate Hard Drive.

Overall it's a pretty decent computer.

Hmm, thanks for letting me know about KSP 1.1 I haven't really been keeping up with the news.

The single thread performance of the AMD chips since the Bulldozer have not been great. Unfortunately, that is exactly what the current version of KSP requires. 1.1 might possibly help you, as might the upcoming AMD generation. As it stands, games and AMD are not an ideal combination in the higher end.

 

16 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Yeah, that video card is seriously underpowered for a system like that. I'd say that, for gaming, you'd want at minimum an R7 370 (non-X) or a GTX 950. They're about equally matched in performance, both sport 2GB memory, and both should be around $150 or €140 (or your regional equivalent). The Radeon may sell a few bucks cheaper, depending on your local market conditions. In the end, it probably comes down to your preferrence in GPU manufacturer.

I have played KSP with a GTS 450 quite a while. If I am to believe the internet, this card is equal or slower than the R7 250 when it comes to performance. KSP always performed wonderfully at maximum settings and then some. I did run it with an i5, though. It really seems the video card is not the issue here.

I really expect little to no improvement with a video card upgrade when it comes to KSP if Table upgrades to a faster card.

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, kenbobo said:

I suggest a GTX 950.

Solid performance on the dollar.

GeForces are my drug of choice.  However, having just replaced a burnt-out GTX 590 with a shiny new GTX 980, I have a couple of caveats to those getting new Nvidea cards...

1.  The new GeForces do NOT like Microsoft stuff one bit.  All my Win7 windows, Windows Explorer boxes, MS Office apps, and most websites when using IE look like crap.  IE is particularly hard hit, many sites including this forum and YouTube don't have any of their usual graphics, colored buttons, etc, but instead are just badly formatted text.  Thus, I'm having to use Chrome to read this forum.

2.  You need to get the GeForce Experience app from the Nvidea site and tell it to optimize KSP.  What this does is actually make a config file for all the many arcane settings of the card itself to tailor it to work best with KSP.  Thus, when you launch KSP, the card will load this config file.  If you do not do this, KSP performance will likely suck completely with the new card.  But once optimized, KSP will work great.  Also note, however, that this optimization also sets all of KSP's in-game graphics settings to very high levels, higher than you might want to use.  For example, I prefer to play in a window, not full-screen (so I can IRC sometimes), and prefer terrain scatter (trees/rocks) turned off (Kerbinside), so I had to reset those manually in the game after optimizing.

[Table]

1 hour ago, Geschosskopf said:

GeForces are my drug of choice.  However, having just replaced a burnt-out GTX 590 with a shiny new GTX 980, I have a couple of caveats to those getting new Nvidea cards...

1.  The new GeForces do NOT like Microsoft stuff one bit.  All my Win7 windows, Windows Explorer boxes, MS Office apps, and most websites when using IE look like crap.  IE is particularly hard hit, many sites including this forum and YouTube don't have any of their usual graphics, colored buttons, etc, but instead are just badly formatted text.  Thus, I'm having to use Chrome to read this forum.

2.  You need to get the GeForce Experience app from the Nvidea site and tell it to optimize KSP.  What this does is actually make a config file for all the many arcane settings of the card itself to tailor it to work best with KSP.  Thus, when you launch KSP, the card will load this config file.  If you do not do this, KSP performance will likely suck completely with the new card.  But once optimized, KSP will work great.  Also note, however, that this optimization also sets all of KSP's in-game graphics settings to very high levels, higher than you might want to use.  For example, I prefer to play in a window, not full-screen (so I can IRC sometimes), and prefer terrain scatter (trees/rocks) turned off (Kerbinside), so I had to reset those manually in the game after optimizing.

Hmm, I'll stick to the Radeons.

[kenbobo]

15 hours ago, Table said:

Hmm, I'll stick to the Radeons.

I've had 2 months experience with a GTX 950 on Windows 10. Not a snag at all. I did not optimize KSP and it works great.

I upgraded from an R7 240. All I had to do was remove the AMD drivers, boot up windows, download drivers online, (GeForce experience optional [I believe, I have it anyways]) and not a hitch.

 

TBH I've had none of the problems mentioned by @Geschosskopf.

[Camacha]

1 hour ago, kenbobo said:

TBH I've had none of the problems mentioned by @Geschosskopf.

Even though I am well introduced to current generation hardware, I must admit I have never heard of these issues either.

[Geschosskopf]

1 minute ago, Camacha said:

Even though I am well introduced to current generation hardware, I must admit I have never heard of these issues either.

Me neither.  I mean to ask Nvidea about it but keep forgetting.  Probably because I can live with everything now, having adjusted my display settings so MS apps like Office look OK now, and have learned to tolerate Chrome (although I really prefer IE).  But at my age (really, it's not the years, it's the mileage), I don't expect my own body to work 100% to my liking so I've become a bit more tolerant of less-than-perfection in my tools.  Now, my employees had better be AJ Squared Away, but they're young so have no excuse not to be 

[pxi]

On 5/3/2016 at 3:09 AM, Geschosskopf said:

GeForces are my drug of choice.  However, having just replaced a burnt-out GTX 590 with a shiny new GTX 980, I have a couple of caveats to those getting new Nvidea cards...

Been using Nvidia chipset cards since Voodoo cards stopped being a thing, including an upgrade to a 4GB GTX960 just before christmas.  Have not had one issue running them with Windows ever.  (Excluding hardware failure.)  Not to say it can't happen, but it certainly hasn't in my case.

Edited March 6, 2016 by pxi