Low fps last resort

[spacehog]

Hi guys. Long time lurker. So ive been flying 20-30 part ships for about 2 years now due to my low fps. Cant really get past duna on account of that. I have scoured these forums and have done every combination of graphic settings and tweaks, but regardless of what I do my frame rate is usually stuck around 12 fps max is about 25. Every thing I have read points to a cpu issue, due to the game engine, but I figured I might as well ask before I stop playing all together. Maybe you guys see something I have missed. Heres my specs, amd fx 4350 4.2 cpu, msi 970 gfx, 12gb ram, ksp runs on my ssd. Here are things I have tried. EVERY possible combination of graphic settings with no results, changing settings in nvida control panel for ksp with no results, running the game in opengl with maybe 10 fps improvement (maxes at 25 on small craft),and  messed around with the cpu affinity for ksp with no results which I have read is pointless. The only thing that had a positive impact was changing the max physics delta slider to .03 which did give me a boost to about 33 fps in some instances, but usually dropped back down on landing maneuvers or take off. This is a definitely a cpu issue, correct? Any thoughts on ways I can improve this? Any input appreciated! 

[scifi6546]

I would try to install new drivers/os

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Shouldn't be that low with that machine- is there a power saving mode in the OS to look into?

[Jaeleth]

2 years, have you always had this problem? Or only after you upgraded to 1.0.5.x? I never had problems with speed (except over 500 part count) until I upgraded to 1.0.5.x, which made me return to 1.0.4.x. And I have nowhere near the hardware you have.

note that 25fps is almost ideal (30fps is enough to look smooth) and 12 fps is not that bad, I've docked huge ships at 1fps, with slower speeds, using mechjeb for flying is recommended, on some ocasions.

 

[spacehog]

I am running windows 7 that has never been activated so maybe thats an issue. Drivers are up to date on everything though. No power saving mode. thanks for replies. 

[spacehog]

Jaeleth, I play this game in spurts until I get frustrated with the framerate so it's probably always been slow. I usually call it quits when i get to duna because by that time its 7 fps no matter what im doing. I cant recall it ever being this slow though.  25 fps is fine with me too, but its only 25 fps when im not maneuvering while landed kerbin. Landed anywhere else it hovers around 12, with takeoff or descents stick around 7 fps. I noticed this game only uses 1 gb ram, 500 used and 500 reserve i think? is this normal?  EDIT : I reverted back to 1.0.4 and same issues. 12 fps. 

 

Edited March 22, 2016 by spacehog

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Have you tried setting the max physics delta even lower via the settings.cfg file?

This is the line you are looking for: PHYSICS_FRAME_DT_LIMIT = 0.03 Just change that to 0.01, some people see an FPS improvement from it.

Your comp really shouldn't run the game so poorly, I have no idea what's going on. Have you pulled up the task manager while KSP is running and checked the % CPU usage? Also, does your graphics card get hot while playing KSP? (The fan will get louder.) A dxdiag would really help. Hold windows key+R and type dxdiag into the field. Then hit save all and you'll get a text file you can copy paste here, preferably under a spoiler tag as it's typically huge.

[spacehog]

Well something was definitely off, although Im not sure what. I was starting KSP to test the things Rocket in my Pocket said and the frame rates are  way up. I rolled back last night to 1.0.4 and then forward to 1.0.5 today and Im getting steady 30-40 fps on a 50 part ship when previously i was getting about 12 fps. Maybe a corrupted file, which is weird because I have done several clean installs. I have no idea honestly. I have all the settings maxed out as well no problem. And I was about to delete this game. THANK YOU. EVE IM FINALLY COMING FOR YOU. seriously thank you guys for the help.  

[Azunai]

glad its solved

[Willbl3pic]

I have this same problem too, with a 6-core 3.4ghz CPU and 8GB of ram, and a Radeon r9 360X... no idea why, but I've always got around 7 fps.

[spacehog]

I wish I had an answer for you. 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

21 hours ago, Willbl3pic said:

I have this same problem too, with a 6-core 3.4ghz CPU and 8GB of ram, and a Radeon r9 360X... no idea why, but I've always got around 7 fps.

Sounds like we have almost the exact same computer, but I get pretty decent fps on max settings.

Wonder what's going on here? Have you updated the drivers? What is physics delta time set to? Copy-paste a dxdiag here if you have time.

Is KSP the only game you have odd problems with? This really upsets me since we have the same setup! 

[Willbl3pic]

20 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Sounds like we have almost the exact same computer, but I get pretty decent fps on max settings.

Wonder what's going on here? Have you updated the drivers? What is physics delta time set to? Copy-paste a dxdiag here if you have time.

Is KSP the only game you have odd problems with? This really upsets me since we have the same setup! 

I have my drivers on the latest version.
It only happens on KSP, most other games have pretty high fps.
I can't dxdiag unfortunately, I'm on linux.
My delta time is set to 0.04. I might try decreasing it.
During a quick flight of the Kerbal 2, my fps was around 7-12 and KSP was using about 108% CPU (as in 100% of one core and 8% of another core) and around 45% of my RAM.
Thanks for asking.
 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

1 hour ago, Willbl3pic said:

I have my drivers on the latest version.
It only happens on KSP, most other games have pretty high fps.
I can't dxdiag unfortunately, I'm on linux.
My delta time is set to 0.04. I might try decreasing it.
During a quick flight of the Kerbal 2, my fps was around 7-12 and KSP was using about 108% CPU (as in 100% of one core and 8% of another core) and around 45% of my RAM.
Thanks for asking.
 

Seems like the only difference is operating system?

I've never heard anyone complain about low fps with KSP on Linux though.

Could be that Linux and AMD/Radeon don't get along? I find that unlikely. Out of curiosity are you using the 64 bit version? I know a lot of ppl go Linux for that. Have you tried using the 32 bit instead? I don't see how it would help but it's the only other possible difference in our set ups.

[Willbl3pic]

46 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Seems like the only difference is operating system?

I've never heard anyone complain about low fps with KSP on Linux though.

Could be that Linux and AMD/Radeon don't get along? I find that unlikely. Out of curiosity are you using the 64 bit version? I know a lot of ppl go Linux for that. Have you tried using the 32 bit instead? I don't see how it would help but it's the only other possible difference in our set ups.

i use 64 bit, and i have tried 32bit in the past but it seemed worse. I also just tried lowering delta time to 0.01. It increased my fps from 7-12 up to 12-20, more than i thought it would.

However, looking at how it uses up 100% of one core and only 8% of a second, i think i might just have to wait for 1.1's multithreaded physics, allowing me to hopefully use more cores.

[kiwi1960]

Download and use: Malwarebytes, Spyware Hunter and Hitman Pro .... agressively search out the crap that takes up your CPU time...

I assume you have an AV, if not, shame on you!

Unload all non essential programs before running KSP (no point having Office stuff loaded, unless Jeb wants to send a love letter to Val)

Make sure you have deleted all the "spyware" patches from Microsoft... reports that one core uses 100% of its time every so often to prepare data to send back to head office... even if you opt out, you're still being spied on... even on win7 but worse on win10

Lastly.... set everything to LOW in the game.... see how that goes.... then, on HIGH.... if there is no change, I reckon its your video card....

 

[Willbl3pic]

47 minutes ago, kiwi1960 said:

Download and use: Malwarebytes, Spyware Hunter and Hitman Pro .... agressively search out the crap that takes up your CPU time... I run linux. All of these are Windows only, and also, I can just run the top command if I want to see what's using my CPU. And the thing at the top of the list is always KSP.

I assume you have an AV, if not, shame on you! I don't, because I only download programs from the following sources: The official apt repos for Ubuntu; Steam; and Websites which I absolutely trust. Besides, barely any malware for Linux even exists, and the stuff that does usually only targets servers, not home computers.

Unload all non essential programs before running KSP (no point having Office stuff loaded, unless Jeb wants to send a love letter to Val) I never have anything else loaded (except for skype sometimes).

Make sure you have deleted all the "spyware" patches from Microsoft... reports that one core uses 100% of its time every so often to prepare data to send back to head office... even if you opt out, you're still being spied on... even on win7 but worse on win10 I'm Using Linux.

Lastly.... set everything to LOW in the game.... see how that goes.... then, on HIGH.... if there is no change, I reckon its your video card.... No change, but seriously, look at my GPU specs. It gets at least 50fps in almost all other games.

Besides, it's probably just Unity 4. I'll just wait for 1.1.

Edited March 24, 2016 by Willbl3pic

[kiwi1960]

5 minutes ago, Willbl3pic said:

Besides, it's probably just Unity 4. I'll just wait for 1.1.

But you are not the OP of this thread, it was HIM I was talking to....

[Willbl3pic]

Just now, kiwi1960 said:

But you are not the OP of this thread, it was HIM I was talking to....

He already said that his issue was solved. Now I probably shouldn't have hijacked the thread, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[kiwi1960]

1 hour ago, Willbl3pic said:

He already said that his issue was solved. Now I probably shouldn't have hijacked the thread, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh, right, never saw that post.... so I should have read... and you shouldn't have hijacked.... LOL... we are even.

 

I suggest I exit stage left, you exit stage right. Have a nice day.

 

[Anquietas314]

Quote

I have my drivers on the latest version.

<snip>

 I only download programs from the following sources: The official apt repos for Ubuntu; Steam; and Websites which I absolutely trust

Willbl3pic: Just a thought, but exactly which driver are you using? If it's not the proprietary one provided by AMD, I'd suggest trying that. I'm far from an expert with Linux but graphics drivers have frequently been a major pain in the backside for me whenever I've tried to set up a dual boot. In my experience the default non-proprietary ones tend to emulate a lot of the more sophisticated graphics stuff on the CPU instead of using the GPU, which would explain your lag problem. 

[stupid_chris]

You guys are looking at problems where there are none. The game is, and always has been, CPU bottlenecked. Its not a matter of your GPU, or of ram, or of CPU cores amount. It always has been of max CPU processing speed. and unfortunately, KSP has been and keeps on being limited by its CPU clocking speed. U5 might bring some help with that, but KSP has always been limited by the max clock speed of single core CPUs, because the physics library of the unity engine is not thread safe on U4. U5 brings thread safety to the balance, but requires the physics calculations to be spread out manually across multiple frames, and this may not be an easy task. So all we can do for now is suck it up and wait for it to get better. Trust me, I'm running clean installs of the game on intel i7-4790, GTX 960M, and 16Gb of ram, and still getting 8fps on launch usually. Rendering celestial bodies is insanely slow, and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.

My laptop runs The Witcher 3 at nearly 40fps on high/ultra settings, but cant run KSP at more than 20fps even on the lowest settings when not in map mode. You just have to deal with it tbh.

Edited March 25, 2016 by stupid_chris

[Anquietas314]

35 minutes ago, stupid_chris said:

You guys are looking at problems where there are none.

<snip>

Trust me, I'm running clean installs of the game on intel i7-4790, GTX 960M, and 16Gb of ram, and still getting 8fps on launch usually. Rendering celestial bodies is insanely slow, and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.

My laptop runs The Witcher 3 at nearly 40fps on high/ultra settings, but cant run KSP at more than 20fps even on the lowest settings when not in map mode. You just have to deal with it tbh.

I'm running an i5-4690K and Nvidia GTX 960 with 16GB of ram. This is the performance I get with a 231 part rocket sitting on the pad with graphics maxed:

Spoiler

OP's specs indicate they're using a desktop, Willbl3pic's graphics card is an r9 360x, which is a desktop GPU unless he forgot to add the M to indicate the laptop variant. Clearly 7 fps for what sounds like a CPU at least on par with my own is far from normal performance for their hardware. Laptops on the other hand are known for having performance issues with KSP.

EDIT: I'll just add: more reasonable rockets like the Kerbal X hit the FPS limit of 120 without issue for me.

Edited March 25, 2016 by armagheddonsgw

[kiwi1960]

the 1.1 KSP looks to have fixed all that, but even so, NOT doing anything to help your game play better is stupid.

Doing what you can is good common sense.... better sense than spending a fortune on a computer that would be overkill JUST to play KSP.