Performance *runs away in fear of being desintegrated*

[atomontage]

Hello.

[1.0.5 the lastest build]

tl;dr: how can part-only mods affect fps (even if none of mod's parts are not present on any vessel in the current game) and why is fps NOT affected by warping as physics must be disabled during warp? Even on a pretty decent hardware. It's not physics then I guess.

I have a base with like 110 parts and I have like 3 fps on it. I've spent about 3 hours to figure out what mod causes fps drops. Even at Tracking Station it has 20-25fps. Huh? Looks like removing the mods completely brings the game back to 'normal' fps values. The mods installed that actually always calculate something even while in KSC: TACLS, RT, SCANSat, KCT, StageRecovery, UKS, KAC.. I think its the list. I removed most of mods to test the performance. In stock + like 4-5 mods (just to keep my base from disappearing as it was used as a test 'vehicle') and got 60fps while in Tracking Station. Added KAC - got 40-45. Huh? Ok nevermind, it may be a coincidence. The base almost without mods (except UKS that my base is mostly built of) gets me pure 15fps. The very confusing thing is that while in non-physics warp aka on rails it does _NOT_ affect fps AT ALL. Huh? I thought it was physics that slowed everything down. Vessels are considered a plain, um, let me say body like a dot on rails or something aren't they? Ok next. After adding the mods I mentioned above (that add tons of functionality, not just parts) the FPS did not drop much. And only after adding the whole set of mods that add many many parts to the game (like KSPIE, NearFuture, DMagic and so on) it dropped the fps back to 3-4 again. And warping does not change anything for the time of warp. Im really confused. How can pure parts-only mods affect FPS even if those parts are not present on ANY vessel in the current game? Oh yeah and the last question. The bottleneck is CPU - that is the root of my confusion. The GPU gets used only for 20% of it's power (measured by Process Explorer).

I intentionally do not specify my computer hardware just because a good friend of mine asked me to give him my mods archive and the savegame with the only vessel in the game. On a high-end computer with 970gtx and a decent core i7 he got 5-6 fps (mine on core 2 duo was 3-4). 

I am not intending to offend Squad in any way, just asking for clarification.

Thanks. The game is great! <no sarcasm>

[Violent Jeb]

Long story short, the game loads all the textures & parts at the start of the game, and KEEPS them loaded. So the size of a mod, directly adds to the size of the cpu load when playing (for the most part). It's quite the bottleneck. If you only have 100 parts on a ship and are seeing lag with those specs that's what i would think.

Part mods in particular, add textures (some mod packs are 100mb+). If you are playing with part mods I would only add parts you are finding yourself using. If you are using lots of parts (or indeed any mods), i seriously SERIOUSLY recommend the mod ATM Active Texture Management, which can reduce your CPU use more than 30% in most cases.

 

(i'm sure someone can explain better i'm not too technical.)

Edited April 18, 2016 by Violent Jeb