Awful terrain detail

[Saylorock93]

Hello guys! Even if i have everything maxed out in the graphic options, everything far enough (talking about terrain, so mostly mountains, and mostly from orbit distance) looks really awful, like it's always on the lowest iteration and it's not "loading and getting more detailed"

I'll put a pic to show. Is this normal? 

Edit: i resized the pic from 1080 to this one, obviously the original pic shows better how everything is blurry, flat and ugly

Edited October 8, 2016 by Saylorock93

[Benoit Hage]

Looks pretty normal to me...

What makes you think your game is different from what you've seen on internet?

[Alshain]

15 minutes ago, Benoit Hage said:

Looks pretty normal to me...

What makes you think your game is different from what you've seen on internet?

Because everyone posting screenshots on the internet uses Eve, Scatterer, and/or Texture Replacer.

OP, sadly this is normal.  If you want better you need to go with mods.  Start here.  Then go here.  Finally, here. That's just for the planet's visuals, there are a ton of great non-planet visual mods too.

Edited October 9, 2016 by Alshain

[fireblade274]

Though hopefully there will be a 1.3 graphical update

[Saylorock93]

Thank you for answering guys, the fact is that i'm already using scatterer (it was off in the screenshot cause of incom. with 1.2). What i'm talking about is not the quality of light effects, maybe clouds and fake city lights, but mostly about how often mountains are totally flat from LO distance, and you can see looking at shores how they're incredibly low in poly count. 

Shouldn't we have this level of detail also from LO at least?

[Vaporized Steel]

KSP is not a high end graphics game and never will be. But admitted I think there is some room for improvement. Atleast give us a slider for auto generated textures like trees (with a tree line this time please)
It's kind of a fixed objective of any game developer to make the game playable for everyone.

Don't expect major changes for that reason, and I'll explain why more specifically if you want to know.
KSP already is CPU intensive. I have a overclocked 4.3ghz 3570K Processor with 8gigs of ram. This particular processor seems to do very well for ksp according to a chart I read sometime ago. The reason for this has to do with calculations (flops) per clock which is technical and I'll spare you. Most newer CPUs are better at this but the 3570k in this instance has that and a high base clock + overclockability. Other CPUs might not work as good as mine.
I get 15+ fps just on my 200 part vessels and even lower if I go near 300 parts (which is where things are still tolerable)

What your suggesting is to make the game besides CPU demanding also GPU demanding. The problem there is that the CPU supplies RAW pre-calculated data for your GPU. The higher the graphics, the more the CPU has to do to serve the needs of the GPU. This is minal though, especially in KSP, so mostly this should not be a bottlenecking factor. But because your CPU in KSP is already pretty much stressed atleast on one if not multiple cores any more load is only going to get the FPS further down.

So making KSP with higher end graphics will exponentiate the performance losses because the CPU now has to do a 2nd thing while already stressed with it's basic physics and KSP related calculations. This is why you see frames per second loss if you got a variety of graphics mod installed on KSP. So expect FPS loss if you are going to mod. With the right settings a proper CPU and enough RAM it should still be very playable, regardless of your gamedata folder contents.

I see it is basically a trend for CPU intensive sandbox environments to have lower graphics. Take vanilla FSX for example. Because programmers are often limited to choose either a CPU or GPU intensive environment because a environment that has both elements will always make the CPU a bottleneck no matter what Extreme overclock edition + phase change cooling you'll choose.