Computer for KSP

[Ksp101]

I apologize to the members of this thread if you seen this question a million times or I am in the wrong spot. Basically a friend informed of KSP so I downloaded it on my PS4 (which is horrible controls mechanics everything) but I loved it so much. (Big space /science/geek) My question is what exactly am I looking for in a computer? I have someone who will build it for me. I know of several websites like pcpartpicker. My intentions are to solely play KSP (I mean I really do love it) so what do I need to optimize the gameplay? I plan on installing several mods to KSP as well. I'm sure I will play other games so a system that's capable of optimizing KSP with good performance for other games. I'm working with 1,000$.

any information is better than no information. Thanks guys.

[technicalfool]

Honestly $1000 is probably high-balling it, though the bigger the CPU, the more parts you'll be able to render smoothly.

As a reference, I'm pretty comfy here with an i5 6400 skylake CPU up to several hundred parts per vessel. The better your CPU, the more FPS per part count. I've got 16GB RAM, which a huge help for some of the silly-modded installs. The stock game is meant to run on a minimum of 4GB RAM (but really, get at least 8). The GTX1060 I got is frankly massive overkill unless you have a need to run 4 or 5 instances of KSP at once. Stock game graphics will run well on almost any graphics card asides some integrated chipsets that aren't really meant for games anyway. As a gaming card in its own right, the GTX1060 is very good, and probably available at a pretty large price cut now the 1080 is out.

Note that I use the phrase "stock" a lot, because the PC version has a whole ton of mods which can drive all system requirements up to far beyond stock requirements. Exactly how far depends on what mods and how many of them.

[LoSBoL]

I'd say the GTX1060 is indeed right in the sweet spot from an performance/price perspective, or a second hand GTX970 if you want to spare out a little money

If I would build a new computer right now which would get great performance with any game and KSP in particular, I would build it around an intel i5-7600.

And I would absolutely try to squeeze in an 29" (or 34" ) 21:9 Ultra Wide monitor, even if it blows the budget a bit, you're gonna love it. 

Edited April 19, 2017 by LoSBoL

[Dafni]

16 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:

 

If I would build a new computer right now which would get great performance with any game and KSP in particular, I would build it around an intel i5-7600.

 

Any specific reason for this? Something to do with single thread performance?

If money were no issue, wouldn't a i7 be better?? Or in other words, do you think that i5-7600 is the optimum these days for KSP??

And about that wide screen monitor, are you sure KSP would cope well with such a monitor??

thank you

[steve_v]

46 minutes ago, Dafni said:

If money were no issue, wouldn't a i7 be better??

Of course, in general. But maybe not for KSP.

46 minutes ago, Dafni said:

Or in other words, do you think that i5-7600 is the optimum these days for KSP??

Good IPC and high turbo frequency. That's all that matters here.
An I7 will likely perform better for general workloads, but for an app that multi-threads about as well as I can tango (i.e. KSP), clock speed and single-threaded instructions per clock are the metrics you're looking for.

Edited April 19, 2017 by steve_v

[LoSBoL]

23 minutes ago, Dafni said:

Any specific reason for this? Something to do with single thread performance?

If money were no issue, wouldn't a i7 be better?? Or in other words, do you think that i5-7600 is the optimum these days for KSP??

 

The I7's do happen to have the best thread performance, so yeah, if youre not on an budget, they are bound to be the best performing, looking at my own I7, it doesn't look like KSP takes advantage of hypertreading though.
I indeed think that the i5-7600 has the best thread performance for the money you have to put down for it. Some say that the i3-7300 series (7300/7320/7350) could be a good contender for KSP, but with multithreaded games getting more common, I would go for an 4 core processor anyway.

 

Quote

And about that wide screen monitor, are you sure KSP would cope well with such a monitor??

thank you

Yeah, KSP runs great with such monitors! 29" 2560x1080 or 34" 3440x1440 would scale very nicely. The only thing I hear complaints about are UHD monitors (3840x2160) as the text becomes unreadably tiny.

Going in the width however

 

[Dafni]

@steve_v and @LoSBoL thank you for the info guys, appreciate it

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

My i5-6600k potato does OK until 320 parts or so

[technicalfool]

Forgot entirely about this thread. Might be useful.

[LoSBoL]

21 hours ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

My i5-6600k potato does OK until 320 parts or so

That's no potato! Unless it's bottlenecking somewhere else it should get fine performance (way beyond 320ish parts). If that 6600K is still running stock speeds you can get a very good performance bump by overclocking it.

Edited April 20, 2017 by LoSBoL

[diomedea]

As suggested above, the subject in this thread is discussed at length in:

don't want to clutter that thread by merging all of this discussion in there (some of the posters would have probably written something different if in that thread), but seriously, this isn't a subject for Technical Support. Locking this thread. If there is still anything to discuss, please post as appropriate in that thread shown above.