Anyone playing KSP on Ryzen 5? Any suggestions for performance improving?

[skoy21]

It was time to upgrade my PC, so I went for a Ryzen 5 1600 + Sapphire rx580 Nitro+ Limited Edidtion, and kept my Samsung 850 EVO

I was and am playing 1.1.2, Modded with RSS+RO + essential mods + a few more.

KSP on the new PC is just a folder copy from the old PC (same install).

Game loading improved greatly, with about 9 minutes on the old PC vs 2:30 to 3 minutes on the new, but everything else feels almost the same...

Same launchpad loading times, same frame drop on flying bigish rockets, etc. VAB is a bit more responsive, but everything else feels kind of same.

I didn't try a stock install, only modded.

My RX580 doesn't start the fans until it is pushed and start heating, and it never ever started the fans while playing KSP, and CPU was at 48C max temp. As if both CPU and GPU were not utilized at all...

I also play ME Andromeda, which runs perfect with most settings on ultra high (as opposed to before, were it was straggling and glitching with the lowest settings)

 

To the question. Is there something that I can do to have some improvement on performance on KSP? Some setting etc to utilize my new system better? Maybe newer KSP versions like 1.2 will run better?

I keep 1.1.2 for MOD compatibility, as I will have to rebuild most of my rockets if I change KSP version, and I try to avoid it. I spent hours and hours on building and fine-tunning my rockets and editing cfgs, have loads of orbiting satellites, and i am terrified to the idea of starting over, due to some not updated mods that I currently use)

 

****IMPORTANT NOTICE:   DO NOT COMPARE INTEL & AMD HERE PLEASE. If you want to, then start a new thread for that on The Lounge section.****

[Pena]

Update to the latest version. 1.2 runs way, way faster on any hardware.

 

[Starman4308]

You can try using MemGraph to reduce GC stutters, but other than that and keeping part counts low, there's not really all that much that can be done. KSP is what it is, a CPU-hungry beast that has to do far more rigid-body physics on the CPU than almost any other game.

With low-part-count vehicles, it should play very smoothly. With larger part counts, a higher-end CPU should let you squeeze out a little extra performance, but you still have the issue that CPU load grows faster than number of parts on a vessel: I'm not sure exactly what algorithms Unity's physics engine uses, but I am pretty sure it's worse than O(n).

The Intel chips might have had a slight edge for KSP, on account of having better single-thread performance, but it would hardly be a deal-breaker. KSP can do a little bit of offloading, but the primary limiting factor has always been the main thread.

[skoy21]

Thanks for the suggestion... Deep down, I know that this will definitely have an improvement impact. I hoped to avoid it, but I don't think I can avoid it forever...

I will give it a try though, and check my mod lists

[skoy21]

Starman4308 Thanks for the suggestions and info as well. 

I will try MemGraph and keep it in mind for next installs, i hadn't heard of it before. As for the part count, I have spent hours deleting unused parts from my mods, and stripped them down to my necessaries.

As you said, with lower part rockets, things are ok, but with the bigger ones, i drop to 2 -10 fps

[LoSBoL]

11 hours ago, skoy21 said:

Thanks for the suggestion... Deep down, I know that this will definitely have an improvement impact. I hoped to avoid it, but I don't think I can avoid it forever...

I will give it a try though, and check my mod lists

Pena is right, KSP transfered to Unity 5.4 which greatly improves multicore usage, I can see great utilization on 4 cores/8 threads, 6 cores probably do even better. So you're cheating yourself out of performance staying on 1.1.2

Bottleneck will always be the partcount though, no matter how fast a CPU you'll run. It's something we all need to accept.

I guess I don't have to tell you that you can run multiple installs on the same PC, so no need to delete your 1.1.2 install, so you could be compare with 1.2.2 easily.

Edited May 22, 2017 by LoSBoL

[PT]

There are two mods that can help. (Well, helped me)

Kerbal Joint Reinforcement reduces physics problems on large crafts, less wobbling seems to have positive result on my rig (performance-wise should be similar). I have not made any fps graphs so it could be just smoother maneuvering rather than performance itself, but since installing it docking motherships to space stations became much better experience. And of course less structural parts equals... less parts.

Part welding mod, although bothersome in usage, can help if you are using stuff like space carriers with "spinal columns" made out of structural parts.

As Starman mentioned, performance penalty for each part is closer to exponential than linear, so when approaching limits of what your rig can run at smooth 60 shaving dozen parts out of few hundreds can have noticeable effect. HWInfo can help you monitor CPU/GPU usage/temperature.

(You have not mentioned RAM, I hope you have enough to avoid paging to disk? Are you running 64bit or 32bit KSP?)

Edited May 22, 2017 by PT

[skoy21]

Hi PT, thanks for the input!

I would't dare play without Kerbal Joint reinforcement. Once, it broke, and all my rockets/ships broke with it...

Part welding is a tool that is probably going to help me a lot, since I do use a lot of parts. I will definitely try this one.

HWinfo always runs behind my games to ckeck things, that's why I said that it is like not utilizing the GPU at all, and the CPU is not to busy either. As for my memory, it's 2x8G Vengence DDR4, it shouldn't be the problem.

LoSBol, probably i am going to update my install, i don't see how I can avoid it anymore.

I have already many installs with different mods for different ships, but I finally got to the point that I have all my satellites in place, my stations etc, in this particular install. And 1.2.2 is still a pain to install all Realism overhaul related mods, but probably the only way...

[eddiew]

What frequency are you running your memory at (and what's it designed to run at)?

I don't own a Ryzen, but I'm looking into it, and it seems they're very sensitive to memory speeds. Unfortunately, they've also had real issues running memory at any decent speed (e.g. above 2400mhz, while Intel systems will handle up to 4000). There are some beta bios updates starting to appear for a few enthusiast boards and people are reporting being able to take it up as high as 3700, which may provide a significant increase in performance. Hopefully these updates will start to appear for more boards as time passes  

That aside, KSP 1.2 was a significant performance boost for just about everyone. On smaller vessels it is almost eerily smooth, although upwards of 200 parts does still exact a penalty. It would be worth making the effort to find up-to-date versions of mods and seeing whether you can live without the vessels that get deleted after an upgrade, as this is certainly cheaper than super-fast memory

[lancefoxcia]

I own a Ryzen 7 1700 cpu, Upgrading to 1.2.2 improved framerates a lot.
Kerbal Join reinforcement works in 1.2.2

and I'm using a lot of mods as well.

BDarmory and assortment of mods with it.

I had 1.1.2 and then upgraded to 1.2.2 and by doing that frame times improved because of the better multithreading

[skoy21]

My memory is Corsair 3200 Vengeance, currently running stable at 2400.

I am updating to 1.2.2, and up to this point I have installed all the dependencies of Realism Overhaul and RSS and a few that are absolutely minimum for me, and already have 1.75 Gb of Game Data.

I will try it tomorrow and see how it goes.

[lancefoxcia]

I have G.skill Aegis Ram, Stable at 2933
Though I have 32gb only because of the insane work I do.

But yeah It works very well.

[PT]

I read in few places that Windows still have issues with thread/core scheduling on Ryzen platform, Linux kernel 4.10 is supposed to have Ryzen support. It might be part of issues as KSP is mostly limited by CPU power.

What fps do you, @lancefoxcia and @skoy21, get at, for example, 255, 300 and 600 parts on launch pad? Respectively I got 40, 25 and fluctuating 16 on my rig. Your R5 and R7 should reach similar results from what I see of their stats. Can you check it on some Linux?

(I'll check with MemGraph tomorrow)

 

For reference: stock [email protected] (please don't lynch me :D), 16GB DDR4@2400MHz, modest GTX1060, obligatory SSD and a lot of mods, so it should be similar - updating KSP to 1.2 was huge performance gain here as well.

[lancefoxcia]

I don't run Linux. However I do pair my Ryzen 7 with a GTX 1080, and as anything. On the Launch pad I get around 120fps with just 1 vehicle. However if I have 12 war tanks it'll drop to about 20-30fps



Edit: Saw your little text stating intel. Lel I don't mind either AMD or intel. I just need a lot of cores. Amd had a good price to core ratio so I got it. Now I'm going to get me threadripper or epyc when it comes out. Lol

Edited May 22, 2017 by lancefoxcia
Didn't see small Text so went ahead and responded to small text.

[LoSBoL]

PT's reply made me remember reading several reviews that the windows power state settings do having a big influence on performance because of 'core parking'. I too have the experience that it makes a big difference in that 'Performance mode' drastically improves performance over 'Standard mode' even on Intel.  I read that AMD (or was it Microsoft?) released a specific powersettings profile for Ryzen CPU's.

Could be that you've already 'been there, done that' though.

 

[PT]

2 hours ago, LoSBoL said:

PT's reply made me remember reading several reviews that the windows power state settings do having a big influence on performance because of 'core parking'. ...

 

I was thinking about Ryzen issues on Windows being caused by new architecture, which makes Windows cpu core manager go nuts. I can't find good, yet simple, technical description so here is reddit thread with some info.

In great simplification, (some?) Ryzens are pretty much two CPU's in one slot, while Windows have multi-cpu support for quite some years it seems to fail to understand how to schedule threads to cores on Ryzen (I guess it presents itself as single CPU, can @lancefoxcia check on your Ryzen 7?).

Quote

Communication between cores on the same CCX is done through the local cache and is at worst 175GB/sec (L3 cache speed). However if a thread on CCX0 depends on a thread on CCX1, you need go communicate through the "slow" 22GB/sec Infinity fabric. So you don't want a thread on CCX0 to depend on a thread on CCX1.

Threads can switch between cores on new CPU/OS to maximize CPU utilization (single thread running on four logical cores), but when core switching decisions are made poorly it may result in horrible performance (for example due to catch misses).  If you can identify which core lies on which CCX on Ryzen (if you have more than one CCX, that is), you might try to use Core Affinity to limit game to single CCX.

Back to KSP itself, each of us should prepare stock (for easy sharing) craft with part count just on border of stable 60fps in clean save, then we should be able to compare game performance and effect of mods on fps/gc jitter. (gimme few hours to get back to my rig :>).

Edited May 23, 2017 by PT

[skoy21]

I made a test with a 410 part /98 engines rocket, in 1.1.2 RSS + Ro and had 5 FPS on launchpad and 1 to 4 after launch.

I also built the same simple two stage, 28 parts rocket in both 1.1.2 and 1.2.2 stock. The results were constant 30 FPS on 1.1.2 and constant 60 FPS on 1.2.2. 30 FPS for just changing KSP version.

As Pena, LoSBoL and lancefoxcia said, there is huge difference between the two versions in terms of performance. I never thought it would be double the FPS. I did expect some improvement, but not that much.

PT, I will build a 255 stock parts rocket in 1.2.2, post FPS on Launchpad and after launch, and share it if anybody wants to check their FPS with that one..

[LoSBoL]

On ‎24‎-‎5‎-‎2017 at 8:33 PM, skoy21 said:

I made a test with a 410 part /98 engines rocket, in 1.1.2 RSS + Ro and had 5 FPS on launchpad and 1 to 4 after launch.

I also built the same simple two stage, 28 parts rocket in both 1.1.2 and 1.2.2 stock. The results were constant 30 FPS on 1.1.2 and constant 60 FPS on 1.2.2. 30 FPS for just changing KSP version.

As Pena, LoSBoL and lancefoxcia said, there is huge difference between the two versions in terms of performance. I never thought it would be double the FPS. I did expect some improvement, but not that much.

PT, I will build a 255 stock parts rocket in 1.2.2, post FPS on Launchpad and after launch, and share it if anybody wants to check their FPS with that one..

Double the performance, wow! That's perfect!

What I would be truly interested in, is if there is a gain in performance when playing on one core complex?

[skoy21]

I ran v 1.2.2 with two cores enabled (I can only disable pairs of cores with RyzenMaster, didn't try through BIOS) and didn't see much of a drop in FPS with low part vessels, I was always above 56 FPS, but didn't test higher part vessels to stress the CPU a bit more.

I tried changing number of cores assigned to KSP through affinity. It was better with 2 processing units working on KSP rather than with any other combination. But the best results were with all six cores enabled by default (12 processing units enabled)

But it was a great improvement just by switching versions, even with a lot of plugins installed (2.08 Gigs of GameData and about 4 minutes of loading the game). I also managed to run my memory @ 2993MHz, so I will make some more tests.

Unfortunately for me though, I cannot switch to 1.2.2 yet, since RO is still a WIP for 1.2 and things are not quite playable... So I have to stick with 1.1.2 for now and bare with the lag...