Graphics sugguestions?

[LeKiwi]

I have a pretty low end laptop and still not sure what to get and I rather not lower my FPS to one. 

 

Scatterer doesn't work out for me

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Are you asking for lightweight graphics mods? if so this one is pretty sweet:

 

[LeKiwi]

Just now, Waxing_Kibbous said:

Are you asking for lightweight graphics mods? if so this one is pretty sweet:

 

Thanks!

[NateisKerbal]

I use a low end laptop as well. Set render speed to fastest and turn down terrain settings. Turn off anti-aliasing, turn down textures a bit and try to build ships with low part count. Low part count can really boost FPS.

[LeKiwi]

6 minutes ago, NateisKerbal said:

I use a low end laptop as well. Set render speed to fastest and turn down terrain settings. Turn off anti-aliasing, turn down textures a bit and try to build ships with low part count. Low part count can really boost FPS.

I usually set everything around low-medium where I get usually 15 fps, so I'm good for now but thanks. And I'm horrible at building ships with a large part count.

[NateisKerbal]

7 minutes ago, LeKiwi said:

I usually set everything around low-medium where I get usually 15 fps, so I'm good for now but thanks. And I'm horrible at building ships with a large part count.

You should be fine. What's your CPU speed in gigahertz? Just curious.

Edited October 15, 2017 by NateisKerbal

[LeKiwi]

1 hour ago, NateisKerbal said:

You should be fine. What's your CPU speed in gigahertz? Just curious.

I believe it is.. 1.80 GHz, it's not great but it's not bad.

[NateisKerbal]

On 10/15/2017 at 5:31 PM, LeKiwi said:

I believe it is.. 1.80 GHz, it's not great but it's not bad.

KSP is a very CPU intensive game, so if you can try overclocking or upgrading. I'm building a new PC to join the Master Race and run KSP at 4.6 GHz. I recommend that, if you can, try looking for a laptop cooler or a aftermarket CPU cooler for $20 and make a steal in terms of performance.

_{I know you said not to help, but I just had some suggestions. Thought this might help, and if not I'll stop.}

[HighFructose]

@NateisKerbal 4.6 ghz!!!!111oneone

thats insane.

[Ty Tan Tu]

In the settings there is Max Physics Delta-time per Frame. In the Unity game engine there are two separate frames, the FPS we are use to thinking about, but there is also the physics frames. You can adjust the Max Physics Delta-time per Frame in the KSP settings. Please correct me if I am wrong here, but moving the slider to the right will slow down the physics calculations when the CPU is bogged down. So, for instance, 10 seconds in game time will take say 12 seconds in real time, but you will get more frames per second. The game will look smoother. In a first person shooter this delay will take away from the feeling of realism (when everyone is moving slower, you will notice it) but in a space game like KSP it is not as big of a problem. If your FPS gets below 10 or to a point where it is annoying, try moving the slider a bit to the right.You will get more FPS, but the game might feel a bit more sluggish. 

[LeKiwi]

5 hours ago, NateisKerbal said:

KSP is a very CPU intensive game, so if you can try overclocking or upgrading. I'm building a new PC to join the Master Race and run KSP at 4.6 GHz. I recommend that, if you can, try looking for a laptop cooler or a aftermarket CPU cooler for $20 and make a steal in terms of performance.

_{I know you said not to help, but I just had some suggestions. Thought this might help, and if not I'll stop.}

Already got that covered, hehe.

[NateisKerbal]

15 hours ago, Scout1218 said:

@NateisKerbal 4.6 ghz!!!!111oneone

thats insane.

Hey, at least I'm putting all that liquid nitrogen in my garage to good use. Don't ask why I have it.

[NightshineRecorralis]

I find that changing the screen res also helps if your GPU isn't up to the task, say if you had a 1080p screen, turn it down to 1600x900 or even 1280x720.

Turning off all the different FXs can help with larger ships that go fast, and changing the Texture and Render Quality to a good balance between looks and performance can help a bunch.  On my Ideapad I have these two set to Fastest Rendering and Quarter Res Textures.

Turn off terrain scatters. Unless you really need them, they hurt performance.

In terms of gameplay, try not to keep more vessels lying around than you need. 1 to 5 should be fine. Any more and you might see significant slowdowns.

Also the Delta-Time per Frame does help if you have larger vessels.

Hope this all helps!

[Deddly]

We need to get this knowledge spread out there to the masses:

The number of GHz means nothing unless you are talking about the same CPU.

The Pentium 4 went right up to 3.8 GHz (or possibly 4) but that 12-year-old CPU is no match for a modern one at a much lower clock speed. Not even close.

For example (source):

2005 Top-of-the-line PC CPU Pentium 4 @ 3.8 Ghz	Modern high-end Laptop CPU: i7 7500U @ 2.7 GHz
140% higher clock speed	314% better performance overall 169% better single-core performance

To put this into perspective (and this is oversimplifying it, of course), to get the same performance out of the Pentium 4, you would have to overclock it to 12 GHz.

So what laptop (and model number) do you have, @LeKiwi? There are a number of things you can do to improve performance, but it depends on whether you are experiencing CPU slowdown (calculations) or GPU slowdown (graphics)

[Agustin]

Really in terms of CPU physics calculations, Move the slider right to the right end of the delta physics slider and that will help you a ton. You really can't tell the difference between the accuracy lost in the process. ANd it helps really too much for physics calculations. About graphics, it has to do more with the GPU and you have to search for the right custom settings. Play around with every setting, including on tyour GPU control panel outside the game. I play with SCIfi link posted above, and it is beautiful. Also I install Scatterer but disable terrain shadows, lower the water effects and I also downloaded a mod to limit my framerate, so ksp doesn't calculate more than it can render and makes more fps in the end. Try it out.

[A Soviet Tank]

On 17/10/2017 at 10:47 PM, NateisKerbal said:

 I recommend that, if you can, try looking for a laptop cooler or a aftermarket CPU cooler for $20 and make a steal in terms of performance.

I have some crappy plastic cooling pad from China, and it works wonders for my laptop's performance on all the games I play. Overheating is a big problem on laptops, at least from my experience. 

[LeKiwi]

@Deddly I have a HP Probook 455 G3 ( RTL8723BE ) I believe, sorry for the late reply didn't go on forums for a while.

[Deddly]

Welcome back, @LeKiwi!

Depending on the exact specs of your laptop, it could well be a GPU slowdown you're experiencing. Here's a suggestion: In graphics settings, please select the lowest resolution in the 4:3 aspect ratio. That will give your computer fewer pixels to render and it can really help with performance when the GPU is the bottleneck. That will hopefully let you install some nice graphics mods, if you want

[LeKiwi]

Thanks for the help, @Deddly it worked out nicely

[Guest]

On ‎2017‎-‎10‎-‎17 at 11:57 PM, Scout1218 said:

@NateisKerbal 4.6 ghz!!!!111oneone

thats insane.

Really? AMD FX8350 is 4GHz stock and I've got it at 4.4 currently in an air-cooled system and not even breaking 65C in temp. It's aging now but still has decent single-core performance in the price range of $100, especially with this Turbo Core feature that essentially shuts down two cores to make two of the remaining six 5% faster. At least that's how I think it works.

[HighFructose]

@Rocket Witch, Isnt the FX8350 4 cores 4 threads??

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Scout1218 said:

@Rocket Witch, Isnt the FX8350 4 cores 4 threads??

Piriform Speccy tells me it really has 8 cores, each with their own thread.