Which KSP mods have a high performance impact?

[Proply]

As the title suggests, I am wondering which KSP mods are known to have a significant impact on performance. I ask because I have a large number of mods installed, and they are causing a clear reduction in performance in the tracking station and on vessels with a large number of parts (eg: 20 FPS vs 150 for the same craft in a stock install). Through systematic removal of several mods at a time I was able to track down that Audio Muffler Redux was causing serious issues (half of the observed frame rate drop vs. no mods), but there are clearly other CPU hogs in the mix too, and I am having a harder time tracking those down (as they may only happen when relevant parts are on a vessel, for example). I would also be interested in hearing if there are any tools/methods for identifying processes/mods causing significant increases to the update delta.

[Julien Kerman]

So graphical mods have definitely a huge performance hit. I am talking about mods like "Scatterer", "Environmental Visual Enhancements" or "Stock Visual Terrain".

[ARS]

Install janitor closet (JC) mod. This allows you to filter out your installed mod. The most resource intensive mods are part mods and graphic mods, mainly because part mods takes a while to load all of the parts installed, even if you never have or never needed that part (ex: huge artilleries in weapons mod that you never gonna use anyway). Using JC mod, you can sort and filter installed part mods and "blacklist" specific parts, allowing them to be permanently not loaded during gameplay (you can revert this, careful though, any active craft that happens to be using blacklisted parts will be missing), saving some RAM and performance since there's less parts to be handled. But then, of course the most resource intensive mod is graphic mod. Those can really slow down the gameplay to a crawl (though it does looks absolutely beautiful). Usually minimum RAM for graphic-intensive gameplay is around 16 GB for smooth performance (not counting other mods). My usual method for part mods is having several KSP folders, each with their own specialization (ex: KSP folder 1 for spaceplanes, folder 2 for rockets, etc.), so I can still enjoy all part mods without suffering performance drop or having to reinstall mods. As for graphic mods, I cannot say anything, since my laptop isn't powerful enough to run even a scatterer without having my FPS plummeted to a crawl

[Ser]

On 11/10/2017 at 3:58 PM, Proply said:

Through systematic removal of several mods at a time I was able to track down that Audio Muffler Redux was causing serious issues (half of the observed frame rate drop vs. no mods)

Could you share the vessel on which you have Audio Muffler causing significant slowdowns? And your PC specs please.