Low FPS when fullscreen

[basherboy516]

I have had KSP for years and just recently got a laptop with a 4k screen that I installed the game on. Everything was working fine for weeks, even with ~30 mods installed through CKAN. A couple days ago, the game started to run very slow and so I uninstalled the game, deleted CKAN, and reinstalled the game again. After the install was complete I ran the game with no mods and no ckan installed and upon entering fullscreen at 1920x1080, the fps in the menu dropped to 50-60 (as opposed to 120), and I could notice a stutter. In game, the space center was running at ~50 fps and in the VAB it dropped to 20. upon launching a Kerbal X, the timer stays yellow and my fps remains at ~20. 

If I change the game to a windowed mode, on a resolution less than my laptops native resolution of 3840x2160 like 1920x1080, then the fps goes right back up to the normal 120fps that I had prior. As I increase the resolution, the average fps starts to drop. I normally play at 1920x1080 fullscreen all the time, because my computer cant handle 4k most of the time.

Of course I can physically play the game at a lower windowed resolution, but it would be highly inconvenient as the game is a small window in the center of my screen at that resolution. Again, this has never happened to me in this way before, and I have always been able to solve the issue by doing a clean install, but this time it doesn't seem so. Thanks for any help that you all have, and Happy New Year as well! 

Specs:

Laptop: MSI GP62MVR 7RF Leopard Pro

CPU: Intel i7-7700HQ

GPU: GTX 1060

RAM: 16GB

KSP installed on 256GB SSD, but there is a 1TB HDD as well

Windows 10

x64 KSP 1.3.1, modless 

 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Welcome to the forums!

I play on pretty much the same settings with just about the same hardware, only mine is a desktop.

Have you updated your graphics card drivers? Also, are you playing with Vsync on? 4k in general is pretty demanding as I'm sure you know, but I usually get near 60fps as long as the ship isn't hundreds of parts (Running quite a few mods including visual ones.) Did you actually manually go delete your mods? A lot of the times even after an uninstall there may be things left over your computer didn't automatically delete.

Edited January 2, 2018 by Rocket In My Pocket

[basherboy516]

45 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Welcome to the forums!

I play on pretty much the same settings with just about the same hardware, only mine is a desktop.

Have you updated your graphics card drivers? Also, are you playing with Vsync on? 4k in general is pretty demanding as I'm sure you know, but I usually get near 60fps as long as the ship isn't hundreds of parts (Running quite a few mods including visual ones.) Did you actually manually go delete your mods? A lot of the times even after an uninstall there may be things left over your computer didn't automatically delete.

I just updated my graphics card driver yesterday, which didn't help anything. I always play with Vsync off, and I have the rest of the setting sliders in the middle. Having the settings like this didn't improve any performance, even when they were all set to low. I did turn the space center crew off, which improved performance in the VAB, but all other scenes were unimproved. 

My uninstallation process was to run the  "unins0000" application to uninstall, and then manually delete any folders which were left over that the application didn't get. Is there another secret folder that KSP has that I don't know about, which is secretly mucking up this new install? 

Another piece of info that may be helpful is that I did a re installation twice, the first time with ckan, and upon launching ckan, it somehow magically knew where my previous folder was, and prompted me with a "could not find readme" error. I am pretty sure I deleted everything ckan, as i searched my computer for anything that had "ckan" in the name. This could possibly point to there being files left over, but I cannot for the life of me find them if there are.  

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Anything left over from a mod would just be in your KSP "gamedata" folder.

Don't know much about CKAN really. I've heard of it causing trouble with removing mods cleanly before though.

Also, since it is a laptop; is it getting adequate cooling? If it's hot on your lap, it's too hot. Another thing to check would be to make sure you aren't set to "power save" mode in the battery settings, that KSP is using your dedicated graphics card if you have an onboard chip, and also that the laptop is plugged in when playing.

Edited January 2, 2018 by Rocket In My Pocket

[basherboy516]

I have possibly found a solution. I did a little reading and found that the game would run better in borderless windowed mode, but as I said, running at 1080p, the game screen only takes up a small area. I read that if you change an option related to scaling in the properties of the exe file, that it would allow the borderless window to scale its 1080p resolution to my entire monitor. After doing this change, it seems to have fixed the problem, but I am still on the lookout for other issues. Thanks for your help.