Speeding up KSP?

[Guest]

I have a Win 7 Intel I5 laptop with an NVS 5200M and 8gb ram. I also have a old desktop with 4gb ram, and a VIIV processor plus integrated intel graphics. I am looking to process 700 parts at 10-15FPS in FAR and AJE. What free or under 20$ softwares/hardware mod/KSP settings change could significantly speed up KSP on the laptop? And how much would it cost to upgrade the desktop to similar standards?

Edited January 9, 2018 by Guest

[Galileo]

Well there is no magic program that will fix performance in KSP. It’s all about hardware. Which can be pretty expensive, certainly more than $20.

While I do think an i5 is plenty for playing KSP, the laptop version is not as powerful as it’s desktop counterpart and probably isn’t great for large ships.

That being said, I have never seen anyone be able to put a 700 part ship into space without living in the yellow in the physics thingy either, regardless of how powerful their rig is. 

This is something that you will probably just have to deal with. Even buying the best ram, cpu/gpu available would probably only wield minimal performance gain with a ship of that size.

 

 

[Mako]

700 parts is a lot. I don't think there is much out there than can make a big difference with that many parts. Now, if you don't need them all to be discrete parts, there is the Part Welding Mod that gets suggested from time to time when people want to reduce part count to improve performance.

I haven't tried it myself since I don't really build that big, but it should allow you to join multiple parts into one to reduce the amount of physics processing the game has to do. It seems like a good solution for things like making stacks of multiple fuel tanks into one big tank, but I believe it can do much more.

Beyond that, I don't have any suggestions. I'm in the planning stage of building a new computer and without counting the graphics card I'm looking at spending around $1000 and I still don't expect it to handle 700 parts at 30fps and 1:1 timescale, but maybe I'm underestimating the possibilities.

Good luck!

[invision]

you would need a newer faster CPU with high single core clock speed. 

[Guest]

When I mean 700 parts, I mean a 5v5 BDArmory dogfights. Part welder might help.

[Mako]

In the last few versions of KSP the physics for separate vessels should be handled by separate processing threads, so an Intel i7 (4 cores hyper-threading to virtual 8 cores) or one of the newer 6+ core offerings from a Intel or AMD could potentially make a difference in handling the separate vessels, but I can't say what kind of performance impact those mods might have.

Upgrading your desktop to a better processor is not in the $20 range, though. Think somewhere in the ballpark of around 10-15 times as much ($200+ for i7 processor and motherboard if you can reuse everything else) on the low end and it goes up from there for better performance/newer hardware.

Your least expensive option to improve performance will always be to reduce part count and reduce programs/processes running in the background on your system. There is also a setting called "Max Physics Delta-Time per Frame" which you can adjust to get more FPS for less physics accuracy or better accuracy for time moving slower than realtime (i.e. 1 in-game second for every 2+ real-world seconds).

Edited January 8, 2018 by Mako

[Kerbal pancake]

1 set terrain settings to low 

2 turn off ground scatters

these significantly reduce lag on celestial bodies 

 

[Guest]

15 hours ago, Mako said:

In the last few versions of KSP the physics for separate vessels should be handled by separate processing threads, so an Intel i7 (4 cores hyper-threading to virtual 8 cores) or one of the newer 6+ core offerings from a Intel or AMD could potentially make a difference in handling the separate vessels, but I can't say what kind of performance impact those mods might have.

Upgrading your desktop to a better processor is not in the $20 range, though. Think somewhere in the ballpark of around 10-15 times as much ($200+ for i7 processor and motherboard if you can reuse everything else) on the low end and it goes up from there for better performance/newer hardware.

Your least expensive option to improve performance will always be to reduce part count and reduce programs/processes running in the background on your system. There is also a setting called "Max Physics Delta-Time per Frame" which you can adjust to get more FPS for less physics accuracy or better accuracy for time moving slower than realtime (i.e. 1 in-game second for every 2+ real-world seconds).

Changing the physics delta thingy up does which one? And down? FAR and AJE slow down ksp by maybe 7-14 FPS.

14 hours ago, Kerbal pancake said:

1 set terrain settings to low 

2 turn off ground scatters

these significantly reduce lag on celestial bodies 

 

I have already done that. I never use scatter at all. And anti-aliasing is off, as it really lags.

Edited January 8, 2018 by Guest

[Rocket In My Pocket]

22 minutes ago, dundun92 said:

Changing the physics delta thingy up does which one? And down? FAR and AJE slow down ksp by maybe 7-14 FPS.

I have already done that. I never use scatter at all. And anti-aliasing is off, as it really lags.

Putting the delta physics time slider up does both those things, it not only decreases physics accuracy but allows time dilation during stressful scenes. Put it all the way to the right for better performance at high part counts.

If you are open to a more unconventional solution, you can get Better time Warp for the slow mo ability and actually play the game at a manually reduced speed, which should improve performance.

Edited January 8, 2018 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Greenfire32]

Part of the problem is also the way KSP is built and unfortunately in your case I don't think anything is going to help you get 700 parts into orbit smoothly. There are options you can turn off (like terrain scatters already mentioned) and some "optimization" mods (like mods that replace stock textures with lower res versions etc etc), but I think in this case you'll find that KSP itself just cant handle that big a craft without sweating.

Instead, a better way to achieve your goals while minimizing the performance hit would be to build whatever it is you're building in a smarter way. Does it have to be 700 parts? Can you ditch something that's not mission-critical? Or can you assemble it in orbit and do three launches instead of one? Perhaps an even better solution to the problem would be an addition of mods like extra-planetary launchpads that allow you to build crafts on other planets (launching from the Mun would take far fewer resources than launching from Kerbin for example and maybe you can ditch an entire stage or two).

----

There comes a point where you have to balance what is possible inside the game and what is possible outside the game.

[Guest]

25 minutes ago, Greenfire32 said:

Part of the problem is also the way KSP is built and unfortunately in your case I don't think anything is going to help you get 700 parts into orbit smoothly. There are options you can turn off (like terrain scatters already mentioned) and some "optimization" mods (like mods that replace stock textures with lower res versions etc etc), but I think in this case you'll find that KSP itself just cant handle that big a craft without sweating.

Instead, a better way to achieve your goals while minimizing the performance hit would be to build whatever it is you're building in a smarter way. Does it have to be 700 parts? Can you ditch something that's not mission-critical? Or can you assemble it in orbit and do three launches instead of one? Perhaps an even better solution to the problem would be an addition of mods like extra-planetary launchpads that allow you to build crafts on other planets (launching from the Mun would take far fewer resources than launching from Kerbin for example and maybe you can ditch an entire stage or two).

----

There comes a point where you have to balance what is possible inside the game and what is possible outside the game.

I dont mean a giant 700 part ship. I mean a dogfight between 10 70part airplanes.

[Galileo]

10 minutes ago, dundun92 said:

I dont mean a giant 700 part ship. I mean a dogfight between 10 70part airplanes.

Well that’s still 700 parts being rendered. It’s the equivalent of a giant 700 part ship

[Kerbal101]

Dear @dundun92 , I have covered what effects performance in this post. Let me quote myself:

Quote

Following may influence performance: parts with excessive polygon count, part count in ship (doh), part joints when physical simulation is active, open docking ports, lighting on parts, volumetric clouds, additional conditional logic, suboptimally scaled textures
Expensive on RAM: extra textures, sounds, any extra content within Gamedata

So, any additional mod will increase RAM usage, but depending on what it does - it may improve or decrease performance.
Some examples:
Mod that adds equal or larger parts with lower poly count than existing parts, will improve performance because there will be reduction in geometry detail, less drawing calls, less physic calculations.
Mod that overrides textures will increase RAM and may increase CPU usage, but may improve fps due to less downscaling of larger texture, using lots of smaller duplicate high-er detail textures instead.

How the mod set affects performance, is best done with own benchmarking.. Start with small amount of mods, prepare a complex ship for example in kerbin orbit (a), on landing pad(b) and  in orbit around Mun(c). Make a save.
Then do a screenshot of gamedata folder and add a group of mods. Compare the difference in these scenes and if there is performance reduction - bissect to problematic mod by pulling the mods from the recent batch.
If there is no problem, make screenshot of gamedata and proceed to add another group of mods.

In my own testing, I have discovered quite contradictory things. Mods that improve visual detail of parts or textures, do not necessary reduce or may actually improve performance.
Mods that introduced parts with better properties or lesser polygon count, allowed to reduce total part count for the ship and improve fps.
The welding mod did not affect performance at all, because while it decreased physics calculation - the geometry complexity remained same: parts were merged, but graphical models were not.

As for ships, I recommend to build ships with less part count, using parts with less geometrical detail in themselves.
The most prominent example is stock Z400 battery. Building a 100x block will destroy performance.
A mod, such as "Near Future Electrical" adds low-poly 10k battery and nuclear reactors, both of options will have much less drastic effect of fps.

Finally, i7/920 is really not good at single thread work. I am saying this, because I am using somewhat similar gen. CPU. An upgrade would be good, the geekbench (single thread column) or passmark(single thread column) have good comparison tables.

Essentially, there are multitude of factors that might drag performance down. Even one of them is sufficient.
I have found that Mods do not necessary reduce performance, but may drastically improve it. However it is all system-dependent.

I think, people who suggest reducing Terrain Detail to low are partially correct, however you need to measure the difference yourself. You can also use this trick to reduce ocean geometry tesselation. Parking stations in high orbit will also help, because at around 200k (?) around  Kerbin the tesselation detail is set to minimum.

What mostly causes drastic performance reduction from my experience is [ part count X part geometry detail ], this is because it causes a lot of draw calls for geometry and draw calls are limited to one CPU core (at least in OpenGL), thus bottlenecking.

So a faster in single thread CPU and smart construction of ships is current solution for current version. And lots of own benchmarking of different configurations using same situation.

[Greenfire32]

7 minutes ago, dundun92 said:

I dont mean a giant 700 part ship. I mean a dogfight between 10 70part airplanes.

Ah...well in that case, the problem becomes exponentially worse as the more separate crafts there are within physics range, the worse KSP runs. This is the case because now instead of calculating speed, position change and any environmental factors on one craft (which are comprised of many parts themselves), it now has to keep track of all that for many crafts. Its one thing to have KSP process one big craft, but it's an entirely different thing to have it process many smaller crafts all at once. Honestly, with KSP, you'd get better performance out of one giant craft than you would with many small crafts.

KSP just isn't built to handle what you're trying to accomplish. As mentioned above there are mods and certain options you can tick that can help mitigate the worst of the effects, but you'll never fully be free of them.

I think you're just going to have to accept a performance hit, honestly. Not even the beefiest of gaming rigs would reliably be able to handle that kind of scenario as KSP itself just isn't up to the task.

[Guest]

34 minutes ago, Greenfire32 said:

Ah...well in that case, the problem becomes exponentially worse as the more separate crafts there are within physics range, the worse KSP runs. This is the case because now instead of calculating speed, position change and any environmental factors on one craft (which are comprised of many parts themselves), it now has to keep track of all that for many crafts. Its one thing to have KSP process one big craft, but it's an entirely different thing to have it process many smaller crafts all at once. Honestly, with KSP, you'd get better performance out of one giant craft than you would with many small crafts.

KSP just isn't built to handle what you're trying to accomplish. As mentioned above there are mods and certain options you can tick that can help mitigate the worst of the effects, but you'll never fully be free of them.

I think you're just going to have to accept a performance hit, honestly. Not even the beefiest of gaming rigs would reliably be able to handle that kind of scenario as KSP itself just isn't up to the task.

I have seen people run 700 part dogfights at 30+FPS. (Although without FAR and AJE)

[AngrybobH]

I recently built a new machine. It highlights how hard it would be to get to 700 parts at 30FPS while running mods and having the parts spread across 10 planes all in the atmosphere with FAR calculations going on. I drop to 30 FPS at ~300 parts with far, tac-ls with background proc on, and 70 or so other mods. The system is a Ryzen 5 1600 (thats overclocked to 3.9ghz) on a MSI pro carbon board with 32GB DDR4 ram and booting from and running KSP from a M.2 960 EVO SSD. The graphics card is a little old being a nVidia GTX 970 running in the PCIe 3x16 mode. So for 700 parts at 30 FPS you need more than double my system.

[Agustin]

Just now, AngrybobH said:

I recently built a new machine. It highlights how hard it would be to get to 700 parts at 30FPS while running mods and having the parts spread across 10 planes all in the atmosphere with FAR calculations going on. I drop to 30 FPS at ~300 parts with far, tac-ls with background proc on, and 70 or so other mods. The system is a Ryzen 5 1600 (thats overclocked to 3.9ghz) on a MSI pro carbon board with 32GB DDR4 ram and booting from and running KSP from a M.2 960 EVO SSD. The graphics card is a little old being a nVidia GTX 970 running in the PCIe 3x16 mode. So for 700 parts at 30 FPS you need more than double my system.

Can you try out the same amount of parts without far and AJE and tell us how much FPS you gain?

Edited January 8, 2018 by Agustin

[Greenfire32]

4 minutes ago, dundun92 said:

I have seen people run 700 part dogfights at 30+FPS. (Although without FAR and AJE)

I'll reiterate:

48 minutes ago, Greenfire32 said:

I think you're just going to have to accept a performance hit, honestly. Not even the beefiest of gaming rigs would reliably be able to handle that kind of scenario as KSP itself just isn't up to the task.

 

[AngrybobH]

11 minutes ago, Agustin said:

Can you try out the same amount of parts without far and AJE and tell us how much FPS you gain?

I don't use AJE but I turned off tac-ls and FAR and only gain about 5 FPS sitting still at the launch pad and about 7 FPS when flying in the atmosphere. I'm not sure how much FAR contributed to that as TAC-LS can be resource intensive. But, for the record, I am running SVT, SVE with high quality textures, EVE, and scatterer(all of which seemed to improve my performance very slightly). Most of my other mods are parts mods but there are some that may or may not have a FPS hit like KSPI-E and [X] science. So not much of a scientific test but I still think 700 parts all flying in atmo would be near impossible at 30 FPS. Also considering my christmas tree for challenge was near 700 parts over 4 vehicles landed at minmus and I got about 5 FPS, which was a 500% increase over my last computer with the same graphics card (on PCIe 2x16) with a Phenom II 965BE and 16GB DDR3.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

This made me curious, so I loaded up a 700 part vessel on the launch pad. About 15 FPS, but it was just sitting there doing jack all. (Took like a min+ to  load on an SSD, I thought the game froze. D:)

What I like to call "The stick O' pain."

Spoiler

(Omg, I just thought of the best challenge ever; I'll upload this craft file and see if anyone can get it to the Mun! )

 

Edited January 8, 2018 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Geonovast]

4 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

I'll upload this craft file and see if anyone can get it to the Mun!

...Without engines?
 

 

1 hour ago, Kerbal101 said:

Finally, i7/920 is really not good at single thread work. I am saying this, because I am using somewhat similar gen. CPU. An upgrade would be good, the geekbench (single thread column) or passmark(single thread column) have good comparison tables.

I currently have an i5-7500 @ 3.4 ghz.  I've been contemplating going up to an i7.  Are you saying it's not really worth it, since my computer's primary mission is to explore the Kerbin system?

[Rocket In My Pocket]

4 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

...Without engines?

Just as a payload, if you know what I mean. You'd have to build a launcher under it, maybe put it in a fairing.

Just a joke anyways; it wouldn't be a gameplay challenge so much as a test of your computers cooling fans.

Heh. xD

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Kerbal101 said:

Dear @dundun92 , I have covered what effects performance in this post. Let me quote myself:

Essentially, there are multitude of factors that might drag performance down. Even one of them is sufficient.
I have found that Mods do not necessary reduce performance, but may drastically improve it. However it is all system-dependent.

I think, people who suggest reducing Terrain Detail to low are partially correct, however you need to measure the difference yourself. You can also use this trick to reduce ocean geometry tesselation. Parking stations in high orbit will also help, because at around 200k (?) around  Kerbin the tesselation detail is set to minimum.

What mostly causes drastic performance reduction from my experience is [ part count X part geometry detail ], this is because it causes a lot of draw calls for geometry and draw calls are limited to one CPU core (at least in OpenGL), thus bottlenecking.

So a faster in single thread CPU and smart construction of ships is current solution for current version. And lots of own benchmarking of different configurations using same situation.

Is DirectX any better?

[Agustin]

you can also play with physics delta time for larga parts count. Time Control has its slider in-game and has so many wonderful features to play with time, warp and everything time-related. You can gain performance by changing the speed at which your cpu processes all the calculations.....

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Kerbal101 said:

Dear @dundun92

Way too professional. You said it as if you were writing a letter to someone.