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Consistent Frame Rate Stutter


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Hi,

 

Recently after installing Patch 1.6.0 and subsequently 1.6.1 there has been a consistent frame stutter in 1 second intervals whenever flying a Spaceplane within Kerbin atmosphere. Oddly enough the effect stops when leaving the atmosphere, quitting to menus, and loading back into the game. Also this problem doesn't seem to hinder frames when rockets are being flown in atmosphere. Furthermore I have so far found that this only happens on Kerbin. In my latest save I have managed to get a Spaceplane to Duna and there is no frame rate stutter when flown in atmosphere there. I have never have had this problem before with previous versions and honestly it is quite frustrating.

 

I have a Dell laptop with a Intel i7, Nvidia 920m and 8GB of RAM as well as plenty of storage on the hard drive according to the recommended specs listed on steam. So far I’ve done some troubleshooting as well task manager to see if it was possibly a problem with my RAM. Without any programs running in the background that are not essential for Windows OS operation my RAM usage in the task manager averages around 35% however, I have managed to get this down to just 30% by logging off of steam and disabling Chrome's background processes. When I run KSP the RAM usage goes up to 80%. According to this, it is very unlikely that this is a RAM issue.

 

My CPU usage also goes up to 49% when running KSP with the computer running rather hot. Last night I cleaned out the vents as well as the fan to insure optimal cooling. Even so my computer has run considerably hotter while playing Team Fortress 2, Hearts of Iron 4, and War Thunder, all without losses to frame rate, so I don’t think this is a problem with cooling either.

 

If anyone has a solution or thoughts on this, please let me know. The majority of my time playing KSP has been building aircraft replicas and flying in atmosphere so I’d really like to not have to give that up.

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3 minutes ago, Spunge_bub12 said:

So I guess no one has any interest or knows how to help me. Shame.

Hi, and welcome to the forum. I'm sorry you are having problems with the frame rate.

In order to help you, I need to get more information from you. Are you using any mods that "beautify" Kerbin? If so, which ones and which configs are you using?

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1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

Hi, and welcome to the forum. I'm sorry you are having problems with the frame rate.

In order to help you, I need to get more information from you. Are you using any mods that "beautify" Kerbin? If so, which ones and which configs are you using?

Hello, thanks for responding. Firstly the only mod I am using that changes graphics would be hot rockets and even though I am aware that it is out of date by a version or two, I have already tried to do a fresh install without any mods installed and the problem still persists. 

 

Here is a list of the mods I am using atm and again I am aware of the outdated mods.

BDArmory 

Chatterer

KerbalFoundries

KSPwheel

MechJeb2

PhysicsRangeExtender

RealPlume 

Smokescreen

Trajectories

TriggerTech

Tweakscale (if you ask me this mod should be incorporated into the game)

VesselMover

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2 minutes ago, Spunge_bub12 said:

Firstly the only mod I am using that changes graphics would be hot rockets and even though I am aware that it is out of date by a version or two, I have already tried to do a fresh install without any mods installed and the problem still persists. 

Ok, well, that doesn't seem to be all the problem. Check your game configuration settings and here's some observations:

  • Terrain Detail: High You really don't have any mods which would prevent your graphics card from handling this. This should be safe
  • Scatter Density: The gut reaction many of us have is to set this to 100%. I'd recommend dropping this to 50% or as high as 75% and see if this helps.
  • Render Quality: Although it is tempting to max this one out too, be careful. This will cause performance issues. I have mine set at Beautiful instead of Fantastic for the very reason of the stutter you've mentioned.
  • Texture Quality: Another one where you must ask yourself is it more important to have a beautiful game or to play a game with FPS that resembles a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Set this to half. You should see better performance.
  • Aerodynamic FX Quality: Again, I have mine set at low... It eases some of the stress on your GPU.

Those are the major settings. You can feel free to use them or tinker with them to get optimum performance on your system.

This is the kind of quality I get:

2ykqFcT.png

or

mwIaK6l.png

If you still have issues, let me know and we can try some other things...

 

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1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

Ok, well, that doesn't seem to be all the problem. Check your game configuration settings and here's some observations:

  • Terrain Detail: High You really don't have any mods which would prevent your graphics card from handling this. This should be safe
  • Scatter Density: The gut reaction many of us have is to set this to 100%. I'd recommend dropping this to 50% or as high as 75% and see if this helps.
  • Render Quality: Although it is tempting to max this one out too, be careful. This will cause performance issues. I have mine set at Beautiful instead of Fantastic for the very reason of the stutter you've mentioned.
  • Texture Quality: Another one where you must ask yourself is it more important to have a beautiful game or to play a game with FPS that resembles a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Set this to half. You should see better performance.
  • Aerodynamic FX Quality: Again, I have mine set at low... It eases some of the stress on your GPU.

See, Earlier I figured that it may be a problem with the Aero FX considering it's what uses a large chunk of GPU power, and so I turned it all the way down to minimal. Once the problem kept on occurring I went into the games cfg. file and changed the value for Areo FX to 0 to see if I could disable it completely. No dice, still had the consistent stutter, although the freezes where considerably shorter than with Aero FX turned on.

Afterwards I just turned all the graphics settings down to the bare minimum and tried it again. The stutter remained.

Also is there a way to attach files and images directly from my computer? If it's here, I can't seem to find it.

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Just now, Spunge_bub12 said:

Also is there a way to attach files and images directly from my computer? If it's here, I can't seem to find it. 

No, you'll need to use a third party host. For images, you can use Imgur. Once you have uploaded the images, you can right click and copy the image link's location then paste it into the forum directly. For files, use a program like OneDrive or Dropbox. Then share the link to the file.

Ok, a few more stupid questions - are you resetting ModuleManager once you've removed the mods?

And is the stutter very pronounced with a vanilla install? The other thing it may be is an out of date video driver.

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1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

Ok, a few more stupid questions - are you resetting ModuleManager once you've removed the mods?

Yes.

1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

And is the stutter very pronounced with a vanilla install? The other thing it may be is an out of date video driver.

And Yes. Like I said the only thing that seems to help with the stutter is to turn down all the graphics settings, and even then its still very noticeable.

I updated the drivers last night thinking that it may be the solution to the problem. still no difference.

then again we all know how trash Nvidia drivers are. :/

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1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

KSP has had the stutter problem for a while, especially after it went to version 1.0.

There are a couple of more settings you can check to see if they will reduce it somewhat:

  • Anti-aliasing: disable
  • VSync: Don't sync

 

Disabling either doesn't seem to do the trick, However while playing with the Aries A3 in atmosphere on Kerbin I just discovered that If I hug the ground and stay below 250 meters the stutter ceases, but when I fly above 250 meters the stutter begins again??? This problem makes so little sense.

Edit: I just disproved this bug. I went back into the flight and the stutter happens at any alt or just doesn't happen at all. It seems random.

Edited by Spunge_bub12
False bug info
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29 minutes ago, Spunge_bub12 said:

could this be perhaps a problem with Unity itself? Might this be fixed by migrating to a different engine?

It could very well be and I do believe it is. And it could also be because the older mods you're using were not compiled for the current Unity version, which would aggravate the issue. 

My suggestion? Is to lose the out of date mods. I know they might l99k awesome, but if it causes issues which makes the game unenjoyable...

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1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

It could very well be and I do believe it is. And it could also be because the older mods you're using were not compiled for the current Unity version, which would aggravate the issue. 

My suggestion? Is to lose the out of date mods. I know they might l99k awesome, but if it causes issues which makes the game unenjoyable...

I stated earlier that the removal of mods didn't change anything. So I guess this is a Unity issue then. guess there isn't anything that can be done.

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1 hour ago, Spunge_bub12 said:

I stated earlier that the removal of mods didn't change anything. So I guess this is a Unity issue then. guess there isn't anything that can be done.

Yes, you did. I was commenting that sometimes outdated mods can make it more noticeable... :)

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2 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

It could very well be and I do believe it is. And it could also be because the older mods you're using were not compiled for the current Unity version, which would aggravate the issue. 

My suggestion? Is to lose the out of date mods. I know they might l99k awesome, but if it causes issues which makes the game unenjoyable...

Well I just fixed it. Turns out I had an outdated version of ModuleManager and upgrading to the latest version fixed the issue.

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On 2/2/2019 at 8:23 PM, Spunge_bub12 said:

I stated earlier that the removal of mods didn't change anything. So I guess this is a Unity issue then. guess there isn't anything that can be done. 

I actually encountered the same lag a few weeks ago. Removed ksp wheels which I thought was causing issues (and it did, whenever I replaced these landing gears by stock parts, it stopped lagging) and decreased graphics quality. Did not have any issue ever since.

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