KSP's load times are still limited by FPS! - Improve your load times. :D

[Poodmund]

Throughout my playtime with Kerbal Space Program I have experienced the in-game frame limiter to be very 'iffy' when it comes to actually limiting the frame rate to the point that even when turning it down to 60fps using the in-game setting, it doesn't actually make any difference and I still experience well over 100+fps in some scenes and my GPU gets incredibly hot and the fans spin like crazy at full tilt. 

To this extent I used to use KerboKatz's FPSLimiter mod: 

Which works amazingly! It actually limits the frame rate in-game down to the values that you set.... HOWEVER, I recently discovered whilst playing other Unity engine based games that their in-game frame limiters actually weren't doing anything either. 

SO, RivaTuner Statistics Server applet to the rescue! https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/rtss-rivatuner-statistics-server-download.html - RTSS is a lightweight application that monitors frame rate and hardware that also supports video capture and frame limiting. The main thing here being frame limiting. I typically limit KSP through RTSS to 60fps and I noticed that it took considerably less time to load the game when I unlimited the frame rate to the extent that I could load my modded game over twice as fast. With this in mind, I applied this to a completely Vanilla install of KSP 1.10.1 at both an unlimited frame rate and also capped at 30fps and the results were pretty insane.

Statistics

Unlimited FPS:
Start 0m 7s
Finish 0m 51s
Load Time: 0m 44s

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Limited to 30 FPS:
Start 1m 12s
Finish 3m 34s
Load Time: 2m 22s

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It is clear that the asset loading during game load is still being synchronized with frame rate... which is questionable, especially for heavily modded installs. It appears that coroutines run on Update so if any resource load takes less than a frame length in time then the rest of the time in that frame will be wasted until the next new frame. This is the cause of the wasted/additional loading time.

IN CONCLUSION / TL;DR - If you want to load KSP as quickly as possible, especially if you're running an install that takes a long time to load (modded), ensure that you are not frame limiting the game prior to the Main Menu screen as you are, literally, throttling the loading process speed. 

https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/25940 - Also, this issue has been raised on the KSP Bug Tracker already. If you think this is a pertinent issue that requires consideration, please upvote it for visibility.

I think its also worth noting that the in-game Frame Limiting and V-Sync settings do not limit frame rate prior to the Main Menu so this only affects users limiting frame rate through external applications or through driver settings (of which are both relatively popular).

Setup Specification:
Kerbal Space Program - 1.10.1.2939 (WindowsPlayer x64) en-us
OS: Windows 10  (10.0.0) 64bit
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9900KS CPU @ 5.00GHz (16)
RAM: 32684MB @ 4300MHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (6097MB)
SM: 50 (Direct3D 11.0 [level 11.1])

It would be nice if SQUAD could rectify this issue.

Edited August 25, 2020 by Poodmund

[Poodmund]

I forgot to update this post but just remembered it as this thread was posted: 

 

You can download a very lightweight plugin, here, that resolves the issue: https://github.com/Poodmund/LoadingVSyncDisabler/releases

From the bug tracker entry, it seems as though the issue was dismissed by SQUAD.