Biggest performance factors, mods and settings?

[YaBoyShredderson]

I tend to run fairly heavily modded games, as ive exhausted the stock game and i need more to enjoy it and challenge me. However, with modded installs i tend to run into performance issues sometimes.

I have a pretty decent pc, ryzen 5 2600, 2070 super, 16gb 3200mhz ram. With the stock game i can run it at max settings over 100 fps, but with modded installs it tends to to down, which is fine, but not as low as it is sometimes.

With ksp being pretty cpu dominant, and single threaded at that, i imagine graphics mods wont affect me that much? As i have a powerful gpu with 8gb vram, and 16gb ram should be more than enough too? 

Im using ksp 1.8.1 at the moment, as i want to play with sigma dimensions. I was using 6.4x scale with 9.6x orbits. I was also using astronomers visual pack with the 8k textures. About 150 mods total installed with ckan. I was getting 1 fps. Not even 2. I had a few guesses as to what it could be, maybe the 8k textures, or the ground scatter being scaled as well, which was weird. But if i went eva, i got 50 fps, but not inside the ship? 

I downgraded to 4k textures for avp, uninstalled my skybox mod, and fixed the ground scatter, and its at 20fps roughly now, but thay may well be just cos i restarted the game.

Using alt f12 and looking at the performance tab, it looks like im only using 4gb ram, with 5gb allocated? I installed this mod called heap padder, as i thought it would improve performance. I havent uninstalled it yet, but maybe thats causing a bug?

All i really want is a general idea of what kind of mods affect performance the most. Part mods, plugins etc. Sorry for rambling but its getting on my nerves especially with my pc being more than up to par.

[Misguided Kerbal]

On 9/14/2020 at 10:09 AM, YaBoyShredderson said:

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Generally, it's the graphics mods that lower your fps. Scatterer and EVE do all kinds of fancy calculations, and with KSP's CPU limitations, you get the point. The 8K textures would also take up RAM. You see, Scatterer has to 'scatter' the light, and it needs to do calculations for that. EVE needs to render the particle effects, and Astronomers has a lot of them. You could try using @Avera9eJoe's Spectra instead, though. For me, running KSP on an 2014 dual-core Mac, Spectra works fine, and I get decent FPS even with about the same number of mods as you.