I'm worried about the possible system requirements of KSP2

[K^2]

2 hours ago, Arugela said:

Will this game work on an 1100t phenom?

According to Unity's manual, it only needs the SSE2 extensions on top of the standard AMD64 set, which 1100T has, so technically, it should work. But I would expect it to struggle really bad. Only 6 threads, each one with a little better than half performance of modern equivalents, and not a lot of L3 cache - all of that is going to hammer KSP2 performance pretty bad. If you're going to not be running it native on top of that, like through Proton, I don't expect that you'll have a great experience.

I would definitely recommend waiting to see how well the game runs for other people.

[Gotmachine]

I definitely don't have the background or experience to make definite statement like you do. I'm aware that PhysX 4 isn't capable of guaranteeing limits and drives in RB chains, but I'm relatively confident that neither are its competitors because it's not a flaw, it's still an inherent caracteristic of those solvers. I will take your word that the situation is so much better in other engines than PhysX, but yeah, KSP is a use case where you have a 50 kg docking port in-between two 500t chains, so that will never work well.

My point is that the main issue here is a game design one. KSP 1 has jointed RB defined-by-function parts because that was the only sane way to make it happen in Unity in 2015 for a near-solo dev, and while I can't ignore that it bring some "fun factor", the only way to make it work functionally is to actually make joints near unbreakable and with absurdly high stiffness drives, to a point where those joints might as well be merged RBs. There is no user-facing "tweak the rocket structural strength" feature or gameplay, the knobs are all internal, and even if they weren't, they wouldn't make any sense to the player, because they don't make any sense from a physics standpoint either. With a bit of work, they could have built a hybrid approach, maybe with some soft-body solution, which would have been very appealing as it could be a common base implentation for the aerodynamic and thermal simulation. But, well, this wouldn't sell as much copies as interstellar gimmicks.

[Cytauri]

I wonder if my computer can load those colossal ships that KSP 2 advertises. They are saying that now bigger ships are going to be used more, which I think is awesome but my computer would think otherwise. My gpu is way better than my cpu (rtx 3060) so it should run the nice atmospheres and nice exhaust plumes fine, but I’m more worried about the much more bigger motherships that will be built in space. My cpu has a processor that is equivalent to an i5 so those ships may lag a lot. I hope everyone can run KSP 2 smoothly.

[tstein]

9 hours ago, K^2 said:

I think you're a bit out of date on solvers. Modern Havok solver, which is what's in Unity with ECS, uses an updated flow based on the work of Erin Catto. While the underlying principles are similar, the algorithmic approach is quite a bit different and results in much higher stability for long chains and much better performance. When implemented correctly, you should see no springiness at all outside of extreme mass differences in the chain. That is, if you have two 1T modules hooked up to a 1kg module in between, yes, you'll see problems, though, even these can be tuned out, and if you throw a single strut between the 1T modules, that will go away completely. The bending you see with KSP is virtually nonexistent with the new solver. You literally can slap a single constraint at every logical joint and be fine for most practical cases.

 

One thing I never understood is why KSP  did not took advantage that  the most common connection is a cylinder connected to another cylinder of exact same diameter and merged them into single objects. A lot of the common  bending issues could have been reduced (ok I know eventually the players get to the point where a single octagonal strut is holding  90 tons spread in 4 different directions,   but at least the early gameplay would look  more polished)

[GoldForest]

21 minutes ago, CytauriKerbal said:

I wonder if my computer can load those colossal ships that KSP 2 advertises. They are saying that now bigger ships are going to be used more, which I think is awesome but my computer would think otherwise. My gpu is way better than my cpu (rtx 3060) so it should run the nice atmospheres and nice exhaust plumes fine, but I’m more worried about the much more bigger motherships that will be built in space. My cpu has a processor that is equivalent to an i5 so those ships may lag a lot. I hope everyone can run KSP 2 smoothly.

You should be fine if you have a semi-modern chip, Ryzen 1st gen+ or Intel 8th Gen+.  Similiarly, I5s or R5s will be fine. Intercept said they are targeting mid-ranged PCs. 

[K^2]

1 hour ago, tstein said:

One thing I never understood is why KSP  did not took advantage that  the most common connection is a cylinder connected to another cylinder of exact same diameter and merged them into single objects.

I can't imagine it's anything but historical. The entire rocket (some animated bits and robotics parts aside) could have been a single rigid body. If you don't care about the flex, it's very easy to solve the constraints matrix for the weld joints once and then you can compute stresses for joint limits very cheaply, and unless a joint somewhere fails, just treat the whole rocket as a rigid body. You only have to solve the constraints matrix every frame if the configuration of the ship changes every frame.

The reason this wasn't done early on, I imagine, was simply because nobody thought about this being necessary. The first rockets were very, very simple, and you were supposed to just use a tank of the right size for the job, not stack four of them together. By the time players got their hands on the game and started building Kraken-summoning totems out of the parts given to them, the bendy, wobbly rockets were engrained in the players' minds. 

I'm absolutely sure that there was at least one meeting during KSP2 development where somebody on engineering said, "You know, we could just make the entire rocket rigid, and then we don't have to worry about any of this," and somebody on the design team would have to say, "No, we want them bendy," to that. By now, it got to be an intentional choice based on historic behavior of the rockets in the original game.

[modus]

 I'm an absolute layman in all of this and really enjoying reading threads like this.

I'm gonna be so bummed when ksp2 releases and this ends.

[Gargamel]

Overlapping threads have been merged. 

[Rutabaga22]

Would my laptop work? I have 16gb of ram, an intel core I7 and an RTX 2060.

[linuxgurugamer]

2 minutes ago, Rutabaga22 said:

Would my laptop work? I have 16gb of ram, an intel core I7 and an RTX 2060.

Most likely it will

[OHara]

3 hours ago, tstein said:

One thing I never understood is why KSP  did not took advantage that  the most common connection is a cylinder connected to another cylinder of exact same diameter and merged them into single objects

I assumed the idea was that a game about building rockets should have ways for rockets to fail.  Joints of limited strength between parts was a simple yet general system that gave a risk of failure on the typical rocket at 'max-Q' (maximum dynamic aerodynamic pressure) and the bending of joints gave some warning of what joint was at risk of failure.

The system mostly worked for me, in that I enjoyed building craft under those rules.  The original struts let us make loop connections so we could have structural frames. In my experience those struts made the strut-linked parts move as one, constraining all relative degrees of freedom, for purposes of the mechanics simulation.  I'm not sure if strut-joining parts reduces CPU load, but I can imagine it may, or at least that it could have reduced it. (I was also lucky in that I used the laptop that I retired from my work, whose CPU easily handled the physics aspects of high part-count craft. )

Simulating individual parts allowed us to build various creative mechanisms ('krakentech') and propeller-driven craft before the robotics DLC. 

Maybe KSP2 has a more general way to let us mechanically merge parts and make loop connections.  We'll see.

[Anth]

How old is too old for a computer that can run KSP2 adequately?

I have an older computer that I haven't used in a while that I want to test KSP2 on which is the following:

Intel i7 4770K
Nvidia 1080GTX
32GB of RAM

is that too old?

 

[GoldForest]

19 minutes ago, Anth12 said:

How old is too old for a computer that can run KSP2 adequately?

I have an older computer that I haven't used in a while that I want to test KSP2 on which is the following:

Intel i7 4770K
Nvidia 1080GTX
32GB of RAM

is that too old?

 

The gpu should be fine, but that cpu might be a problem.

[WelshSteW]

 

 I have an AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor 4.00 GHz. It's about 10 years old now.

 

I'm saving up to replace it (and the motherboard and the RAM), but there's no way it's gonna be before KSP2 comes out.

 

Edited December 28, 2022 by WelshSteW

[Anth]

4 minutes ago, GoldForest said:

The gpu should be fine, but that cpu might be a problem.

Well hopefully its good enough to show me potential issues with the game performance.

Running KSP2 on my better computer might hide issues with the game.

 

Just now, WelshSteW said:

I have an AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor 4.00 GHz. It's about 10 years old now.

4ghz and 8 cores? that should be fine for KSP2 right? What GPU do you have?

[WelshSteW]

Just now, Anth12 said:

Well hopefully its good enough to show me potential issues with the game performance.

Running KSP2 on my better computer might hide issues with the game.

 

4ghz and 8 cores? that should be fine for KSP2 right? What GPU do you have?

 

GPU-wise I'm fine, I think. My GTX 760 gave up the ghost a few months ago, and I got a RTX 3060 on the cheap from a friend.

 

[GoldForest]

11 minutes ago, Anth12 said:

Well hopefully its good enough to show me potential issues with the game performance.

Running KSP2 on my better computer might hide issues with the game.

 

4ghz and 8 cores? that should be fine for KSP2 right? What GPU do you have?

 

8 minutes ago, WelshSteW said:

 

GPU-wise I'm fine, I think. My GTX 760 gave up the ghost a few months ago, and I got a RTX 3060 on the cheap from a friend.

 

8 cores will do you no good if thr single core performance is lacking. You'll need a semi modern cpu to handle high part counts. Something like a 1st gen ryzen or a 9th gen intel.

[Anth]

39 minutes ago, GoldForest said:

8 cores will do you no good if thr single core performance is lacking. You'll need a semi modern cpu to handle high part counts. Something like a 1st gen ryzen or a 9th gen intel.

KSP2 wont be a single core game though. I guess we wont see how much it uses the CPU until early release though.

[GoldForest]

12 minutes ago, Anth12 said:

KSP2 wont be a single core game though. I guess we wont see how much it uses the CPU until early release though.

 No, but part physics will be single core, just like in KSP 1.

[WelshSteW]

 

I mean, all I can do is wait, and see what it's like. And then put up with what it's like until I can afford to do something about it.

 

I guess if it's not good, I could come on here and whinge about it, like a complete wang.

 

Edited December 28, 2022 by WelshSteW

[miklkit]

1 hour ago, WelshSteW said:

 

 I have an AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor 4.00 GHz. It's about 10 years old now.

 

I'm saving up to replace it (and the motherboard and the RAM), but there's no way it's gonna be before KSP2 comes out.

 

You should be able to get it running faster with little effort.  The first overclock I did on mine got it to 4.3 with a little less voltage and heat with a $20 air cooler.  Later I got it to 4.8 and the performance gain was very noticeable.

[Anth]

1 hour ago, GoldForest said:

No, but part physics will be single core, just like in KSP 1.

Nate Simpson talks about parallelization in the PC Gamer interview but nothing specific enough about parts physics. Should be easy enough to test on my old computer with a high part count test.

Maybe they have a way of doing it on more than one core? Or one core is enough for complete dedication to the parts physics and then focus the other cores on other tasks?

[GoldForest]

6 hours ago, Anth12 said:

Nate Simpson talks about parallelization in the PC Gamer interview but nothing specific enough about parts physics. Should be easy enough to test on my old computer with a high part count test.

Maybe they have a way of doing it on more than one core? Or one core is enough for complete dedication to the parts physics and then focus the other cores on other tasks?

Multi core physics is a can of worms that is hard to tame. I've heard thr Havok engine can do it, but Unity uses PhyX or Havok. PhyX is single only. We don't know which Intercept is using for KSP 2. We'll have to wait and see.

[Anth]

1 hour ago, GoldForest said:

Multi core physics is a can of worms that is hard to tame. I've heard thr Havok engine can do it, but Unity uses PhyX or Havok. PhyX is single only. We don't know which Intercept is using for KSP 2. We'll have to wait and see.

Its going to be fun comparing KSP1 to KSP2 when we get it into our grubby hands. One thing I will have open on my other screen will be the task manager showing me KSP CPU usage and memory usage.

On the memory side I will be watching to see if scene changes (caused by the save file being loaded and/or saved at most scene changes)  are still contributing to a severe memory leak after Squad said that it was a Unity issue and couldn't be fixed.

[K^2]

11 hours ago, Anth12 said:

4ghz and 8 cores? that should be fine for KSP2 right?

Can't really compare on GHz alone. This tells you that the most basic instruction, or a cycle, on CPU takes one 4 billionth of a second (0.25ns) to complete. But overwhelming majority of instructions take multiples of these cycles to finish. There was a lot of improvement in instruction efficiency in the past years. A lot of heavily used instructions have been reduced by a factor of 2 to 3. Integer division was something like 20 cycles. Now it's 4-6. So a modern 3.5Ghz CPU runs circles around the 10 year old 4GHz processor.

And that's just raw compute. The other huge improvements have been in cache, scheduling, and branch prediction. Big chunk of CPU performance comes from how little time it spends not doing anything useful, and it comes down to knowing in advance which operations will need to be performed (in case of a branch) and having the data available, which is what the cache is responsible for. Modern games are pretty hungry for cache, so even if raw performance of CPU is there, if it can't feed all the data for all the necessary operations because of small cache and slow RAM, well, the raw performance just doesn't matter anymore.

If we take that same AMD FX-8350 and compare it to a Ryzen 7 3700X, which is pretty close to what PS5 has, a single thread of Ryzen is going to be able to do nearly twice as much work in the same amount of time as a core on FX, and Ryzen can run two threads per core. So even though FX is 4GHz and has the same 8 cores as a Ryzen at only 3.6GHz, Ryzen's performance is nearly 4x as high. And the benchmarks I'm looking at aren't that cache-heavy, so I expect this will be an even greater gap in games.

This won't be a problem for a lot of the games out there, but because we still expect KSP2 to be CPU-heavy, the only real benchmark we still have is that it has to run well on gen 9 consoles. So we know the performance will be at least decent on Ryzen 7 3700X, which is why I keep bringing it up. But will one quarter of that be enough to be playable? It's very hard to say. We will really have to wait and see some real KSP2 benchmarks on variety of CPUs once the Early Access is out to start getting a measure on this. It might be that I'm being entirely too pessimistic, the game will be optimized well enough to blaze through on consoles, and it will be very well playable on a good CPU from 10 years ago. But it might also not be, and at this point, I think best we can do is wait.