I'm worried about the possible system requirements of KSP2

[Anth]

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

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.

I stated previously in this post that I would be testing it on:

Intel i7 4770K (4 cores) (I want to see how this performs with the onboard graphics only as well)
Nvidia 1080GTX
32GB of RAM

My main computer is the following:

Intel i9 9900K (8cores) (I want to see how this performs with the onboard graphics only as well)
Nvidia 3070ti
32GB of RAM

It will be interesting to see how they compare.

The i9 9900K might be able to compensate for any performance issues but hopefully the i7 4770K will show issues in a very obvious way.

Wait. the Ryzen 7 3700X isn't that much less in performance than my i9 9900K. There is no way that the majority of people have the equivalent of a Ryzen 7 3700X level CPU.

KSP2 is going to have to be able to perform on a lot less than that.

[Cytauri]

22 hours ago, GoldForest said:

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. 

Nice

[GoldForest]

6 minutes ago, Anth12 said:

I stated previously in this post that I would be testing it on:

Intel i7 4770K (4 cores) (I want to see how this performs with the onboard graphics only as well)
Nvidia 1080GTX
32GB of RAM

My main computer is the following:

Intel i9 9900K (8cores) (I want to see how this performs with the onboard graphics only as well)
Nvidia 3070ti
32GB of RAM

It will be interesting to see how they compare.

The i9 9900K might be able to compensate for any performance issues but hopefully the i7 4770K will show issues in a very obvious way.

Wait. the Ryzen 7 3700X isn't that much less in performance than my i9 9900K. There is no way that the majority of people have the equivalent of a Ryzen 7 3700X level CPU.

KSP2 is going to have to be able to perform on a lot less than that.

I would think most people have the R5 3600X if they're AMD. As for Intel, I would suspect people have a 9th or 10th gen I5. We can't really tell since Steam, for some reason, doesn't collect CPU names. Only Ghz.

[tstein]

I think people need  to  be more realistic about the scenarios.  Do KSP  run well on your machine with ships with  very high  part counts? If yes, then you are very likely going to get  good enough  performance with REASONABLE sized ships. That means you will be able to do what you are expected to do in the first stage of EA and you will have time to evaluate  things, as if you will need more to run colonies etc....

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Anth12 said:

There is no way that the majority of people have the equivalent of a Ryzen 7 3700X level CPU.

KSP2 is going to have to be able to perform on a lot less than that.

Not "have to". It'd certainly be preferable. But technically, the plank for "has to perform well," is gen 9 consoles. If the consoles can handle it, you can ship the game, and odds are, your sales will be mostly fine. The rest is a bonus, as far as min spec for a title goes. It's a nice bonus, I'm sure Intercept is going to try hard to get the min spec as low as possible, and I hope they are successful in this, but there is no concrete obligation, either financial or contractual, so until there are official specs, 3700X is the floor of what we can be absolutely certain of.

Likely, it will be lower, of course. As people have mentioned above, they really ought to try to hit good performance at least on recent R5 and i5 chips. But I don't think it will go a lot lower than that, and I'm skeptical of support for some of the older hardware.

We do, indirectly have a lower bound as well. We know that the plans for gen 8 release have been nixed, kind of predictably. And I'm confident saying it's not because of the graphics. So we know the min spec is going to be significantly above what the PS4 Pro and XB1X are capable of. The CPU on these was very different from anything AMD released to the public in that exact architecture, but it's effectively two 4-core modules, each very similar to what they later released as part of their A8-6410 APU. So if you think of PS4 Pro or XB1X CPU as a pair of A8-6410s, you won't be far off. I've seen people compare it to FX-8150, but while there are a lot of architectural similarities, the FX chips run at much higher clock, 3.6GHz in the case of 8150, and so each core is nearly twice as fast as that of PS4 Pro/XB1X CPU. So the only way your FX-8150 might perform as badly as a gen8 console is if you have it severely thermally throttled, causing it to drop to ~2-2.5GHz and staying there.

Needless to say, we can be all around confident that the min spec won't be that low. But there is a LOT of room between a pair of A8-6410s and an R7 3700X. The min spec for KSP2 is somewhere in there. You might call that uselessly broad, and I won't be offended, but honestly, that's all we have concrete data on. Everything else is speculation and some degree of wishful thinking.

[Anth]

5 hours ago, GoldForest said:

I would think most people have the R5 3600X if they're AMD. As for Intel, I would suspect people have a 9th or 10th gen I5. We can't really tell since Steam, for some reason, doesn't collect CPU names. Only Ghz.

I am not sure everyone has computers that are at that level. But whenever the required specs for KSP2 come out they will hopefully tell us in a weird way where the people's computers are in general for gaming.

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

Not "have to". It'd certainly be preferable

Preferable yes. If KSP2 ended up only being able to play on the most recent computers even if they are mid tier I think they would be losing customers.

I am hoping it will play at least ok on my i7 4770K and 1080GTX.

On my i9 9900K and 3070ti I expect it to run amazingly well once they have optimized it properly.

The KSP2 Artemis video showed some performance issues so I don't know exactly what to expect on day 1 of the release.

[GoldForest]

2 hours ago, Anth12 said:

I am not sure everyone has computers that are at that level. But whenever the required specs for KSP2 come out they will hopefully tell us in a weird way where the people's computers are in general for gaming.

Preferable yes. If KSP2 ended up only being able to play on the most recent computers even if they are mid tier I think they would be losing customers.

I am hoping it will play at least ok on my i7 4770K and 1080GTX.

On my i9 9900K and 3070ti I expect it to run amazingly well once they have optimized it properly.

The KSP2 Artemis video showed some performance issues so I don't know exactly what to expect on day 1 of the release.

Latest footage we've seen is the Christmas Flying Reindeer Plane. Frame rates looked okay to me. And Nate said they are focusing on optimizing frame rates, so we should at least get around 60 fps at launch of EA, hopefully more. 

[Missingno200]

3 minutes ago, GoldForest said:

Christmas Flying Reindeer Plane. 

I only saw the Christmas tree video, there was one with the reindeer plane? Anyways, that one looked fine... kind of slow, but I suspect it's editing that made it slow, and the framerate was smooth.

Edited December 29, 2022 by Missingno200
Need to be on topic.

[GoldForest]

Just now, Missingno200 said:

I only saw the Christmas tree video, there was one with the reindeer plane? Anyways, that one looked fine... kind of slow, but I suspect it's editing that made it slow, and the framerate was smooth.

Oh wait, it was just two pictures nvm. 

[Anth]

3 hours ago, GoldForest said:

Latest footage we've seen is the Christmas Flying Reindeer Plane. Frame rates looked okay to me. And Nate said they are focusing on optimizing frame rates, so we should at least get around 60 fps at launch of EA, hopefully more. 

60fps would be nice

[K^2]

5 hours ago, Anth12 said:

I am hoping it will play at least ok on my i7 4770K and 1080GTX.

Graphics-wise, I don't see any problems. Some of the techniques that Intercept is using are VRAM heavy, but we ran slightly scaled down versions of similar techniques on PS4 Pro hardware just fine. So, like, obviously you won't be running on ultra settings, but there is absolutely no reason you'd need to completely disable any of the visual flare to make it run smooth on a 1080. So long as Intercept lets us adjust fidelity on some of these things, like quality of volumetric effects, it can be dialed in to where you'll barely notice a difference running at 1080p.

CPU-wise, again, lets hope, but my confidence isn't there. It depends a lot on how much of the optimization is in threading. Single thread on 4770K is actually pretty good, it's from the era of Intel processors when they were absolutely kicking rear in single thread performance. But if they game is heavily optimized to make full use of all 16 threads, there could be problems.

That said, it would be amazing if you post your results when you get a chance to try the game. That 4770K would be a very good data point to try and figure out how the performance actually scales with hardware.

As a matter of fact, we should probably have a thread somewhere, closer to early access release, where we have a set of save files with different rockets of different complexity and in different conditions, that people can run and post their hardware specs and uncapped frame rates for each of the examples. That way we can do proper science to it. It might help a lot of people, especially these with older hardware, to make a decision. Plus, if there are oversights, it might give Intercept an opportunity to locate additional improvements for the full release.

 

[Anth]

19 minutes ago, K^2 said:

That said, it would be amazing if you post your results when you get a chance to try the game. That 4770K would be a very good data point to try and figure out how the performance actually scales with hardware.

As a matter of fact, we should probably have a thread somewhere, closer to early access release, where we have a set of save files with different rockets of different complexity and in different conditions, that people can run and post their hardware specs and uncapped frame rates for each of the examples. That way we can do proper science to it. It might help a lot of people, especially these with older hardware, to make a decision. Plus, if there are oversights, it might give Intercept an opportunity to locate additional improvements for the full release.

I will post my results for sure.

A thread like you are suggesting is a good idea. I wonder if Intercept Games could have a benchmark built into KSP2 that might make that easier.

[Drakenred65]

I’m not going to worry about it too much.

 

 if my current rig can’t Handel ir then meh. Get it on my s whet it comes out for that.

 

I tend to do that anyway.

Edited December 30, 2022 by [email protected]

[LoSBoL]

So what are we getting with KSP2? optimization of code and eye candy. Eye candy can and shall be able to be turned down and physics calculations have not gotten any harder over time. Problem which needed to be solved is high part count physics calculation handling, which basically has been promised.

This should run on laptops with an 4 core 8 thread cpu and IGPU.  Like a 7th generation I5 low voltage cpu with an uhd 620.

Will it run 60 FPS? No, but a lot of people will settle for 20 FPS, KSP is not a 'gamers' game, targeted audience is a whole lot broader then that, not just gamers with gaming built machines.

CPU performance has come a long way and you would be surprised what non-gaming laptop CPUs with IGPs are capable of. Mentioned low voltage cpu will run games like Cyberpunk and Red Dead Redemption 2 on lowest settings, if you accept average FPS of 25 to 30 at HD ready resolutions. Why wouldn't it run KSP2, physics calculations? I can't imagine they'd be harder then on KSP1, rather the other way around due to the very needed optimisations KSP2 will have.

Just my two cents.

[tstein]

I  am somewhat mersmerized that everybody is so worried about their CPUs when my experience in KSP has been that the bottleneck  is  a crapton of memory leaks.  My Ryzen 1  can handle 200 ton landers no problem, but  every time I reload a game or reload  KSC after a Mission the game gets slower slower.... ahnd memory creeps up.  I have to  restart the game every 2 hours because of that.

 

The game runs amazingly  smooth here, as long as it has loaded the scenery only once.   I do not know  if it is a coincidence, but I had the same problem with several  games in Unity.

[LoSBoL]

1 hour ago, tstein said:

I  am somewhat mersmerized that everybody is so worried about their CPUs when my experience in KSP has been that the bottleneck  is  a crapton of memory leaks.  My Ryzen 1  can handle 200 ton landers no problem

Use cases may vary, I think most of the worry is because of KSP 1.

It was very easy to get KSP 1.2.2 on its knees 6 years ago with an I5-4440, 8 Gb of Ram and an GTX970.

It was just as easy doing it after that with an 'built for KSP' highly optimised and overclocked I7-4790K with 16 Gb of Ram and an GTX970 on mildly modded installs up to 1.12.4 which I ran till a few months ago.

And even today with a mildly overclocked I7-12700KF, 32 Gb of Ram and a RTX3080 I can have it in the 20 FPS with modded installs.

I think most are looking to much at KSP1's performance and therefore predict that KSP2 will suffer the same issues.

 

Then again, playing Vanilla KSP on my old laptops (with throtelling I7-4600u or I5-5300u and their IGPU's) over the past in planes and on holiday ran playable when you're not to demanding. I don't see a reason as to why it would be different with KSP2 and 8 years of IT development since.

Edited December 30, 2022 by LoSBoL
date correction + typo's

[K^2]

4 hours ago, tstein said:

my experience in KSP has been that the bottleneck  is  a crapton of memory leaks [...] I do not know  if it is a coincidence, but I had the same problem with several  games in Unity.

Is this with mods? I haven't seen that much of a problem with leaks in vanilla. Though, I'm sure there are some. C# garbage collection isn't exactly the cleanest or most robust, and a lot of the lifecycle is obfuscated by Unity's scene management, so it's easier to end up with some cyclic references that prevent objects from going away. There are best practices for avoiding that, of course, but when you have large teams, mistakes get made. More in some studios than others.

Mods tend to leak like a sieve. They aren't, typically, written by professional programmers, and in my experience, people aren't taught good practices for a particular language until they start working with it in the industry. And every language I know of, with exception of maybe Rust, is leaky by default. C being the worst, of course, but languages like Java and C# create a false sense of safety with their garbage collection, which can actually lead to more code where things seem to work fine until they don't.

I've briefly looked at the work experience of the Intercept team members who have it marked on their LinkedIn a while back, and they certainly don't look like amateurs. Hopefully, they'll be able to maintain best practices and deliver code that doesn't leak. If the mods run in Lua, depending on exactly how that's handled, it might even help there. But there are a lot of unknowns in that regard. It depends a lot on how the memory for Lua scripts is sandboxed and on how the asset loading works for modded parts, since it's a lot easier to create a noticeable leaks with art assets than some state variables.

2 hours ago, LoSBoL said:

Then again, playing Vanilla KSP on my old laptops (with throtelling I7-4600u or I5-5300u and their IGPU's) over the past in planes and on holiday ran playable when you're not to demanding. I don't see a reason as to why it would be different with KSP2 and 8 years of IT development since.

KSP is very heavily main thread bound. This is why the improvement from a decent laptop CPU to a high end desktop CPU wasn't that high. Laptops can generally boost one core nearly as much as a desktop, and the main performance edge of desktop CPUs for anything remotely recent has been more cores and being able to boost more of them to higher speeds at the same time. When only one thread in KSP is doing most of the work, a 4600U boosting one core to 3.3GHz or 4770K boosting to 3.9GHz doesn't make that much difference. In fact, it's pretty close to these exact 18% improvement when you look at single thread benchmarks, and for KSP, that's what matters the most.

Unfortunately, not a lot has changed on the Unity side in the past decade to improve on that. And while there has been a lot of the improvement in cache and instruction efficiency, most of the tech improvement has been focused on getting more cores in. So if 13700K outperforms the aforementioned 4770K by a factor of 7 in overall benchmarks, the single thread improvement of 13700K is only a factor of two.

In other words, if you took a main thread bound game like KSP that runs at 60FPS on a 13700K, it could still manage a marginally playable 20FPS on that old 4600U laptop. That's still an improvement, but not what we usually think of as 8 years of progress.

Now, KSP had a lot of problems. There were per-frame update tasks that were very poorly written and optimized, resulting in majority of that performance hit, especially for larger rockets, to come from things that should have been almost instant to compute. We expect KSP2 to have solved majority of these. KSP 2 will also have a much better utilization of threads. They simply have to make good use of threads to get good enough performance out of the consoles, that are kind of running at laptop speeds, but with 8 cores / 16 threads.

At the same time, some of the tasks that were expensive in KSP, like trajectory updates and physics, are still here and have gotten a lot harder, because now we have continuous collisions, ships using engines in warp, likely higher warp multipliers to accommodate interstellar, colony management, huge ships built at space docks, and so on. 

 

Most games on the market are limited by the graphics. This is why we're used to seeing 10 year difference in tech completely obliterating what used to be considered a high end game. CPUs haven't advanced nearly as much as GPUs, as there hasn't been quite the same market pressures there. And KSP was and KSP2 almost certainly going to be one of the few games where your CPU is what matters. And worse, the specs that matter to these games aren't what we usually see highlighted as important for high performance CPUs. A lot of conventional wisdom about games just doesn't imply. There is every reason to believe that KSP2 will run much better than KSP when benchmarked on corresponding contemporary hardware, but we'll really just have to wait and see how Intercept went about building this game in regards to how it will scale with lower end modern CPUs or some older hardware.

[Gotmachine]

5 minutes ago, K^2 said:

I haven't seen that much of a problem with leaks in vanilla.

There are massive memory leak issues in vanilla. See https://github.com/KSPModdingLibs/KSPCommunityFixes/issues/49

[K^2]

7 minutes ago, Gotmachine said:

There are massive memory leak issues in vanilla. See https://github.com/KSPModdingLibs/KSPCommunityFixes/issues/49

Good notes. Thank you. I guess I just didn't notice. (I do tend to run my desktop way over-provisioned on memory.)

[Anth]

4 hours ago, tstein said:

I  am somewhat mersmerized that everybody is so worried about their CPUs when my experience in KSP has been that the bottleneck  is  a crapton of memory leaks.  My Ryzen 1  can handle 200 ton landers no problem, but  every time I reload a game or reload  KSC after a Mission the game gets slower slower.... ahnd memory creeps up.  I have to  restart the game every 2 hours because of that.

 

The game runs amazingly  smooth here, as long as it has loaded the scenery only once.   I do not know  if it is a coincidence, but I had the same problem with several  games in Unity.

That particular memory leak is caused because KSP loads/saves at most scene changes and the memory leak is directly proportional to the size of the save file.

I have the following bug report https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/25218 where I did 55 different actions with graphs of recorded memory I manually took from the windows task manager  using different sized saves over different versions of KSP (By the way it started when Squad added the so called helpful garbage collection that Unity does in 1.2.0)

Examples of where I concluded from my bug report this was occuring:

1. First time its loaded from the main menu
2. Everytime going from a loaded scene to the KSC screen
3. Everytime going from the KSC screen to the SPH/VAB
4. Everytime that a craft is launched from the SPH/VAB
5. Everytime that a craft is loaded from the tracking station
6. Everytime going from a loaded scene to the tracking station
7. Everytime going to the KSC Screen

I then tested this theory with Subnautica which is also a Unity game. A Subnautica save normally is loaded once by a player when they first start up the game but I loaded a save, then went back to the main menu and loaded it again and back to the main menu etc and there was evidence that it was also suffering from the same problem but its not loaded enough times to be noticed.

Squad said this was not fixable though 1.1.3 wasn't suffering from the problem.

Its a major thing I will be looking for in KSP2. I doubt that Intercept Games will allow this to happen. They will figure out a work around like we do when navigating KSP1 bugs to get what we want out of the game.

Also I am wanting to see if the move from the SPH/VAB to scene is instantaneous in KSP2 because the only times the game should need to be loaded is for revert to launch and when loading a quicksave and loading the save for the first time. The KSP1 debug menu has 'set orbit' and 'set position' which can move crafts within the Kerbol system without loading or saving.

 

Oh @K^2 and @Gotmachine posting while I was creating my response. Hey guys

[Anth]

26 minutes ago, Gotmachine said:

There are massive memory leak issues in vanilla. See https://github.com/KSPModdingLibs/KSPCommunityFixes/issues/49

Could Squad have fixed the problem? You know a lot more about this from looking at that link. Also the main memory leak was directly proportional to the size of the game save. Was it all the parts of the entire save even if it wasn't in scene? My bug report https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/25218 for game save size testing for the most part used small crafts in scene and had huge crafts that were never loaded and the memory leak still happened.

15 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Good notes. Thank you. I guess I just didn't notice. (I do tend to run my desktop way over-provisioned on memory.)

At one point KSP1 would have obvious stuttering problems when the garbage collection was happening regardless of how much memory I had available. And then the stuttering would get more and more frequent. I don't know which version that stopped happening and then after that it was just obvious with the increase in memory and the longer and longer load times.

Edited December 30, 2022 by Anth12

[Gotmachine]

26 minutes ago, Anth12 said:

Could Squad have fixed the problem?

Yes. 100% of the memory leaks are caused by issues in the KSP codebase, this has nothing to do with Unity.
And most of those issues are either incompetence (like wrong usage of a finalizer) or just trivial mistakes. Either way they would have been quite easy to fix if someone decided to spend a few hours using some proper tools to diagnose them.
And even if they didn't fix every case, they could have implemented some basic safety mechanisms that would have prevented 99% of the memory leaks, both in stock and in mods.

34 minutes ago, Anth12 said:

At one point KSP1 would have obvious stuttering problems when the garbage collection was happening regardless of how much memory I had available

This one was on Unity/Mono, and was mostly fixed with the 1.8 update when they upgraded to Unity 2017 and its incremental garbage collector.

This being said, apart from a few specific issues, KSP is decently optimized in terms of GC pressure. The bulk of that issue has always been caused by mods.

[Anth]

16 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

Yes. 100% of the memory leaks are caused by issues in the KSP codebase, this has nothing to do with Unity.

Well that is promising for KSP2.

16 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

This being said, apart from a few specific issues, KSP is decently optimized in terms of GC pressure. The bulk of that issue has always been caused by mods.

The only times I really noted any memory leak issues with KSP was scene changes like we have talked about and exploding crafts. Have a craft high part count which blows up in a cascading way and the memory will climb. Mods I haven't noticed any problems with but I am pretty conservative on how many I use compared to some people who have a lot of them running at the same time.

Edited December 31, 2022 by Anth12

[LoSBoL]

8 hours ago, K^2 said:

KSP is very heavily main thread bound. This is why the improvement from a decent laptop CPU to a high end desktop CPU wasn't that high. Laptops can generally boost one core nearly as much as a desktop, and the main performance edge of desktop CPUs for anything remotely recent has been more cores and being able to boost more of them to higher speeds at the same time. When only one thread in KSP is doing most of the work, a 4600U boosting one core to 3.3GHz or 4770K boosting to 3.9GHz doesn't make that much difference. In fact, it's pretty close to these exact 18% improvement when you look at single thread benchmarks, and for KSP, that's what matters the most.

The difference is huge, a 15watt low voltage throtling 2 core 4600u against an overclocked 4790K single performance king, which was the best you could buy for KSP for years.

 

8 hours ago, K^2 said:

Unfortunately, not a lot has changed on the Unity side in the past decade to improve on that. And while there has been a lot of the improvement in cache and instruction efficiency, most of the tech improvement has been focused on getting more cores in. So if 13700K outperforms the aforementioned 4770K by a factor of 7 in overall benchmarks, the single thread improvement of 13700K is only a factor of two.

In other words, if you took a main thread bound game like KSP that runs at 60FPS on a 13700K, it could still manage a marginally playable 20FPS on that old 4600U laptop. That's still an improvement, but not what we usually think of as 8 years of progress.

You are right, single core performance development has been incremental for years, that's why I could not justify upgrading the thing untill the 12 th generation, and now again, the difference in KSP performance is huge between the 12700KF and the 4790K running at 5 GHz all core.  Which is purely due to single core percformance gain between the two. Over the course of 8 years the incremental gains each year do add up eventually, but it took a very long time.

The point I was trying to make is that whatever machine you build, it will be fairly easy to get it on its knees with KSP, and that most of the worry for KSP2's performance is due to that.  

9 hours ago, K^2 said:

Now, KSP had a lot of problems. There were per-frame update tasks that were very poorly written and optimized, resulting in majority of that performance hit, especially for larger rockets, to come from things that should have been almost instant to compute. We expect KSP2 to have solved majority of these. KSP 2 will also have a much better utilization of threads. They simply have to make good use of threads to get good enough performance out of the consoles, that are kind of running at laptop speeds, but with 8 cores / 16 threads.

At the same time, some of the tasks that were expensive in KSP, like trajectory updates and physics, are still here and have gotten a lot harder, because now we have continuous collisions, ships using engines in warp, likely higher warp multipliers to accommodate interstellar, colony management, huge ships built at space docks, and so on. 

Good pointers, to be fair though, somewhere along the line of updates of KSP1 (Unity)  there was an update which was significant in spreading the load over more cores and with that offloading the main (physics) thread, which was noticible in performance, but you are right, KSP had and still has a lot of problems due to being poorly written and optimized. We'll have to see how much optimisations KSP2 has made, but I'm not worried about that, they knew exactly what problems needed to be solved to get the performance better then KSP1. KSP1 however does run on potato's, and I'm still confident that KSP2 will run on what we call potato's nowadays.   

9 hours ago, K^2 said:

Most games on the market are limited by the graphics. This is why we're used to seeing 10 year difference in tech completely obliterating what used to be considered a high end game. CPUs haven't advanced nearly as much as GPUs, as there hasn't been quite the same market pressures there. And KSP was and KSP2 almost certainly going to be one of the few games where your CPU is what matters. And worse, the specs that matter to these games aren't what we usually see highlighted as important for high performance CPUs. A lot of conventional wisdom about games just doesn't imply. There is every reason to believe that KSP2 will run much better than KSP when benchmarked on corresponding contemporary hardware, but we'll really just have to wait and see how Intercept went about building this game in regards to how it will scale with lower end modern CPUs or some older hardware.

I can fully agree again, I mentioned before that KSP is not a 'gamers'-game and indeed, it will again be single performance bound and we'll have to wait and see to confirm, but I remain confident that you won't need a high tear PC and you should be able to run it on a 5 year old laptop with visuals turned down.

Incremental single core performance development however is not because lack of market pressure, but because we've hit the ceiling of what is possible on that front  almost a decade ago, we've only been getting small optimisations each generation since. Hence the devolpment to more cores, which did nothing for KSP.

Only a few more weeks to go and we can benchmark all we want, I'm exited 

 

[tstein]

14 hours ago, K^2 said:

 

Mods tend to leak like a sieve. They aren't, typically, written by professional programmers, and in my experience, people aren't taught good practices for a particular language until they start working with it in the industry. And every language I know of, with exception of maybe Rust, is leaky by default. C being the worst, of course, but languages like Java and C# create a false sense of safety with their garbage collection, which can actually lead to more code where things seem to work fine until they don't.

 

I my 30 years career I  got to the preference of  languages that  bad memory handling result in an early catastrophic  crash (like C++) than ones that  pretend to keep things safe and make bad programmers  commit code that should never ever  have left their machines