KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread

[invision]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

You know, you must know how to read to make that numbers useful. 3:-)

For example, you will find that Ryzen 5 lacks SS3 e SS4 and that would impair performance on some games and cripto-utilities unless they are recompiled to use the features specific for this chip. Probably not a huge impact with modern gaming, as most of such operations are done by the GPU anyway - so this can be a problem only if you intend to use this machine for more things than only gaming.

On the other hand, it has twice the L3 cache and twice the threads than the current machine @putnamto uses - so, yeah, the raw performance will be hugely improved - if your scenario has multiple vessels. Currently, KSP uses one thread for vessel as parallelising strategy - so, given his requirement of running a huge vessel (and not many medium to small ones) at the same time, perhaps Ryzen 5 would not be the best choice as its clock speed for each thread is slower that the current CPU he has now. CPUs with higher clocks (even by having less threads) will perform better for him in this specific case.

Note that the overall performance will be hugely improved - it's on this specific case (running a huge vessel) that Ryzen 5 will not fulfil the expectation.

 

In time, there're some issues using Windows 7 with Ryzen 5. It can be workarounded, however.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-5-1600-vs-AMD-FX-6300/3919vs1555

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, invision said:

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-5-1600-vs-AMD-FX-6300/3919vs1555

You are going to be very disappointed if you just use raw metrics.

If you have a CPU with 6 cores running at 3GHz each, and compare with another one with 4 cores at 4GHz each, you probably will get something between the two extemes:

1. A multithreaded and highly parallelized application running at 6 x 3 = 18GHz apparent performance versus 4x4 = 16GHz.
2. A mono threaded application running at 3GHz with 5 idle cores, versus 4GHz with 3 idle cores.

In KSP, each vessel is calculated on its own thread, without (too much) parallelization. So, if you have only one vessel running on KSP, your performance will be similar as the item 2.

You will get perceptible performance enhancements running many vessels at once, but if you only intend to fly one big vessel, your gains will not be what you expect.

There will be some improvements due faster memory and bigger L3 cache, indeed. But not enough to satisfy your expectations.

 

1 hour ago, Elthy said:

CPUboss shows the R5 1600 as "rumored", it doesnt even have kaby lake. Also number like cache and expansions like SS3 are completly meaningless, the only thing that realy counts is performance, and CPUboss doesnt show a single benchmark. The same thing can be said about its sibling GPUboss, which is famous for its extremly bad advice.

Anandtech has no benchmark about intel i5 8600k neither. Go there, see for yourself.

SSE3 is still used by some current games, and if you think that L3 cache is meaningless... Dude... =D

Well, your money, your funeral. Good luck.

Edited May 20, 2018 by Lisias
better phrasing. again.

[putnamto]

4 hours ago, Lisias said:

You know, you must know how to read to make that numbers useful. 3:-)

For example, you will find that Ryzen 5 lacks SS3 e SS4 and that would impair performance on some games and cripto-utilities unless they are recompiled to use the features specific for this chip. Probably not a huge impact with modern gaming, as most of such operations are done by the GPU anyway - so this can be a problem only if you intend to use this machine for more things than only gaming.

On the other hand, it has twice the L3 cache and twice the threads than the current machine @putnamto uses - so, yeah, the raw performance will be hugely improved - if your scenario has multiple vessels. Currently, KSP uses one thread for vessel as parallelising strategy - so, given his requirement of running a huge vessel (and not many medium to small ones) at the same time, perhaps Ryzen 5 would not be the best choice as its clock speed for each thread is slower that the current CPU he has now. CPUs with higher clocks (even by having less threads) will perform better for him in this specific case.

Note that the overall performance will be hugely improved - it's on this specific case (running a huge vessel) that Ryzen 5 will not fulfil the expectation.

 

In time, there're some issues using Windows 7 with Ryzen 5. It can be workarounded, however.

i kind of need to be able to do both, run a huge vessell and many medium sized vessels.

well, to put it bluntly im building a surface station on the mun and i use two 30 part rovers to move modules around, i intend for the station to be huge. so would the ryzen help me or not here? i dont want to drop 5-600 dollars and see no improvement in terms of fps.

as for the windows 7 workaround, ive read that article and a few others and they never mention anything about chipset/lan/audio drivers, only usb, is their a workaround for those?

[Elthy]

Afaik Intels Skylake CPUs are still supported in Windows 7, everything more recent is kinda a mess. Even if you can get it to work now the next update might break the workaround, so its definetly not recommeded for the average user.

Since Intel didnt change the CPU cores since Skylake you can actualy get decent performance out of a i5 6600k/i7 6700k, Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake only offer slightly higher clockspeed (due to better fabrication) and more cores, which arent that usefull for KSP. Mabye you can get a good deal for a used CPU.

Ryzen 2XXX will be a bit slower than those Intel CPUs in KSP, but still be way faster than your old FX processor. So if you rather want an AMD CPU you can definetly get one, the speed difference in KSP will be to small to notice and you get superior performance for most productivity workloads.

[Lisias]

43 minutes ago, putnamto said:

well, to put it bluntly im building a surface station on the mun and i use two 30 part rovers to move modules around, i intend for the station to be huge. so would the ryzen help me or not here? i dont want to drop 5-600 dollars and see no improvement in terms of fps.

On the short run, yes it will. Faster memory, more threads and bigger L3 cache will make things smoother, somewhat compensating the slower clock of the Ryzen's cores. On the long run, however, as your surface station gets bigger, she will bottleneck the entire frame - so, your FPS will be limited by the core running your station while the other cores will be somewhat idle.

For this specific case (and just because of it), I recommend you to search for a CPU with high mono-thread performance.

I recommend, also, that you find someone with a Ryzen machine and ask him to do some tests for you. I found this on Reddit, and since KSP is built using Mono, there's a chance this issue would affect you on the short run - on the long run, Microsoft will fix this for sure.

Ryzen is a very nice and decent chip, it probably should be a good choice - it only happens that, due some characteristics on KSP coding and your desire to run big crafts, it's safer to look for alternatives before going with it.

The i5-8600k will perform slightly slower than Ryzen on the overall, as it has 6 threads only (6 cores, 6 threads - no hyper-threading). On the other hand, it can "turbo-clock" to 4.3 GHz when only one core is being demanded - and this will allow you to run bigger vessels then on Ryzen.

If money wasn't an issue, I would recommend going to a i7 Coffee Lake: 6 cores, 12 threads and turbo to 4.7Ghz - but boy, it's twice the Ryzen's price. =/

Edited May 20, 2018 by Lisias

[Lisias]

10 hours ago, putnamto said:

hopefully ill be able to traverse my mun station at higher than 12 fps.

WAIT!! 12 fps?

Your current CPU is not top notch, but it's not that bad neither. Unless your surface station have about a thousand parts, there's something else on your setup brutalizing your FPS.

Try to compress the textures - scatterer and some other mods make heavy (ab)use of textures and if this is the case, your GPU can be fetching some textures from the CPU RAM and boy, this is like racing with the emergency brakes on.

Try this: use "Half Res" on the Settings Menu and see if anything changes:

[putnamto]

ok, when im eva around the station its actually 25 fps with seemingly random drops to 12, but if i have my skycrane within physics distance i only get 9-12 fps.

[invision]

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

WAIT!! 12 fps?

Your current CPU is not top notch, but it's not that bad neither. Unless your surface station have about a thousand parts, there's something else on your setup brutalizing your FPS.

Try to compress the textures - scatterer and some other mods make heavy (ab)use of textures and if this is the case, your GPU can be fetching some textures from the CPU RAM and boy, this is like racing with the emergency brakes on.

Try this: use "Half Res" on the Settings Menu and see if anything changes:

trust us the FX-series CPU is a pile of crap when it comes to KSP, i use to overclock mine to 4ghz just to get any sort of decent speed from it. it will run most modern games well unless they are very CPU heavy. i knew it was time when battlefield 1 maxed out all 8 cores to 90%+ and still didnt hold 60 FPS and will only get worse as games  need more hungry processing.

 

 

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, invision said:

trust us the FX-series CPU is a pile of crap when it comes to KSP, i use to overclock mine to 4ghz just to get any sort of decent speed from it. it will run most modern games well unless they are very CPU heavy. i knew it was time when battlefield 1 maxed out all 8 cores to 90%+ and still didnt hold 60 FPS and will only get worse as games  need more hungry processing.

I know. The FX series have a terrible IPC (Instructions Per Cycle). But not that much terrible - the OP said it got 25 FPS on one scene (not good, but not terrible), dropping to 12 (bad) when a specific vessel enters into the physics' range.

Another thing in which AMD is not that good (including Tyzen - almost 8% behind Coffee Lake) is the memory controller, and since KSP is more memory intensive than CPU (most of it is written in Mono anyway), identify the bottleneck will definitively help on choosing the right CPU.

KSP is not exactly CPU intensive. KSP is low optimized - Mono compiles CSharp into CIL, and the runtime interprets CIL into native machine code. This kind of stunt is more memory than CPU intensive - bigger and faster cache gives better performance than higher IPC here, as most of the time the CPU will be fetching CIL opcodes and data from memory instead of executing VM's instructions (I'm ignoring the JIT, better CPU will help on JIT).

7 hours ago, putnamto said:

ok, when im eva around the station its actually 25 fps with seemingly random drops to 12, but if i have my skycrane within physics distance i only get 9-12 fps.

What parts and modules do you use on your skycrane?

Then "random drops" is the Garbage Collector kicking in. It will happens too on any other CPU, as its Mono's (and Unity, as they changed the GC) specific. More memory can help you more then more CPU here.

Diagnosing the steady drop to 12 fps when the skycrane in being computed will help us to guess your system's bottleneck, and then you can choose a system that would minimize this bottleneck.

Edited May 21, 2018 by Lisias

[putnamto]

4x rv145 mono thrusters
4x flt-200
4x lv-900 engines
1x rockomax x16
1x advanced radial wheel large
2x clampotron docking ports 
4x stratus V tanks
4x z100 batteries
4x cubic octogonal struts
12x ox stat
1x rockomax adaptor 02
1x probodobodyne HECS
4xstruts
and 4x fuel lines

i dont know what parts are stock and which arent because im using vens stock revamp

edit: just now launching a 103 part ship from kerbin my fps was fluctuating from 17-19, but my games also been running for about four hours, ive noticed that the longer the game runs the crappier performance gets.

Edited May 21, 2018 by putnamto

[Lisias]

7 hours ago, putnamto said:

edit: just now launching a 103 part ship from kerbin my fps was fluctuating from 17-19, but my games also been running for about four hours, ive noticed that the longer the game runs the crappier performance gets.

Yep. It's the Unity's mangled GC. This is not going to be "fixed" in the short run, as the current Mono's GC halts everything when active. And as faster is your machine, more garbage per second it produces - and as more memory you have, more garbage is accumulated before the GC became active.

Oh, yes... And Unity leaks memory - so as the time passes, KSP allocates more memory to do the same thing and eventually Windows start to swap, lovely when garbage collecting. =/ You can postpone it, but not prevent it.

The new machine will improve this numbers for sure, but you will still get these performance drops sooner or later.

The trick is trim the situation to get acceptable FPS on the worst case.

Edited May 21, 2018 by Lisias
better phrasing

[Lisias]

16 hours ago, putnamto said:

4x rv145 mono thrusters
[snip]
and 4x fuel lines

i dont know what parts are stock and which arent because im using vens stock revamp

Not big (or weird) enough to cause so much trouble, IMHO. 

Currently, I'm inclined to suspect the Garbage Collector. This craft contributes, but doesn't appear to be the real culprit of the situation, only that "last drop". As I use to say, she is only the "victim that screams".

Try this: move EVE, SVE, Scatterer and PlanetShine out of the GameData. Run KSP and Measure your Scenario. Then move back one at at time, taking measures each time. Move them out, and move them back in different order if you find the mood. You may want to use GCMonitor on the measuring (I made a quick report on using it, good info). This should pinpoint the Module (or Module combination) that appears to trigger your problem.

Also, try Spectra. It's what I'm using on my crappy MacMini.

 

POSTEDIT: Humm... Planet Shine... It reflects the nearest body's luminance on the vessel. It's a nice suspect for the problem, as the processing is increased as new vessels are out of rails - each one must have their luminance recalculated every frame. 

Edited May 21, 2018 by Lisias

[Lisias]

As an example about what to expect on huge vessels/stations/bases, consider my current status quo.

This is what I get after editing/trying/crashing =P one vessel of mine after 6 to 8 hours:

Yeah. 18 Gigabytes allocated on a machine with 16G of RAM (and almost 1G "wasted" as memory mapped I/O, BIOS, etc, what renders about 15.4G of useful address space). HALF of that memory is compressed by MacOS, and I don't have to explain how this hinders FPS. Anyone used SoftRAM or any other "RAM doubler" utility for the Windows 3 on the 80's? Same thing. =/

Well, time to restart KSP. This is what I get after restarting KSP and loading exactly the same craft I was editing:

Take your own conclusions about the matter.

Curiosity for MacOS X users. This is what happened while I typed this post:

There's no CPU or GPU in the world what would give us good FPS with this stunt Apple shove us by the throat.

[f070214]

Hi everyone!

I'm new here and would like to buy KSP. But my laptop has very weak specifications.

CPU - Intel Celeron 1.60 GHz

Memory - 4 Gb

Graphic - Intel HD Graphic

Will it manage to handle the game?

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, f070214 said:

CPU - Intel Celeron 1.60 GHz
Memory - 4 Gb
Graphic - Intel HD Graphic

Will it manage to handle the game?

Barely, and probably unpleasantly. And don't even think on trying Mission Builder.

If you really want to run KSP on this "potato" (forum slang for weak machines), IMHO you will have to downgrade KSP to 1.3.1 or even 1.2.2 to have fun. Trim down all video settings to the minimum or you will get 2 to 4 FPS on reentry and other graphic intensive situations.

Disclaimer: I never tried this stunt, things can be somewhat better or worse as stated. In a nutshell, I won't.

[invision]

On 5/21/2018 at 4:52 PM, f070214 said:

Hi everyone!

I'm new here and would like to buy KSP. But my laptop has very weak specifications.

CPU - Intel Celeron 1.60 GHz

Memory - 4 Gb

Graphic - Intel HD Graphic

Will it manage to handle the game?

dont do it. it will run terrible as the hardware isnt fast enough for decent game play

[putnamto]

On 5/20/2018 at 3:33 AM, invision said:

 

 

On 5/20/2018 at 3:33 AM, invision said:

 

 

On 5/20/2018 at 3:33 AM, invision said:

 

basic build

CPU 189.99

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113496

motherboard 74.99

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157761

ram 165.00

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231878

428.00

 

Any  last  input  before  I  sell  my  switch  and  buy  these?

Sorry  about  the  blank  quotes  my  phone  is  being  junk

Edited May 26, 2018 by putnamto

[invision]

13 hours ago, putnamto said:

 

 

Any  last  input  before  I  sell  my  switch  and  buy  these?

Sorry  about  the  blank  quotes  my  phone  is  being  junk

welcome to the pc master race 

[putnamto]

2 hours ago, invision said:

welcome to the pc master race 

ive always had a gaming capable pc, but i prefered console because everyone i know has a ps4, and i bought a switch on a whim.

im leaning more and more towards pc now a days with the way console's are starting to nickel and dime you for everything.

[Dfthu]

So I just a (4 year old) new computer back to me after my old kicked the bucket. So it's a HP Compaq, got everything hooked up and... nothing on the monitor (A Hannspree hf229h). The blue light keeps blinking at me every 15 seconds and squeaks at the same time. I'm really quite confused on what happened, it worked perfectly before the computer died. Could the computer somehow kill the monitor? Or is my new computer messing with it?

[BigFatStupidHead]

Hi all; Lately I've been having KSP freeze up, and sometimes my entire computer freezes up. Before I just assume it's KSP being KSP, I thought I would ask here. I installed new RAM; I suspect it might be conflicting with the old ram and wonder if there's any way to test for this. Thanks!

Edited May 29, 2018 by BigFatStupidHead

[putnamto]

4 hours ago, BigFatStupidHead said:

Hi all; Lately I've been having KSP freeze up, and sometimes my entire computer freezes up. Before I just assume it's KSP being KSP, I thought I would ask here. I installed new RAM; I suspect it might be conflicting with the old ram and wonder if there's any way to test for this. Thanks!

Did  you  try  running  it  with  just  the  new  ram? Try  removing  the  old  sticks  and  see  if  you  still  have  the  problem.

Maybe  the  new  ram  is  faulty? Try  running  the  system  with  just one  of  the  new  sticks, then  with  the  other.

Maybe  reset  cmos  also

 

 

[Harry Rhodan]

On 5/29/2018 at 2:47 AM, BigFatStupidHead said:

Hi all; Lately I've been having KSP freeze up, and sometimes my entire computer freezes up. Before I just assume it's KSP being KSP, I thought I would ask here. I installed new RAM; I suspect it might be conflicting with the old ram and wonder if there's any way to test for this. Thanks!

The classical solution is memtest86: https://www.memtest86.com/

 

An older version is included in quite a lot of linux live images if you happen to have one lying around.

Edited May 30, 2018 by Harry Rhodan

[BigFatStupidHead]

9 hours ago, Harry Rhodan said:

The classical solution is memtest86: https://www.memtest86.com/

 

An older version is included in quite a lot of linux live images if you happen to have one lying around.

Ha, thanks for that! I found it not long after posting, and it has found no errors. I guess my problems are just KSP being KSP.

[Momo8289]

So, I'm getting a new laptop, and i want to know jf this one's GPU will be good enough. Id doesn't really give a lot of detail, but hopefully someone can help. Honestly i just want to know if this will run KSP well.

 

Link: http://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/cty/pdp/spd/inspiron-15-5575-laptop/ni155575_btsb_s8012e/configurations?cid=3852&st=&pdv=m&lid=5736660&VEN1=sIj9Al4at,177321299993,901mtv7630,m,&VEN2=,&dgc=st&dgseg=dhs&acd=1230881379501410&VEN3=519304314024641511