[GUIDE] How I reduced loading times from 45 mins to under 10 mins with [150 mods installed]

[spaded1]

Ok, I've been playing this game for years now, like.... over 5000 hours in game, across many laptops over the years. 

Loading times have always SUCKED, especially with more and more mods. I could never understand why or how to improve. I'd go from a 2,000 dollar gaming laptop to 45 min loading times, to a $5000 gaming laptop 3 years later and still have 45 min loading times!!! 

Finally, I got a $8,000 laptop - thinking, this HAS to be the best for speed as its literally the best on the market I can buy..... Nope, still 45 mins. 

 

So I started digging, researching, understanding, testing.... and heres what I've learned and how to do it: 

First what did I look into: 

• In game settings
• Graphics drivers
• 3rd party nvida apps to improve performance
• windows settings for gaming
• installing completely on RAM disk - unusable but slight improvement in loading times (1-10 mins) (I have 32gm RAM and with all my mods ny pc would crash since I needed 25gb of ram just to run KSP and the remaining RAM couldn't run other background services, so I doubt anyone here will have more luck unless their mod size is lower)
• forcing openGL
• Preventing FPS limiting

 

After all of this, here is what I found to be the most effective and what I'm doing now, if the stuff above isn't included its because they sucked, or didn't work.
 

1.  Don't open KSP from steam, or the KSP.exe in the folder structure. Delete the shortcut from your desktop to make it very easy not to screw up.
2. Go to your steam KSP folder, and find the launcher.exe, open this, and use this for now on to load the game everytime. Don't load via ckan "launch button".
3. Click on settings in the launcher
4.  then make sure your anti aliasing is disabled - your CPU/GPU is better than this 20 year old version of AA 
5.  frame limit is 180
6.  do NOT use full screen
7. 1/8th or 1/4th texture loading and can keep on "beautiful"
8. Click Advanced and disable logging, and then force fake fullscreen mode (idk why this helps but this changes everything).
9. Install RivaTuner (its safe, and it lets you stop the internal limits KSP sets on FPS, which is the bottleneck for loading time. Just add the ksp_64.exe on rivatuner and use these settings https://gyazo.com/a766e2b2cc6032fc4b8cca54042e2c4d
10. With RivaTuner installed, I can reach up to 450 FPS on the loading screen.
11.  Press launch on the launcher.exe and then close it once KSP opens. 

EDIT: EVEN BETTER PERFORMANCE!!!!!!!!

12.  Click settings, remove force fullscreen from step 8, set to the LOWEST resolution possible, for me its like 1000x800 (around there, just spam down until it can't go lower). 

13. Close the game window that pops up (since for some reason if you open launcher.exe it will also open KSP.exe, using the old settings, so close that, you may have to force it via alt f4 and windows force close to save time), then once thats forced closed, go back to the launcher and press play again, now, the window will be extremely small with the new settings and you'll get FPS like below. 

 

FPS rates at lowest resolution get up to 850+ FPS 

Confirm everytime before launching that the texture is back to 1/4th or 1/8th because sometimes if I close ksp and reopen the launchers settings are all saved except it has my textures set back to full res, same for the resolution.

 

Hope this helps - someone please post their time differences once saved. 

 

Oh btw, these changes with no mods on my PC KSP completely loads within 30 seconds to main menu

Edited August 28, 2022 by spaded1

[Poodmund]

Yup

 

[The Aziz]

Okay but how good it is with switching scenes after longer play? Testing something by going from SPH to runway and back makes the scene loading longer than making any changes to the craft. I don't mind initial loading when I'm about to start a long session, but loading scenes effectively kills my long sessions as I spend more and more time waiting than playing.

Also 2k to 5k to 8k is a bit of a flex but ok.

[JonnyOThan]

1 hour ago, The Aziz said:

Okay but how good it is with switching scenes after longer play? Testing something by going from SPH to runway and back makes the scene loading longer than making any changes to the craft. I don't mind initial loading when I'm about to start a long session, but loading scenes effectively kills my long sessions as I spend more and more time waiting than playing.

Also 2k to 5k to 8k is a bit of a flex but ok.

helps to fix that.

On 8/20/2022 at 3:51 AM, spaded1 said:

1/8th or 1/4th texture loading and can keep on "beautiful"

Doesn't this mean you're playing with 1/4th or 1/8th the texture resolution?

[tajwo]

Unfortunately I don't have any loading times or FPS numbers to compare right now(when I do I'll edit this post), but some of these do help the game run noticeably smoother on my computer's integrated graphics . Thanks

[miklkit]

I tried some of these things and it looks better.  Loading times are slightly better too, but I don't have many mods.

[spaded1]

On 8/21/2022 at 9:15 PM, JonnyOThan said:

helps to fix that.

Doesn't this mean you're playing with 1/4th or 1/8th the texture resolution?

 

Nah, once game loads you can set back to normal textures. But also, its a 20 year old game, I'm not really playing it for the beauty. So not too important for me 

[spaded1]

On 8/20/2022 at 9:10 PM, Poodmund said:

Yup

 

Your thread is what got me thinking about this more seriously. So thanks. Took what you said and expanded upon it. 950 fps from the typical 60 is HUGE improvements. Thanks man! 

[Guest]

Good stuff. I'll add that if you don't want every mod texture compressed you can use something like GIMP to make your own permanent 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 resolution textures.

 

[Gargamel]

Moved to Tutorials.

[darthvader15001]

THIS WORKS INCREDIBLY EVEN WITH ONLY HALF OF THE STEPS IT LOADS TWICE AS FAST! HAVE MOAR REP!

[ttr]

Most of this happening is because You reduce resolution and remove FPS cap which will help loading times as KSP loading is linked to FPS (loading screen rendering).
Problem I do have is after load, switching back to full-screen and desired resolution game have almost no benefit to loading from steam into full screen straight away.

So, Yes, having small game resolution will speed up loading game time (there was a plugin that remove synchronous rendering of load screen so it also fix this issue), but for me this was 5 mins vs 3 mins (each time tests done with purged filesystem cache and scrubbed ram to force loading from disk).

 

Oh, and AA version is not 20y old but 6 (it's running on unity from 2019)
 

 

[JonnyOThan]

KSP community fixes already completely replaces the asset loading loop. Just use that.