PC hardware advice master thread for KSP2. (Ask if your specs are good enough or what to buy here.)

[Kimera Industries]

Hi, looking for computer advice. (Specifically building a cheap one for KSP2)

If you couldn't tell from some of my mission reports, (<-- Notably that one, scroll down to the rover) I 1. have a moldy potato for a PC, and 2. do not mind playing at a so-so framerate. I have been looking into buying parts for a new PC, (basically just to play KSP2 but I think it's worth it) but I have extremely limited knowledge about computer parts, what they do exactly, and how they all fit together. If I get the parts, I'll figure out how to build it, but I really struggle with choosing the ones that I need.
What's some good advice for someone who is looking to

• Build a computer that just has to run KSP2 at a bare minimum
• Not spend extravagantly on this
• Does not care for graphics (they are already as low as possible on KSP1 for me)
• Still wants a decent playable framerate for moderately-sized craft (200-300 parts count, I'd say)

Anything at all would be appreciated, I'd prefer links to something on Amazon or other services where possible, and linking to earlier posts is fine. Thanks!  

Edited January 5 by Kimera Industries
New page for a new PC...

[Jackalope]

I'll weigh in with my rig to add a midrange machine to the mix. I consider my rig midrange, as it was when i bought it almost 3 years ago. Im rocking:

Intel i5 10400F at 2.9 GHz

Gigabyte GTX1660 Super 6GB vram

16 GB DDR4, 3400MHz iirc

 

Currently, with fs! and the many improvements the past year I'll get a solid 60 frames on a new game. As the number of flights increases, I start getting lag in the vab and sub-40fps in flight, I suspect it's a mix of the game and my rig. The game is certainly doable on midrange machines, and I'd anticipate further improvements as time goes on.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Anyone have experience with Eaton  UPS units? 

Replacing an old and currently underpowered cyberpower UPS. 

[Icegrx]

I just wanted to state this. 
since ForScience update, I have been enjoying KSP on integrated graphics. 
 

yes I said it. 
 

I am playing on a Lenovo L15 with 32GB of ram with a Ryzen Pro 5675U CPU, on its integrated graphics. 
 

some things to note, game is 100% playable, I’ve gotten a probe to every planetary body, and landed successfully on a few main planets. I’ve built a small - medium space station and successfully docked and undocked. 
 

it’s not perfect, my graphics are set to as low as can be, and larger rockets & stations give the system a lot of slowness. However in 100% of my gameplay it’s been managable. 
 

Don’t be afraid to try KSP2 

[grenyahumana]

Hi, 

i've got a 9 years old PC: Intel  i7-4790, 16GB RAM and GTX960. I know im way under the minimun specs needed by the game but im trying to play anyways.

My main issue is that i get tons of crashes everytime im In a loading screen... like every 4 of 5 times making it almost unplayable....

I dont get why, because when i finally go throw the loading screen and start playing the game goes pretty smooth on low graphics so it doesn't seems like a graphic issue.

Could you give me some advice about what i could to to fix it? Or i have no chance?

Tnks in advance

[Mike S]

I am using a Ryzen 5600G and an AMD 6650 8GB dedicated GPU with 32GB DDR4@1600.

Initial game release was very poor performance.  Granted, everyone's experience wasn't great, the game wasn't really playable regardless of the visual.  The December update gave me a huge boost up to 120FPS.  But this only lasted for small ship designs.  As I progressed through the game and had to  use multiple engine design to compensate for the weaker engines in early science mode.  Lots of parts equals lots lof frame rates lost.  200-300 part ships became a nightmare to fly due to less than 10FPS on average.  Changing GPU settings had little effect on performance.  This most recent update helped a bit with the performance.

[EngineeringWaffle]

Has anyone established a relationship between specs and performance? I know this sounds silly, but when running the game with a big ship I was getting 2 FPS. I checked task manager etc. and nothing was being pushed. No CPU core was over like 30% or 40%, no GPU temperature spike and no part of my GPU was anywhere close to maxed out.

Obviously potato PCs will have issues, but has anyone established if upgrading CPU  or GPU will actually make an appreciable difference? It seems like it must be some kind of crazy bottle neck.

For reference, I have a 3070 and a 5600X

[Fizzlebop Smith]

Delta 15 AMD Advantage™ Edition (AMD Ryzen™ 5000 H-Series Mobile Processors / AMD Radeon™ RX 6000M Series Mobile Graphics)

 

Now a couple years old and begging to be replaced by a Box.  I am taking care of a family member and have yet to carve out enough personal space for a PC. ( I will Come here when I Do).

So.. my laptop Plays KSP2 and  VFX + heavily modified KSP1 with decent frames on medium settings.

BUT

Heat. My bane. I got a cooler that sits below.. but it doesn't work. Only a degree or 2.

I have to run the cooller boost to keep it from crashing on any kind of decent setting. It will handle fine without stuttering, but cooks. I was worried about running the cooler boost for long extended periods of gaming due to reading a couple forum discussion where people talking about the cumulative load on a power supply.

Something about a gradient of usage that increases based on GPU / CPU  toll being enough to push most factory PS to a threshold that extended periods 115% load to two fans  may be enough to push it into failure.

I get increased entropy and running it on cooler boost could decrease the overall life, but didn't know about failure potential increases being much greater with high end graphics games.

These were people building machines talking about specific pieces of hardware though and I don't know jack about all that.

I'm hoping there are some coolers that work really well that someone knows about. Like why aren't there some kind of wicking heat sync like in the machines at work. Potential for condensation at certain dew points is my only thoughts.. but I ramble.

 

Whay tricks actually help with heat that someone with little technical expertise can employ?

Also... I hadn't owned a computer in 10 years when I got the laptop . An era of strictly digital gaming is taking a toll in my SSD. I find myself managing games like inventory space in some roguelike survival game.

What would be the best hard drive for me? Not size so much but inherent features that I don't understand. Like can you get one with write speeds fast enough that I can put some of the Less intensive games on it amd use emulation tools to mount it?

At one point in time I understood computers but a few years of utter and total withdrawal  from society has seen much of this leave me in the past.

 

[Tony Tony Chopper]

On 2/16/2024 at 3:57 AM, EngineeringWaffle said:

Has anyone established a relationship between specs and performance? I know this sounds silly, but when running the game with a big ship I was getting 2 FPS. I checked task manager etc. and nothing was being pushed. No CPU core was over like 30% or 40%, no GPU temperature spike and no part of my GPU was anywhere close to maxed out.

Obviously potato PCs will have issues, but has anyone established if upgrading CPU  or GPU will actually make an appreciable difference? It seems like it must be some kind of crazy bottle neck.

For reference, I have a 3070 and a 5600X

Mind sharing your exact ship/save so I can test this situation on my rig too? I have a 5800X3D and upgraded my graphics to a 7800XT(a reference card) 2 weeks ago. I didn't came to the point of getting 2FPS so far.

Things coming to my mind: How is your VRAM doing? I'm very sure this might be your problem. Although it should have been seen in the task manager by you. You didn't mentioned VRAM however.
Maybe it's a 3000 series problem, I remember seeing plenty of low FPS reports from 3000 series gamer in various games. It might just have been a launch/early driver problem. In any way it seemed odd to me. You actually almost meet recommended specs anyway.
Which resolution actually? Experimental drivers (wouldn't expect it)?

[EngineeringWaffle]

On 2/18/2024 at 6:15 PM, Tony Tony Chopper said:

Mind sharing your exact ship/save so I can test this situation on my rig too? I have a 5800X3D and upgraded my graphics to a 7800XT(a reference card) 2 weeks ago. I didn't came to the point of getting 2FPS so far.

Things coming to my mind: How is your VRAM doing? I'm very sure this might be your problem. Although it should have been seen in the task manager by you. You didn't mentioned VRAM however.
Maybe it's a 3000 series problem, I remember seeing plenty of low FPS reports from 3000 series gamer in various games. It might just have been a launch/early driver problem. In any way it seemed odd to me. You actually almost meet recommended specs anyway.
Which resolution actually? Experimental drivers (wouldn't expect it)?

VRAM is fine. It's high, but it's fine. I am not using any experimental or strange drivers and my resolution is 1080p. But setting my resolution to like 480p only gave me like 1 extra FPS.

Now the ship itself is large. Quite large. It's a bunch of ships I docked together to go to Jool and visit all the moons AFAIK the part count is just too high for KSP2 to handle. I don't know if it's possible to see part count in the flight mode, but that's not really the point. The point is I pushed the game to the limit, but the game didn't push my hardware to the limit. Obviously it's possible to build something that will slow down your game. Anyone can open cyberpunk and crank the max raytracing reflections to 100 and tank their performance, whether they have a 4090 TI or a 2060 super. But when you do that and open task manager you see your GPU get maxed out and heat up. What I find strange is that the bottleneck doesn't seem like it's hardware. It seems like my CPU and GPU are totally fine and able to handle more, but the game just won't push them.

For me, this is reminiscent of a problem I used to have with Minecraft on an old laptop where it would default to my intel graphics instead of my discrete graphics because Nvidia didn't recognize a generic Java app as being something it should enable itself for. So I'd be getting single digit FPS, but task manager would show no activity on my GPU. This is obviously not the problem, since the computer I'm currently using has no onboard graphics. I've also checked I'm not in power saving mode, that the game is recognized as a game, etc. but it just has the same kind of feel, like something is just not using the right system and bottle necking on something totally random.

 

Maybe it's an Nvidia driver issue. But IDK, no other game behaves like this for me. And my card has been out for a long while now. But I don't even know how to tell if it's a CPU problem or a GPU problem.

 

[rogerawong]

On 2/22/2024 at 11:56 AM, EngineeringWaffle said:

I don't even know how to tell if it's a CPU problem or a GPU problem.

It's neither.

It's an "unoptimized game loop" problem that causes the game to saturate a single CPU core and not really use any others. 

It skips frames and suffers time dilation effects because its single compute thread running on a single CPU core literally cannot complete all the necessary game calculations in the required 16.6 ms per frame needed to give the video card new frames 60 times per second. 

There is nothing wrong with your machine specs. It's a result of KSP2 being in an early access stage where game design and mechanics are still the software engineering priority over "make the game run smooth". 

The tldr; is, With any average video card, CPU core clock speed is the single most impactful number right now that determines KSP2 frame rates over the number of cores.

A CPU with 8 cores that runs at 6Ghz would run KSP2 better than a 16 core 4 GHZ CPU. 

If you run liquid helium as a coolant to get your CPU to 9 Ghz, you would have the fastest KSP2 computer.

But again, you're only having to throw so much single core CPU clock cycles at it because the game is so inefficiently programmed.  

Performance hopefully will improve vastly as the early access gets closer to release.

[cocoscacao]

You can play KSP 2 on any old laptop... if you have a powerful PC and enable Steam remote play... trolololo

Edited March 17 by cocoscacao

[Ninemeister]

On 1/13/2024 at 3:16 PM, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Anyone have experience with Eaton  UPS units? 

Replacing an old and currently underpowered cyberpower UPS. 

Eatons are fine. I've used a few of them as well as CyberPower and APC UPSs for personal use as well as in enterprise environments. I've had an APC Pro1000S powering my main gaming rig for two years now with excellent results. Power consumption maxes out at 550W under stress testing and shows about 70% used capacity.

[failurecascade]

In case it's useful to anyone, I bought the game a few days ago and found that it is playable on my relatively low-spec system:

Intel i5 6600K at 3.5GHz
16GB DDR4
EVGA GTX 970 4GB VRAM

I'm playing at 1080p and otherwise low settings (as close to wireframe as it will allow).  Getting 50 to 60 fps in the KSC and 40 to 50 fps for launches (this dips by 10 to 15 fps when pointing the camera down to the surface of Kerbin or Mun).

Note that I haven't tried assemblies of several hundred parts.  Thinking that will slow the game to a crawl regardless of my hardware...
 

[Kimera Industries]

2 hours ago, failurecascade said:

(this dips by 10 to 15 fps when pointing the camera down to the surface of Kerbin or Mun).

Ugh, same problem in KSP1 for me.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Anyone know why a USB DAC with both a pink and green input won't communicate with the computer that a microphone is connected? 

Headset works with the pink and green connectors directly to the back panel sound ports - but I bought the USB DAC for the convenience... Would like to be able to easily unplug the headset and have the speakers kick in. 

(my old DAC did this just fine for Corsair headphones - but it was a single connection whereas the new headset has separate pink & green.  FWIW front panel audio ports don't work requiring the USB DAC. 

Thoughts? 

[Pthigrivi]

Anyone have experience/ recommendations on prebuilt sellers? ABS, MSi, iBuypower etc? Mainly Im looking for reliability and good support. 

[SolarAdmiral]

On 4/18/2024 at 7:28 AM, Pthigrivi said:

Anyone have experience/ recommendations on prebuilt sellers? ABS, MSi, iBuypower etc? Mainly Im looking for reliability and good support. 

Shockingly, I've always heard good things about HP Omen, for desktops (not sure if this good reputation extends to their laptops or not). And I've heard no end of bad things about Dell / Alienware.

Neither is from first hand experience though.

Personally, I'd always go with Memory Express, but that's only an option if you happen to be Canadian. But maybe also look around to see if you have a local / regional PC and parts store with a good reputation, reviews, and doesn't look like it's on the edge of going bankrupt. Then, check prices, see what they cover and handle for support, compare to make sure you're getting a good deal.

[Icegrx]

Just for a little clarification here. 
 

in most cases for KSP2 you don’t need a top of the line GPU. GPU likely isn’t holding you back. If you have an outdated or very underpowered GPU thats another story…

You can test this in a few ways, but typically you want to turn down your in game textures. If you see a large frame rate boost at a lower texture quality then you can point the finger to your GPU holding you back. Lowering game resolution can also give you insight into your GPU. 

The thing I see holding most people back is CPU & Ram selection. 32GB of fast low latency ram vs 16GB of slow ram made a pretty good difference for me. Another thing to consider if you’re shopping for parts is a CPU with high frequency speed and high cache. High core count seems to make little difference in KSP2. 

You want the physics calculations to happen as fast as possible, you can achieve this with high frequency and high cache CPU paired with high frequency low latency ram. 
 

 

Edited April 23 by Icegrx

[sleepy_eb]

Long time KSP guy now KSP2 early access guy. I just thought to drop a line that KSP2 Runs lovely on Pop!_OS/steam/wine/proton

My system info kindly below. Stay wobbly, fellow kerbonauts! To any toe dippers; give it a try!

me@hauspc
OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS x86_64
Host: B550
Kernel: 6.8.0-76060800daily20240311-generic
Uptime: 2 days, 1 hour, 45 mins
Packages: 2230 (dpkg), 22 (flatpak), 9 (snap)
Shell: bash 5.1.16
Resolution: 2560x1440
DE: GNOME 42.5
WM: Mutter
WM Theme: Pop
Theme: Pop-dark [GTK2/3]
Icons: Pop [GTK2/3]
Terminal: gnome-terminal
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G w/ Radeon Graphics(16) @ 4.673GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
GPU: AMD ATI 07:00.0 Cezanne
Memory: 9684MiB / 31477MiB
 

 

Edited April 23 by sleepy_eb

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

I've got a Ryzen 5 5500 and GTX 2050. Will that be enough for KSP 2? Hopefully with mods as well. I intend to play at 1920 by 1080p

[Chilkoot]

On 4/18/2024 at 9:28 AM, Pthigrivi said:

Anyone have experience/ recommendations on prebuilt sellers? ABS, MSi, iBuypower etc? Mainly Im looking for reliability and good support. 

Not sure if you're hooked up yet, but Alienware is worth a look again if you're in the market for a gaming rig.  Dell seems to have righted the ship wrt/build quality and service after those dark years.  Premium price, tho.

I'd also recommend ASUS for gaming laptops, at least.  Build is usually pretty solid on those.  Unsure about support as I haven't needed it (which says something).

MSI has given me problems in the past, esp. with their gaming laptops.  Build, heat dissipation, keyboard+panel quality were all poor.  YMMV.

[Pthigrivi]

57 minutes ago, Chilkoot said:

Not sure if you're hooked up yet, but Alienware is worth a look again if you're in the market for a gaming rig.  Dell seems to have righted the ship wrt/build quality and service after those dark years.  Premium price, tho.

I'd also recommend ASUS for gaming laptops, at least.  Build is usually pretty solid on those.  Unsure about support as I haven't needed it (which says something).

MSI has given me problems in the past, esp. with their gaming laptops.  Build, heat dissipation, keyboard+panel quality were all poor.  YMMV.

Thats funny I landed on an MSI desktop. No problems so far but we’ll see. Im spoiled by macs. Like shouldn’t you just buy a machine and expect it to work? Is that crazy?

[Chilkoot]

8 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Thats funny I landed on an MSI desktop. No problems so far but we’ll see.

I use MSI motherboards and vid cards in my builds, and they have been great.  The only problems I've had with MSI are their laptops, and always related to laptop-specific parts like the housing, air flow design, etc.  I'd bet your MSI desktop will be really solid.  What kind of vid card did you get?

8 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Im spoiled by macs. Like shouldn’t you just buy a machine and expect it to work? Is that crazy?

Pretty much everything Apple makes is top-shelf, but you pay for that.  You can do the same with a PC by getting a first-party premium brand, but it will be approaching price parity with a Mac.  The problem with PC's is that it's a commodity market, and that means race-to-the-bottom pricing and everything that goes with it.

In car terms, Apple only makes Mercedes.  Well, the 80's Mercedes that ran for decades.  For PC's you can buy anything from a Ladda up to a custom Koenigsegg.  And just like with cars - in the PC market - you can get ripped off with something that markets itself as premium.  Looking at you, Maserati - don't get me started!

Hope you have a good experience with the new rig.  It's always a pain switching to a new ecosystem, though I will say Windows has come a long way since the bad old days.

[Pthigrivi]

22 hours ago, Chilkoot said:

Hope you have a good experience with the new rig.  It's always a pain switching to a new ecosystem, though I will say Windows has come a long way since the bad old days.

Thanks! I went with an i7 13th gen and an RTX 4060 ti, not tipity top but plenty for my purposes. Its been fantastic so far but Im basically using it as a glorified xbox. Totally agreed about macs. Fantastic machines but I spent almost twice what I did on the PC for my macbook. Its still chugging nicely after 6 years but dang it was pricey. 

Edited May 11 by Pthigrivi