Did you Upgrade or Buy to be able to play KSP2?

[ColdJ]

Though it was also to be able to play X4 Foundations, I built a brand new system in the hopes of running KSP2 someday. It was a big outlay for me. How many people out there also spent out a large amount for a game that was promised but never got to a stable release?

[modus]

Of course I'm benefiting from it in playing other games, but KSP2 (and cities skylines 2...yeah) was the direct reason to buy a new rig. I was already thinking about it, but ksp2 was the perfect excuse 

No regrets though

[Bingmao]

I bought a new high end PC for playing KSP2 and Starfield... 

Now I play Dishonored (1) and Jedi Academy on this overpowered monster 

[K^2]

I'm a game dev. I have RTX, 20 cores, and 64GB so I can actually do the same stuff on my personal computer as I'd do on the work machine, But it's also great for gaming, so I was already about as prepared as I needed to be.

But in general, yeah, don't preemptively upgrade for a game that hasn't been released yet. Wait for the game (or at least the Early Access if there is one) to release, for people to play it, and to know for sure both the specs you'll want and that you'll enjoy playing it. Don't just put in hundreds of dollars into an expectation of a game.

[Scarecrow71]

My rig was only like 2 years old when KSP2 dropped in EA, so I figured I didn't need to upgrade anything on it.  It runs all my other games just fine, so I didn't think I needed to upgrade.

And then the game dropped, and I watched my FPS go down the drain when running it.  I've got a 12 core processor, 32 GB of RAM, and a decent - not high-end, but decent mid-range (at the time) - graphics card.  Sure, the graphics card could probably stand to be upgraded, and maybe I could drop more RAM in there.  But what I've got ran every other game I play just fine.  But the performance in KSP2 made me think I should have upgraded.

[K^2]

7 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

But the performance in KSP2 made me think I should have upgraded.

It's normal pre-alpha performance. I know a lot of games polish their Early Access cross-section to a beta level, but this wasn't done here. No amount of upgrading's going to save you from a game being poorly optimized. Most people with top-end machines had awful performance despite most CPU cores being idle, and even GPU being far from 100% utilized.

Funny enough, you could probably fix GPU performance of KSP2 with mods. But you'll still have problems with awful performance of the resource management and the single thread bottlenecks. So while you can make the framerate on lower end GPUs a lot snappier for simpler planes and rockets flying through the atmosphere, there's not much you can do for the CPU performance bottlenecks on larger rockets outside of maybe custom parts, like larger tanks, that would reduce your total part count. But that's obviously a very limited band-aid solution.

[shdwlrd]

I upgraded for a few games including KSP2. So yeah, no regrets here. I'll be happy with my system for awhile longer.

[Tony Tony Chopper]

My whole focus lied on Satisfactory most of the time. So, no. Upgrading my 2200G to a 5800X3D was a no brainer with that game and board and I planned to replace my 15 years old monitor (VGA only, it became somewhat urgent) anyway. So I slowly built something which would fit my planned 1440p system with reasonable overall performance. I also plan to skip AM5 and hope I can use the parts for a really long time now. Still, I bought and received my OLED monitor with KSP2 in my mind just 2-3 days before reading about the layoffs. It was really hard to decide between IPS and OLED and now I have a little bitter aftertaste. Well, still a nice screen! The blacks are crazy!

[Superfluous J]

Nope. My 2 year old PC runs it fine.

Granted I waited until FS came out and the game had been optimized a bit, and I've never been one to make thousand-part craft, so MMMV from yours.

[cocoscacao]

Announcement of KSP 2 release and  its system requirements certainly tipped me over. No regrets, since my old "gaming rig "was a 20 year old PC that was a moderate setup even back then... Basically, my average modern laptop was 8 times faster xD

[Siska]

I had only laptop at the time, since i have to travel a lot because of work.

On laptop GPU rtx 2070 it was running ok only if i had not more than two engines sucking the same fuel tank. A bit later i got thinkpad p15 with A3000 grašphic card, which is about the same as rtx 2070 laptop gpu. It was running a bit worse actualy.

So i didn't played it for some time, until few patches were out.

I bought now desktop computer with RTX 4090, 64GB ram, I9 14900K. On that machine it runs good i must say. But i didn't upgraded it just for KSP 2 no. It is really bad that you need a rig like this just for this game since KSP1 runs smoothly with all the mods.

[Bingmao]

15 hours ago, K^2 said:

Don't just put in hundreds of dollars into an expectation of a game.

I had to learn it the hard way. But hey, at least I can watch orbits decay at 60+ FPS 

[Zacspace]

I built a new pc in 2019 after the announcement. To be fair, I was well overdue for an upgrade by then and it saved me from paying pandemic prices to do it. It was a little disappointing that a medium-high end system built when the game was announced, and was notably said by Nate to perform well on low-end hardware, was completely inadequate to play the game on release. I put probably less than 10 hours into KSP2 total though so I'm not really that upset. Plus, I can use all the graphics mods I want in OG KSP now, and play all the other games I couldn't before now too especially after scooping up a cheap rx6700 after prices calmed back down.

Previously I had been using an old xeon workstation salvaged from a construction site's trash and a discarded GTX 670 with a jimmy-rigged cooler partly made with cardboard and hot-glue. This is actually my first time having an actually nice PC and I kinda have Nate and the various KSP 2 teams to thank for that.

[PDCWolf]

I already had plans to upgrade my graphics card. KSP2 did not add much to that because I knew the media event PCs were absolute beasts and even then they struggled. What did push me over the edge was the AMD+Starfield promo. I went for a 6750XT Qick Ultra. I was very happy about my purchase, as I got it for an amazing price before the economy hit a huge snag in my country. However... turns out the devs followed another bad practice: None of them had AMD gear to test the game on, and KSP2 was working really bad if it even worked on exactly the 6700 and 6800 series GPUs.

Talk about stuff piling up.

[Mutex]

13 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

However... turns out the devs followed another bad practice: None of them had AMD gear to test the game on, and KSP2 was working really bad if it even worked on exactly the 6700 and 6800 series GPUs.

Hmm, I didn't have any particular issues with my 6800XT. Apart from those black glitchy artefacts on the clouds at one point. Performance wasn't bad though, compared to what everyone else was getting anyway.

[miklkit]

I had just upgraded my pc with new motherboard, cpu, and ram so that is in good shape.  Upgraded the gpu and then when the specs came out found out it was still below standards.  And it is by far the most expensive GPU I ever bought at almost twice as much as the one it replaced.  but it plays everything else really well. 

[CanOmer]

There are two nice upscalers that work with any game that hasn't naturally; Magpie (free) and Lossless Scaling (not free). I have both but usually use Magpie. If I didn't know of these I probably replaced my old GTX 1080 by now because it is not enough for 4K resolution.

[kerbiloid]

I was never going to upgrade the hardware for the KSP-2, but I will have in mind its requirements as an orientir when I will be doing it.

[Alpha_star]

I'm happy to say that my NUC8 runs KSP2 perfectly fine at 15 or so FPS at max. graphics settings when launching the stock Aeris. This is the stat for it running 0.1.3.2 which is a highly unpotimized version compared to post 0.2 versions.

P.S. I don't care about people saying how aqnything below 60 is unplayable, 15 is very fine for me.

Edited June 10 by Alpha_star

[Dakitess]

Yes I did, exclusively for KSP2 and was glad to do so. I have spent so many hours, I have developed so many activities around KSP, that it was clearly something I was ready to do to enjoy a NextGen KSP2. But we know how it ended and it was already quite clear some months before the release. The communication was so damn lazy (or maybe "very honest" ?... Nah, it was plain incompetence) about showing the game that all the defects were clearly visible and very not promising. And it delivered ! With a very bad game, aesthetically and technically speaking (To avoid speaking about the gameplay and the content haha).

Fortunately, Hogwarts Legacy also came out, which I did not plan to buy at first, but which provided a lot of joy to play with my girlfriend, and it really took benefit from my new computer.

[Scarecrow71]

10 hours ago, Alpha_star said:

P.S. I don't care about people saying how aqnything below 60 is unplayable, 15 is very fine for me.

I'd love to hit that high benchmark of 15.  Unfortunately, the ships I build tend to be in the 100s of parts, which, as has been shown and proven, wrecks performance in KSP2.

[Infinite Aerospace]

On 6/10/2024 at 11:20 AM, Alpha_star said:

I'm happy to say that my NUC8 runs KSP2 perfectly fine at 15 or so FPS at max. graphics settings when launching the stock Aeris. This is the stat for it running 0.1.3.2 which is a highly unpotimized version compared to post 0.2 versions.

P.S. I don't care about people saying how aqnything below 60 is unplayable, 15 is very fine for me.

Frame rate is a metric people get far too fixated on to be honest. I get decent frame rate on laptop with 0.2.1 the issue for me is stuff like the parachutes not opening rather than performance right now. Back when Crysis was around, people scoffed at 30 FPS but it was plenty smooth with CryEngine.