Huge creations in .20

[DrDima]

So far .20 has been much of an improvement for me. I have not yet experienced any lag or performance issues, compared to .19 where I would have physics lag.

However I'd like to know if someone has tested the boundaries for the current version. I mean, how big does your ship/station/base have to be for it to lag. I will be testing this myself later.

If you can, post pics and your specs!

If you're using mods would be useful to add this as well.

[lyndonguitar]

i was just going to start a thread like this.

anyways yeah, I would like to know what the general current lag limit, For my rig, which is i7-2600 4.5ghz, 8GB RAM, Radeon HD 6870, It super lags on 500+ parts. like 10 FPS, normal FPS is around 100+, I tried playing .20 for a bit, just to test the features, Normal fps is 200+, but never tried to push it because I switched back to .19 due to mod compatibility reasons.

A General question would be, Anyone here who had any heaviliy part'd vessel that previously lagged on .19 but now runs better on .20?

[Shiftyeyesshady]

My station has been lagging less, though it is by no means large. It does get very busy though with 4-5 ships docked at it when prepping for a mission.

Really, the biggest improvement has been the larger docking port causing less wobble.

[Rage097]

Due to less lag, i'm probably going to make a giant captitol ship.

[lyndonguitar]

My station has been lagging less, though it is by no means large. It does get very busy though with 4-5 ships docked at it when prepping for a mission.

Really, the biggest improvement has been the larger docking port causing less wobble.

Can you tell us more? how many FPS before and after? If exact value aren't available, at least give us an estimate

[AnalogAddict]

I'm very anxious to get home and try. I have a couple 1k part crafts I could attempt to launch.

[Psychoholic]

I didn't notice any improvement at all regarding physics, though I wasn't expecting any. Anyone should feel free to correct my layman's interpretation of physics in KSP:

This is not a problem with KSP, rather it is the game engine (Unity) not utilizing hardware resources.

The physics calculations done by the game engine are still single threaded, and don't use more than one CPU core, nor does it use the GPU for physics. Because of this, the game will lag horribly with large part counts, even on your beast computer with an i7 and 32GB of RAM plus a 4GB video card and an SSD. Until we get actual threading support from Unity, and/or have physics calculations done by the GPU (which is much better suited for such tasks by many orders of magnitude), we will be living in lag central.

Edit: Also, I believe the physics issue has been discussed at length previously, a forum search should yield better and more complete explanations, so long as they weren't eaten last month.

Edited May 23, 2013 by Psychoholic

[Curs0r]

I have a somewhat obscenely elaborate creation that I call Roverlab. It gave me roughly 3-4 fps sitting on the launchpad in .19, now it gets maybe 1 if I'm lucky. Regardless of the FPS count it is unlaunchable, even with mechjeb. My poor PC just can't handle it. My space stations seem a lot less laggy though

[KinkyFerrets]

I didn't notice any improvement at all regarding physics, though I wasn't expecting any. Anyone should feel free to correct my layman's interpretation of physics in KSP:

This is not a problem with KSP, rather it is the game engine (Unity) not utilizing hardware resources.

The physics calculations done by the game engine are still single threaded, and don't use more than one CPU core, nor does it use the GPU for physics. Because of this, the game will lag horribly with large part counts, even on your beast computer with an i7 and 32GB of RAM plus a 4GB video card and an SSD. Until we get actual threading support from Unity, and/or have physics calculations done by the GPU (which is much better suited for such tasks by many orders of magnitude), we will be living in lag central.

Edit: Also, I believe the physics issue has been discussed at length previously, a forum search should yield better and more complete explanations, so long as they weren't eaten last month.

Spot on. But yeah, GPU=Poor Man's super computer

[Shiftyeyesshady]

Don't have any exact figures. The station by itself, which I rebuilt the core even bigger in .20, doesn't hit lagsbane at all whereas before it would infrequent ping it.

I only start to see lagsbane trigger when I've got a pair of large part count vessels attached to it. Even then, it is extremely manageable.

Actually, .20 has caused problems with my 70+ liquid booster launcher stage. Mainly, the way it would lag prior actually made it easier to fly. Now it infrequently lags, mainly during gravity turn. (Silly excessive I know, but Jeb insisted. It's also technically a SSTO on smaller payloads.)

[birrhan]

I was launching an 1800 part monstrosity (Eve lander at 350 tons and associated Kerbin Launch vehicle), and in 0.19 it was taking at least 10 minutes to get to 25,000 m (where it would slowly disintegrate), but last night I got there in moderately less time--less than 10 minutes, more than 5. Sorry I didn't document the time, it hadn't occurred to me to measure that as a variable between versions. 2500k, 8GB RAM, 1 GB GeForce 560Ti, windows 7.

Still, that time is made up when I select "end flight", and then the screen gets all frozen and non responsive and spends 2-5 minutes thinking about spitting you back out to the VAB--and I really do mean it's thinking, because alt-tabbing to, say, chrome to ride out that time will force back to KSP every 5-10 seconds. It's quicker to close the game and restart from Windows.

[joppiesaus]

oh, this is extreme fun for me. I just builded my first pc, and it has 16 gb ram! and because 0.20 is out, I can make huge ships!

[RawChicken]

Im also on a new 16Gb ram pc and i am currently building pretty big things...will post them on youtube when finished!

[Motokid600]

That ram will certainty help when building a ship, but once that physics engine kicks in on the launch pad *farts*

... Id rather see performance updates then... flags. One thread utilized.. whats the reasoning behind that? That should be priority number one. If this game could utilize all four of my cores it'd be locked at 60fps with maxed Nvidia overrides.

[KinkyFerrets]

That ram will certainty help when building a ship, but once that physics engine kicks in on the launch pad *farts*

... Id rather see performance updates then... flags. One thread utilized.. whats the reasoning behind that? That should be priority number one. If this game could utilize all four of my cores it'd be locked at 60fps with maxed Nvidia overrides.

That's the fault of the Unity Engine, not KSP itself. Since squad really cant do anything until Unity devs implement it, they might as well work on the game.