How long before a performance increase?

[Motokid600]

Because I think ill be putting this game down until then. All my projects are hindered by bad fps. I play this game for hours at 5 - 10 fps and I simply cannot stand it anymore. The simplest tasks become hard. I don't know what Squad can do with the Unity engine, but something needs to be done. This should be priority number one as they make this game. I know... alpha. But its the engine itself that needs to update as well. So if that's the case I imagine I wont be playing for quite some time. PC's got a 3770k and 16 gigs of ram..

[Ben Kerman]

How many parts do you have on your craft?

Do you have anything else opened?

Have you tried lowering the settings?

[Motokid600]

Yea settings are low. No AA, no vsync. Nothing in the background. Id say the largest is my moon base. 700 parts. The base itself is really small compared to what I've seen. How do people make 1000+ crafts, and keep it playable?

[technicalfool]

I only wish I could manage 5-10fps on some of my larger launches! It's more like 0.5 or less frames per second, usually, until I'm way up in orbit and most of the stack has been shed. The game's quite playable with a low frame rate. It's the control lag and occasionally uneven frame rate that gets me the most, which is why I haven't bothered trying to create a massive space station yet. No point if it's going to start wandering between 5fps and 0.5fps as soon as I get a module within 2.5km of the construction.

I think the whole single-core-only thing is the big killer right now. There have been visible performance increases going from 0.19.x to 0.20.x. Increases enough that I might even try again on the whole "build a huge space station" thing. Unfortunately though, there's only so much you can do when there's 1000+ parts that all need to have their physics calculated, and no parallel processing going on under the hood.

[NeoMorph]

Q: How long until we get a performance increase?

A: PIECE OF STRING!

[ASnogarD]

Optimisations are usually late in development, its pointless spending all that time optimising code in a game that isnt even feature complete... what if you need to change things to get a feature in, and it breaks all the optimisation done up to then ? Time was wasted, rather get the game done then run over it with optimisation passes.

This is of course a con for early access to developing games, you cant complain about the performance until its a full game.

[Kerbface]

Oh, 700 parts, how tiny!

[Kanga]

What are your computer specs? Just curious as to whether it's your PC struggling with the game, or the game struggling with the parts.

[joppiesaus]

Do you have win32 or something?

[royying]

I think the dev. team should give up the unity engine.

Multi-core CPU not a new technology,first personal PC dual core CPU release in 2005.

It is ridiculous that a game engine still not support multi-core process after 8 years.

How can we expect unity support multi-core process in short term?

I know change the game engine are very painful for dev. team,

but it will be more painful when the game code become bigger and bigger.

dev. team should consider to change the engine ASAP

[boxman]

Because I think ill be putting this game down until then. All my projects are hindered by bad fps. I play this game for hours at 5 - 10 fps and I simply cannot stand it anymore. The simplest tasks become hard. I don't know what Squad can do with the Unity engine, but something needs to be done. This should be priority number one as they make this game. I know... alpha. But its the engine itself that needs to update as well. So if that's the case I imagine I wont be playing for quite some time. PC's got a 3770k and 16 gigs of ram..

Last version had quite a bit of performance boost with large ships for me.

And you have to realize that squad never realized that people would build ships with thousands of parts or that it was even possible to send such massive rockets/objects into space.

And what do you think will happen with every performance increase? People will just build bigger and bigger and always reach that limit where performance goes down. If they make 1500 part ships run smoothly then people like me and most likely you will just start building 3000 part ships.

It has already improved alot since .17 and i bet it will improve a bit with future versions as well.

If you play this game like it was intended to then there should be no problems getting smooth framerate. This game runs acceptable even on my old intel core 2 duo when launching medium sized rockets.

[msyblade]

i had made the mistake of turning the physics up to .80, thinking that means it only cycles every 3/4th's of a second. My game felt broken also, and I didnt make the link that I had caused it to happen. I fiddled around and turned the physics down to .02 and all of a sudden, all of my stuff is lag free!I'm guessing that it is USING .02 of every second to calculate physics, instead of using 8/10ths of every second to calculate physics. Anyway, I thought it set how often it cycles, rather than how much effort it puts into it. Not sure if this could be contributing to your issue.

note: I can't recall the actual name of the setting to change, and am not near my pc, if someone would elaborate this for me, I'm sure it would be appreciated

[Uberick]

I'm going to second the motion that I would LOVE some optimization. . . but if I have to wait for it until the game is feature complete. . . so be it

Firstly, go into your config file and change the delta physics to some very small number. The default the you can turn it down to is .03, but if you go to the actual file you can input a small number(like .0000000000000000000001). That will encourage the game to give you more FPS at the expense of "slowing down" the gameplay. It looks like slow-mo, but it gives you more FPS so there's less jittering.

go to your KSP file, go to "settings", and change the MAX_PHYSICS_DT_PER_FRAME to some low number There's a slider in the game settings menu that does the same thing, but it will max out at .03. I seem to find a couple extra FPS performance boost by changing it to some fraction of .000000000000000000000000000001

Also, this game seems to be VERY clock speed and processor dependent. I just built a new PC with a 4770k, and it's getting 30~FPS where my second gen i5 was getting mid-teens, as well as my laptop 3rd gen i7(which is a laptop core, so it's slower by default).

[jwenting]

And what do you think will happen with every performance increase? People will just build bigger and bigger and always reach that limit where performance goes down. If they make 1500 part ships run smoothly then people like me and most likely you will just start building 3000 part ships.

THIS!

Whatever they do, people are going to take it over the design limits and then complain.

Seen it time and time again with other games and simulators that allow modding or building your own stuff. It's the one constant between them.

And then there's the fps addicts who complain that they can't get more than X fps, will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get 0.1 fps more than they used to.

[Kerbface]

THIS!

Whatever they do, people are going to take it over the design limits and then complain.

Seen it time and time again with other games and simulators that allow modding or building your own stuff. It's the one constant between them.

And then there's the fps addicts who complain that they can't get more than X fps, will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get 0.1 fps more than they used to.

Yeah, I think it's silly sometimes, my game probably runs about 4-7fps launching a medium-smallish rocket. It's not optimal, but it's hardly gamebreaking. I certainly wouldn't complain if I got 5fps on a 700+ part base.

Edited June 22, 2013 by Kerbface

[N_Molson]

For me, slowdowns begins above 150 parts, and excessing 250 parts make the game quite unplayable.

My computer is rather "old" by todays standards : AMD Athlon 64, Win7, Geforce GT240, 4MB RAM DDR3... Nothing very fancy. I must say I'm already happy to see how well my config handles 3D terrain with parts physics and collision detection. And humble rocket designs can get you anywhere with those number of parts. Sometimes orbital assembly is required, that's all.

[NeoMorph]

I try to keep my launch vehicles under 150 parts. Of course, once in orbit you will have lost some bits and when you dock with a station it is increasing them again so it gets to be a hard decision on making fancy ships and killing your FPS or using plainer ships and making the game playable.

I honestly don't see that the game isn't playable for this stage of development... that is, if you behave yourself and keep the part count under 150. My biggest problem has be crashes and even that doesn't bother me too much (the exception being the one instance that I thought I had killed my graphics card due to artifacts developing before each crash).

I do wonder at the decision to use unity though. For a game that uses so many physics calculations and doesn't support multi-threaded and GPU calculations is a bit of a strange decision. Was it costs that forced them? If so, couldn't the success of the alpha help them to move to a more able engine?

[protoz]

THIS!

Whatever they do, people are going to take it over the design limits and then complain.

A game focused on design w. design limits, you could say maybe it wasn't designed too well?

[1096bimu]

I think the dev. team should give up the unity engine.

Multi-core CPU not a new technology,first personal PC dual core CPU release in 2005.

It is ridiculous that a game engine still not support multi-core process after 8 years.

How can we expect unity support multi-core process in short term?

I know change the game engine are very painful for dev. team,

but it will be more painful when the game code become bigger and bigger.

dev. team should consider to change the engine ASAP

Because apparently it would make more money if you could release the same game on all platforms from supercomputers to TI graphing calculators than if you can release a optimized PC only game.

P.S.

I don't understand how you're all talking about slowdowns and performance without talking about what PC you're using. There is no free lunch and no optimization will make the game run smooth on a Pentium 4

Edited June 22, 2013 by 1096bimu

[Sir Nahme]

A game focused on design w. design limits, you could say maybe it wasn't designed too well?

find me something WITHOUT design limits and you might have a point

[theflyingfish]

I'm rather pleased with the performance of KSP, especially considering all the calculations that your CPU has to do. Think about how many physics calculations that the engine has to crunch every second for a 700 part craft. KSP is simulating physics on every single one of those 700 parts. Have you ever seen a persistence file? That's a lot of data that's being modified dozens of times per second.

[protoz]

find me something WITHOUT design limits and you might have a point

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft

Point delivered. Its one of those games where you can make 32bit computers.

My current rig from 2008 is E8400(core2duo) 3ghz gtx 560ti 8gb ddr2 1066 610w psu

I'll I'll be upgrading on Monday to i5-3570k OC it to 4.5ghz 2x SLI 560ti 8gbddr3 1866 750w ps.

How much will this get me in BF3 for example? I'll go from 40 FPS on Low settings to 60 fps on Ultra. My benchmark scores will increase anywhere between 400-600%.

How much of a performance boost will this get me in KSP? Probably 0%.

[1096bimu]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft

Point delivered. Its one of those games where you can make 32bit computers.

My current rig from 2008 is E8400(core2duo) 3ghz gtx 560ti 8gb ddr2 1066 610w psu

I'll I'll be upgrading on Monday to i5-3570k OC it to 4.5ghz 2x SLI 560ti 8gbddr3 1866 750w ps.

How much will this get me in BF3 for example? I'll go from 40 FPS on Low settings to 60 fps on Ultra. My benchmark scores will increase anywhere between 400-600%.

How much of a performance boost will this get me in KSP? Probably 0%.

build me a car in Minecraft

and oh, BF3 although is massively more parallel than KSP, is not a good comparison because it doesn't have as much rigid body physics.

By upgrading to an I5 you'll get a massive improvement because of the much improved single core performance when compared to the Core 2 architecture.

Edited June 22, 2013 by 1096bimu

[1096bimu]

I'm rather pleased with the performance of KSP, especially considering all the calculations that your CPU has to do. Think about how many physics calculations that the engine has to crunch every second for a 700 part craft. KSP is simulating physics on every single one of those 700 parts. Have you ever seen a persistence file? That's a lot of data that's being modified dozens of times per second.

irrelevant, because we don't have an understanding as to how much computer power our CPUs have. Should I remind you that G stands for Giga and is 10 to the 9th power? So a modern CPU cycles for a few billion times per second. And how much is a billion? well a billion grains of sand would probably count as a beach.

[Stealth2668]

I think the dev. team should give up the unity engine.

Multi-core CPU not a new technology,first personal PC dual core CPU release in 2005.

It is ridiculous that a game engine still not support multi-core process after 8 years.

How can we expect unity support multi-core process in short term?

I know change the game engine are very painful for dev. team,

but it will be more painful when the game code become bigger and bigger.

dev. team should consider to change the engine ASAP

Pretty much. This isn't 1998.