What kind of Hardware do you use to run KSP

[Jart]

Just upgraded last weekend, ...

Link to your animation?

[Padishar]

What I don't understand is the MASSIVE difference in performance between those 2 GPUs; The 5770 can barely draw KSC at 60FPS with nothing more than a command pod sitting on the launchpad, while the 5830 has no issues holding 60FPS anywhere, even with 200+ part monstrosities. The rest of the system doesn't change, and the 5830 should only be about 20% more powerful than the 5770... I've never had other games be so much "happier" with a 5830 over a 5770. Anyone have similar experience?

Does the 5830 have more memory (or a wider internal memory interface)?

I use a 5 year old laptop with a Core Duo T2600 at 2.16GHz, 3Gb of RAM and Nvidia Quadro NVS 110M graphics with only 128Mb of dedicated memory. Even with all the settings highly optimised I still often see framerates below 5. Is it still fun? You bet!

[Jart]

Does the 5830 have more memory (or a wider internal memory interface)?

I use a 5 year old laptop with a Core Duo T2600 at 2.16GHz, 3Gb of RAM and Nvidia Quadro NVS 110M graphics with only 128Mb of dedicated memory. Even with all the settings highly optimised I still often see framerates below 5. Is it still fun? You bet!

5830 has more shaders, almost double the memory bandwidth and Better Texture Fillrate. 5770 has better core/mem speed and pixel fillrate. Overall I am guessing it comes down to clock speed for the most part.

[MaxxQ]

Link to your animation?

Well... since you asked. The first link is to my first anim. That one only took a few days. The second is to the new one that took the two months. Keep in mind that these are actually only my fourth and fifth animations total, but the first that I've ever released publicly.

And just for giggles, here's my Deviant Art page: http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/

[Jart]

Well... since you asked. The first link is to my first anim. That one only took a few days. The second is to the new one that took the two months. Keep in mind that these are actually only my fourth and fifth animations total, but the first that I've ever released publicly.

http://youtu.be/fy8e-3lrKGE

http://youtu.be/uEiGEeq8SiI

And just for giggles, here's my Deviant Art page: http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/

Very very cool, nice surprises.

[John Crichton]

2014 Macbook Pro, 16gb ram, Geforce graphics card, 500gb SSD...runs super smooth on high settings even with 500 part ships

[pslytely psycho]

Well... since you asked. The first link is to my first anim. That one only took a few days. The second is to the new one that took the two months. Keep in mind that these are actually only my fourth and fifth animations total, but the first that I've ever released publicly.

http://youtu.be/fy8e-3lrKGE

http://youtu.be/uEiGEeq8SiI

And just for giggles, here's my Deviant Art page: http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/

Nice, Webers Honor Harrington series was my favorite for years. Read the series from 'On Basilisk Station' through 'War of Honor,' Your animations capture the ships so well.

Is this a project that will one day see light of day? (hope hope)

That would be incredible.

[Polstar]

Cpu : i7 2600k @ 3.4Ghz

Ram :32Gb DDR 3 1600Mhz

Gpu :GTX 690 4Gb DDR5

SSD :crucial 512gb

OS :Win 7 64bit

[Xaiier]

The second is to the new one that took the two months.

What on earth caused that to take two months? Massive detail? Potato computer?

[MaxxQ]

Nice, Webers Honor Harrington series was my favorite for years. Read the series from 'On Basilisk Station' through 'War of Honor,' Your animations capture the ships so well.

Is this a project that will one day see light of day? (hope hope)

That would be incredible.

I don't really want to derail this thread, but seeing as there's no general (non-game) discussion forum here, I guess I can answer this one here. After this, I think we should take it to PMs, just to avoid derailing. This is going to be a bit long, as I want to cover everything at once.

First off, I "work" for BuNine, a group that consults directly with David Weber on visualizing and filling out background in his Honorverse books. A better explanation of who we are can be found here: http://bunine.org/ It's mostly unpaid volunteer work, but we *do* have a board of directors, and some people *do* get *some* income - mostly by way of royalties from work provided for the book House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion. Everything I have done, as well as everything that has been produced by BuNine for David can be considered hard canon, although over time, things may change, superceding previous canon.

My own 3D work is mainly for B9 (heh...) internal use. Line drawings of ships (such as those in the Companion) are all well and good, but 3D modeling helps to fit things better and allows the line art to be more accurate - some of the line art in the book was changed based on my 3D models, mostly weapons port locations. That said, there's no objections (now - I'm under an NDA for some things, but my ship work is okay to post publicly) to my posting stuff I've done, and that's about as much of a project that will see the light of day as my stuff is likely to get. That's not saying that *someday* down the line, there may be something going on, but if there is, I've not been told. There *are* two more companions coming out. The next one should be sometime late this year or early 2015. That one will be titled House of Lies, and where HoS concentrated on the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Protectorate of Grayson, this next one will deal with the People's Republic of Haven and I believe the Andermani Empire (and maybe Silesia, but I'm not sure about that). I don't recall the name of the third companion, but both subsequent volumes will also contain pages of color plates and line art. None of my work is directly inside the books (they wanted to keep a consistent look for the art, so Thomas Marrone (credited in all my videos and renders) did all the line art and color plate art - incidentally, Thomas is also the person who got me interested in KSP), but it *was* used for reference for some of the art, so therefore, I get a short bio and author credit in the book.

Since you don't seem to have kept up with the series, you should know that there's an additional 10+ books after War of Honor. Some are mainline books, others are side-novels/trilogy written by David, others are side-novels/trilogy co-written by Weber and Eric Flint, and there's a Young Adult trilogy co-written by David and Jane Lindskold, not to mention, the series is up to six anthologies of short stories and novellas based in the Honorverse written by David and other authors, including the aforementioned Eric and Jane, as well as John Ringo, Joelle Presby (another BuNine memeber, as well as her husband - both active-duty Navy), Charles Gannon (who currently has a book nominated for a Hugo, I think), and others.

Also, yesterday (5 March), the comic Tales of Honor: On Basilisk Station issue #1 went on sale. This is a comic published by Top Cow, probably best known for their Witchblade comics (which was also made into a live-action TV series, and adapted for a Japanese anime).

The comic is part of a multimedia blitz being conducted by Evergreen Studios (Walking With Dinosaurs). There should also be an Android and Ios Honorverse game coming out sometime this year. Evergreen is doing this because they are already doing concept art for an Honor Harrington live-action movie set to come out sometime in 2017. The CEO of Evergreen was already a huge fan of the Honorverse, and the fact that they're based in Alaska means (hopefully) we won't see a lot of the typical Hollyweird BS. I believe most of the sets will be CGI, similar to Sky Captain but not quite to that extent. WWD was critically praised for the CGI work, but slammed for the writing and dialogue, which, to be fair, was forced on them by Fox - there wasn't supposed to be *any* dialogue in the movie.

I mentioned all that in conjunction with talking about my stuff because David and BuNine consider what *we* do as "book canon" and what we will be seeing for the comics and movie as "other canon". Book canon will be as accurate to the books as we can make it, whereas what's seen in the comics and movie should be considered canon only for themselves, since adapting to a different medium (writing vs, a visual medium) pretty much requires changes to attract fans and non-fans alike. Basically, you should consider the books and the work B9 does as definitive, and everything else is only an adaptation and may not look at all like what we've done.

http://tales-of-honor.com/honor-harrington

Anyway, that's pretty much everything in a nutshell. Any other questions or comments I'll take in PMs.

[MaxxQ]

What on earth caused that to take two months? Massive detail? Potato computer?

1920x1080, plus almost 7 million polys, plus lots of glass and reflections, plus 698 individual lights total, plus an output framerate of 30fps for the master render (6000 frames total, the last 3500 or so taking upwards of 45 minutes to render... per frame), plus a quad-core @3.6Ghz/core and an AMD 7970 that didn't help rendering at all because Blender doesn't have any instructions to work directly with AMD... yet. OTOH, Blender uses the CUDA setup on Nvidia cards, so as much as I like ATI/AMD, I made the switch.

Edit: It *could* have been three days shorter, but there were three Windows Updates that required a restart. Fortunately, just a few days before I started my render, I had discovered online a way to render an animation that allowed it to be interrupted, and you could restart the render from where you left off.

Edited March 6, 2014 by MaxxQ

[Xaiier]

1920x1080, plus almost 7 million polys, plus lots of glass and reflections, plus 698 individual lights total, plus an output framerate of 30fps for the master render (6000 frames total, the last 3500 or so taking upwards of 45 minutes to render... per frame), plus a quad-core @3.6Ghz/core and an AMD 7970 that didn't help rendering at all because Blender doesn't have any instructions to work directly with AMD... yet. OTOH, Blender uses the CUDA setup on Nvidia cards, so as much as I like ATI/AMD, I made the switch.

Hmm, I work at a computer animation studio (I'm there right now actually haha don't tell) and that seems like a massive amount of detail for something only being rendered at HD. The main issue is probably the lights, holy crap. I can't see where that many was necessary, I would think you could have baked textures or faked the lighting in other ways, especially considering that your render machine was so weak. The final results do look nice though.

[MaxxQ]

Hmm, I work at a computer animation studio (I'm there right now actually haha don't tell) and that seems like a massive amount of detail for something only being rendered at HD. The main issue is probably the lights, holy crap. I can't see where that many was necessary, I would think you could have baked textures or faked the lighting in other ways, especially considering that your render machine was so weak. The final results do look nice though.

There are *no* textures in that at all. The ship name and registry are just decals. I don't do textures. I don't know *how* to do textures. I can't UV map. I don't know how to use Paint Shop for much more than adding text to a pic, resizing, and cropping. I'm pretty much self-taught with Blender, so even though I've been using it off and on for almost ten years, I still don't know a lot about it. Online tutorials don't help much, because no matter how basic they are, I still can't seem to follow them. There are a few exceptions, though. I have a slight learning disorder that makes it dificult for me to learn something unless I have someone right here next to me to show me what something does or how it works.

Most of the lights are individual area lights in each light panel inside the boarding tubes - 16 tubes, 24 light panels per tube = 384 lights. Raytrace transparency for running lights. Individual area lights for each lighting panel inside the boat bays, lighting inside the cutters (can be seen in the back of the aft boat bay), and so on. There's also a lot of interior detail that just isn't visible, or finished (which is why I haven't lit the boat bay galleries yet). As for rendering "only" at HD, I render at my monitor resolution. Sure, I could bump it up much higher, but what's the point?

As I mentioned above, this stuff isn't meant to be anything professional. I'm not looking for work with this as a portfolio - I know my abilities well enough to know that no one in their right mind would hire me. This is strictly a hobby, with some occasional pay coming in.

Thanks for the compliment. I'm glad you like the final result. I *do* appreciate it, especially since you know a lot about this stuff, and I'm just an amateur.

Edit: Hmmmpphhhh! I need to read better. I just realized that this place *does* have a completely off-topic (non-KSP) forum. Sheesh!

If any mod feels the need, I have no objections to moving some of these posts there and out of this thread.

Edited March 6, 2014 by MaxxQ

[pslytely psycho]

Cpu : i7 2600k @ 3.4Ghz

Ram :32Gb DDR 3 1600Mhz

Gpu :GTX 690 4Gb DDR5

SSD :crucial 512gb

OS :Win 7 64bit

My god....your video card alone is worth more than the computer I'm building next week!

That thing must be a monster!

Wow.

[pslytely psycho]

Thank you MaxxQ, your right, I fell behind in the series when I started driving truck. As a trainer it ran 24 hrs a day with two drivers switching off. Not conductive to reading.

Now that I'm laid up with a back injury, I think it's time to re-visit my favorite places in fiction.

Thank you again for that most interesting reply.

[MaxxQ]

Thank you MaxxQ, your right, I fell behind in the series when I started driving truck. As a trainer it ran 24 hrs a day with two drivers switching off. Not conductive to reading.

Now that I'm laid up with a back injury, I think it's time to re-visit my favorite places in fiction.

Thank you again for that most interesting reply.

No problem. I understand the reading-while-driving problem. I have a friend who also drives trucks, so he has limited time for reading as well. That said, I believe most, if not all, the books are available in audiobook format, and they're unabridged, so you get the entire thing (which will amount to a lot when you get to At All Costs or Shadow of Saganami. Each of those is almost 1000 pages in paperback.

[Xaiier]

Texturing is definitely something you should work on, even the most basic texturing methods can vastly improve the final result for fairly low overhead. Also, in order to reduce poly count, normal mapping can be extremely useful in smoothing out low-poly models, as well as allowing you to fake small details (I presume all the little hatches and bolts on the ships are modeled) and have them act appropriately with lights. As for lights, there are various techniques that can be used to fake lighting effects, you don't need to ray trace every single pinpoint of light in the scene.

Rendering at HD is perfectly fine, its just that here we commonly render at higher res to allow cropping and zooming and such, or to provide higher quality source for editing in other software later.

I'm far from a professional myself, but I can say that its well worth looking into the more advanced methods, as daunting as they may seem. Even small things can greatly improve the results and cut the render time way down, and then you can focus more on other things and make more complex animations.

[MaxxQ]

Texturing is definitely something you should work on, even the most basic texturing methods can vastly improve the final result for fairly low overhead. Also, in order to reduce poly count, normal mapping can be extremely useful in smoothing out low-poly models, as well as allowing you to fake small details (I presume all the little hatches and bolts on the ships are modeled) and have them act appropriately with lights. As for lights, there are various techniques that can be used to fake lighting effects, you don't need to ray trace every single pinpoint of light in the scene.

Rendering at HD is perfectly fine, its just that here we commonly render at higher res to allow cropping and zooming and such, or to provide higher quality source for editing in other software later.

I'm far from a professional myself, but I can say that its well worth looking into the more advanced methods, as daunting as they may seem. Even small things can greatly improve the results and cut the render time way down, and then you can focus more on other things and make more complex animations.

I know I should learn texturing, but I actually *like* making the details out of geometry, and only using materials for color. The thing is, Honorverse warships are pretty much the exact opposite of what most people expect from sci-fi ships nowadays - there's very limited greebling, because it's stupid to put stuff on the surface of a warship - what you see in my images and videos is what absolutely *has* to be surface mounted. So, overall, the ships are plain and I can get away with just modeling the detail. There's no paneling to speak of since canon has the ship's hull/armor "grown" in place using nanotech, which means it's all a single piece Basically, the frame and internal equipment is built, then the hull is applied over it, which makes things difficult for major repair/removal/replacement of components too large to fit through cargo doors (this is actually touched on in one of the books when a reactor is found to be faulty during acceptance trials). Also, there's no real deadline for any of this. I work at my own pace, and it's good enough for other peeps in BuNine to work from, or to post online when someone has a question. As for the lighting, aside from raytracing the transparent stuff, and shadows from the sun, nothing else is casting shadows. I tried that once and it was a mess. Even my fills (only two) don't cast shadows.

I tried once to do some texturing and failed miserably at it, so I pretty much decided to not try anymore. If worse comes to worst, I could suggest getting BuNine a texture artist, but TBH, it's not necessary. These renders and animations aren't needed for much else other than reference, and I'm not *required* to add as much detail as I have. I do it because I enjoy it. Polycount will be reduced once I freeze the mesh. Because these are still WIPs (and have been for almost three years, with many changes and rebuilds), the mesh is still unfrozen, and I set the smoothing to two iterations. Without smoothing on, the count is roughly 1.2 million or so (that's counting the pinnace, the two cutters, and the Fearless combined), depending on whether I have unseen stuff activated in layers or not. If I had decided to animate the weapons hatches opening and the energy weapons running out (think Age of Sail ships running out their cannon - missile tubes stay put), the polycount would have probably hit over 10 million.

The two months was a nice break from working on the stuff anyway. I'd been going pretty much for the six months prior at almost nothing *but* modeling and rendering stills, so being able to get away from it for a bit was nice. It's not like I couldn't play games or do other stuff while it was rendering. I didn't try Skyrim, because I *knew* that would play havoc with my render times, but I reinstalled MechWarrior 4 and its expansions, Homeworld, and a few other, older games that wouldn't hog a high overhead.

[kola2DONO]

A crapbook air with 4gb of ram.

[Madrias]

I've found the biggest disadvantage with what I did when I built my rig is no one tends to believe it. I did what I did to avoid the everlasting cycle of CPU upgrades for a long time. Yeah, my GPUs are a little old and tired at this point, but I bet I can get another 5 years out of my rig's CPUs before something hits the market that can surpass this beast in multithreaded tasks. I understand as well that KSP can't utilize what it brings to the table, but it wasn't built for KSP.

2x Intel Xeon E5645 6-core CPUs. Stock speed of 2.4 GHz, but due to the board, I'm running 3.7 GHz.

EVGA SR-2 mainboard. Yeah, it's huge. Yep, it was expensive. Yes, it was worth it.

12 GB Corsair Dominator DDR3. I played with the latency a bit and got it screaming.

2x EVGA GTX 580 SC in SLI. Sadly the 1.5 GB VRAM versions. My screen resolution in some games tends to slap the memory cap on 'em hard.

1x EVGA GTS 250 to drive my Auxillary monitor.

1x BFG GTX 275 OC as a PhysX card. I know, why not use the 250 or the 580's. The 250 isn't as fast as the 275, and the 580's are already working hard.

Primary screen resolution: 5040x1050 spanning 3 displays. Why 1050 and not 1080? Because they're what I had laying around.

Secondary screen resolution: 1680x1050.

Screen positioning: 3 monitors across the top, one sitting low. T configuration, for those in the know.

And, because someone will inevitably cry out that I'm making crap up: http://i.imgur.com/edouvJk.jpg

[Bobnova]

I know a few people with setups like that. They're very nice, if you use multithreaded programs that work well in SLI.

If you could still buy it, this and SB-E CPUs would outperform it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188119

Your setup will be good for a number of years, but it's already outperformed. That's the wrong way to look at it IMO.

[Red Iron Crown]

Running an i7 4770k @ 5GHz

64GB DDR3

SLI GTX 680s

LOL at the impossible configuration.

I play on a Core 2 Duo 2GHz, 4GB RAM, nVidia NVS135 GPU. Runs ok at 1440x900 with the graphical settings turned down, as long as I don't go crazy with the part count.

[Jouni]

I've found the biggest disadvantage with what I did when I built my rig is no one tends to believe it. I did what I did to avoid the everlasting cycle of CPU upgrades for a long time. Yeah, my GPUs are a little old and tired at this point, but I bet I can get another 5 years out of my rig's CPUs before something hits the market that can surpass this beast in multithreaded tasks.

If we skip the cheap consumer PCs, there are already much more powerful things in the market. In late 2011, when we were looking for a server for memory-intensive tasks, we figured out that 4x8 cores (+hyperthreading) and 1 TB of memory was the best you could build from off-the-shelf components for a reasonable price. Now you could probably get twice the number of cores and 2 TB or 4 TB of memory for the same price.

[maarten2208]

i5-2410M (2.9 GHz)

4GB DDR3

geforce gt540

I'm on a laptop and it is really fast since I did the driver update

[Madrias]

I know a few people with setups like that. They're very nice, if you use multithreaded programs that work well in SLI.

If you could still buy it, this and SB-E CPUs would outperform it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188119

Your setup will be good for a number of years, but it's already outperformed. That's the wrong way to look at it IMO.

If we skip the cheap consumer PCs, there are already much more powerful things in the market. In late 2011, when we were looking for a server for memory-intensive tasks, we figured out that 4x8 cores (+hyperthreading) and 1 TB of memory was the best you could build from off-the-shelf components for a reasonable price. Now you could probably get twice the number of cores and 2 TB or 4 TB of memory for the same price.

The way I meant it was in the same way I rode out a Core 2 Quad well into the i7 age. By 'outperforming' I mean that point where hardware requirements for stuff starts pushing what I'm running out. I try to skip several generations at a time when doing upgrades. Heck, my CPU history shows it. Pentium III Coppermine @ 900mhz, Pentium 4 HT Prescott @ 3.0 Ghz, Core 2 Quad Q9550 @ 2.83 Stock (OC'd to 3.4), and then Dual Xeons @ 3.7 OC. Each time I upgraded was simply because my older hardware could no longer perform the tasks at hand. I figured with this system I could get 5 years easily, maybe more, before the hardware no longer has the strength to run consumer grade programs.

As for what I used to use it for, a combination of playing video games and Folding @ Home, an attempt to use distributed computing to cure diseases. Backed off and stopped because I was sick of the heat wash the workstation threw in my face during summers. Even H80's can't throw all that heat out, and I'm not up to doing a proper custom watercooling loop just yet.

For now, I'm content with this machine, and the only thing I'm upset with is the aging GPU's.