Think that your computer is bad because of KSP performance?

[Spica]

Funny thing is, I have a 5 year old Mac and I can run 150 part ships at 20fps

Same here, except mine is 4 years old, and a laptop, WTF is going on???

Furthermore, my old laptop gets a similar framerate even though it is 7 years old.

Not to complain, which I would never do about this game, but this is VERY odd.

Spica

[magnemoe]

The benefit of consoles is not there raw power, but there consistent hardware.

For computer customers, software has to work across all available combinations of chips, ram, and video cards.

With consoles you can custom fit your software to work extremely well on that one system. Taking advantage of every bit of power it has to offer. Where as you cant do that with a pc, because of drastically different specs per customer. Well you could but it would only work on a few systems.

This is why a game made for the 360 and ported to PC works and looks better on the 360.

Yes you looses performance in porting especially if the porting is bad, this is even more visible if you port from 360 to PS3 or the other way.

Then coding on PC you have to work trough the operation system on an console you can work directly on hardware, note that early console games also program through interfaces as its much easier to code.

Later they start work directly on hardware to squeeze out more performance. As all systems are the same they can squeeze far harder than on PC where the game crashes a lot on weak hardware.

Also the directX used on windows is pretty slow, AMD has released an new interface who should increase performance on the cost of making coding harder.

However this is pretty unimportant as any semi decent pc will run a game far better than an 360 simply as 360 is 8 year old hardware, the raw power of the graphic card eats the difference.

Two exceptions, if the pc version don't have better textures it tend to look worse as you sit close to the screen and see more details, more important the controls are to often badly ported.

Regarding the next gen consoles, as first poster says the graphic chip in them are not impressive, comparable to an medium level graphic card. PS3 and 360 had far more impressive graphic chips then released.

Xbox1 had an pretty much top of the line chip.

This is done for two reasons, first is money, PS3 lost a lot of sales being to expensive. Second is that graphic already today is so good much better graphic hardware like the hyper expensive titan card don't give enough value for money.

The CPU is interesting, low speed but with many cores, it make it harder to program against compared with an i5 with higher speed but fewer cores. However cpu was newer an weak part of 360, PS3 had cpu problems as it only had one main core and 7 small who made it very hard to program against, to easy to overload the main core.

Ram it that gets the strongest update: 512MB to 8gb is an 16x improvement, GPU is 6-8x better.

Now for pc gamers this is as good as it could get: very pc like hardware, plenty of ram, an cpu with lots of cores, the effect is that the games will scale up very well.

[magnemoe]

Good points Rarity. I think the PS4 will change the way games are built from the ground up; heck, there's plenty of games still not 64bit even outside of Unity.

Unity can compile to 64 bit very well, the mac and linux version of KSP is 64 bit. the windows 64 bit version crashes of unknown reason. My guess Squad don't spend time on it as both new build of the game and new versions of unity can have this bug both disappear and come back.

Now for most other games they are 32 bit for two reasons. first they are multi platform current gen consoles only have 512 mb ram, the pc version has little use for 64 bit, still some people running xp or 32 bit vista.

Its kind of funny that the games I have played who uses most ram is KSP and Sims3, none of the games have impressive graphic but both are pc only games.

Yes an heavy moded skyrim runs at 3.2GB but guess it just load and drop data back to the disk cache.

[magnemoe]

This is proof of nothing. Releasing a game on a console is as simple as this.

Code game, optimize it to run on old hardware, release.

Releasing on PC is more like this:

Code game, optimize to run well on lower end systems, optimize to make use of mid-system features and optimize to make use of advanced features, increase game quality above the original console maximum, test on a range of different drivers to ensure that it works consistently, test on multiple operating systems and with overclocking profiles.

Yes GTA V came out on consoles first, but it looks like utter crap. There is no AA to speak of, AF is almost non-existent, LOD is horrible and it's a buggy mess. The PC version is going to be an improved (albeit still buggy) game.

Just because something comes first does not mean it is the better and for what you're possibly trying to say "definitive" version of the game.

Macs are never that good in the hardware department, especially not when Apple insist on using onboard laptop GPUs in them. Edit: Not trying to insult your system, just saying that a lot of mac users complain about performance issues with laptop gpus.

Looking for AA and AF on high end games on current gen consoles is kind of like looking for the Air conditioning buttons on an T-ford. With any level of AA or AF they would not be able to reach 20 fps.

Recommended install of GTAV on 360 is to not install disc two. This enables the system to read from both disc and dvd at once, yes the dvd is slow as dirt but if you read both places at once you gain 1MB/s, you desperately need that 1MB/s.

Think Eve accent in KSP terms, no you don't need solar panels on the final stage, this saves 5 kg who is critical.

With an decent pc it would be more like orbital construction on Mun, yes I think each kerbal would like an private hitchhiker module and lets us add kethane mining to this lander for future use.

[Stealth2668]

How did this thread even get on the the subject of consoles?

Because the title is "Think that your computer is bad because of KSP performance?"

So that's how consoles came into play. See the connection?

Ya, me neither

[DMagic]

I think the PS4 will change the way games are built from the ground up; heck, there's plenty of games still not 64bit even outside of Unity.

Actually, it's fairly hard to find any games with a 64bit executable. The original Far Cry came out with a 64bit exe (for Win XP 64), I think the original Crysis had one too, but none of their sequels do. Half Life 2 used to have one, but I don't think you can get it from Valve anymore. I think there are a handful of others, but none of them really benefit, and I think some even perform worse than their 32bit versions. Almost all of what's been released so far have been more of a technical demonstration than a really useful alternative.

So it's not surprising that the Unity devs don't spend much time worrying about this. I've heard that DICE is going to make all of their new games run on 64bit exe's, so maybe we'll finally start to see some more focus on this area. And yeah, having consoles with more than 4GB of RAM will probably help speed things along (even though games are apparently limited to 4.5-5GB, while the rest is for the OS and other things).

[magnemoe]

Actually, it's fairly hard to find any games with a 64bit executable. The original Far Cry came out with a 64bit exe (for Win XP 64), I think the original Crysis had one too, but none of their sequels do. Half Life 2 used to have one, but I don't think you can get it from Valve anymore. I think there are a handful of others, but none of them really benefit, and I think some even perform worse than their 32bit versions. Almost all of what's been released so far have been more of a technical demonstration than a really useful alternative.

So it's not surprising that the Unity devs don't spend much time worrying about this. I've heard that DICE is going to make all of their new games run on 64bit exe's, so maybe we'll finally start to see some more focus on this area. And yeah, having consoles with more than 4GB of RAM will probably help speed things along (even though games are apparently limited to 4.5-5GB, while the rest is for the OS and other things).

Almost any popular games are made to run on both pc and current gen consoles, as the consoles has 512 MB total memory its kind of hard for the pc version to need more than 4GB even with better textures and graphic settings. Next gen consoles changes this totally, and the 3.5 GB for system is kind of reserved, kind of is that it will be dropped as soon as its any need. MS will not want a AAA game to look worse on one, they rather have the player have to wait 30 seconds to get up chat or disable other feature functions nobody uses, this is an old story, PS2, Xbox1, 360, PS3.

[CHUBBYSUMO]

Actually, it's fairly hard to find any games with a 64bit executable. The original Far Cry came out with a 64bit exe (for Win XP 64), I think the original Crysis had one too, but none of their sequels do. Half Life 2 used to have one, but I don't think you can get it from Valve anymore. I think there are a handful of others, but none of them really benefit, and I think some even perform worse than their 32bit versions. Almost all of what's been released so far have been more of a technical demonstration than a really useful alternative.

Not if you look around. There are plenty of games that even updated their game clients to have a pseudo 64bit exe(like WoW). Some games have the 32bit client selected by default, and you have to go thru some advanced menu options, or even directly into the config files to force the 64bit game launcher/client.

Games that come from other countries(like Korean MMOs) have been using 64bit exes for at least 5 years, and they definitely improve performance by leaps and bounds. The difference is that games from current US devs are not ground up 64bit game code, but are instead 64bit game launchers with the same 32bit textures and everything else ported over that they could. If you look at games like Aion(yea, its a bit older, but a good example), they have had a 64bit game client since the game came out, and its a true, ground up 64bit game client, meaning it does not share hardly anything with the 32bit version, and its performance over the 32bit version is tons better.

The major issue with 32bit exes is that they are fully limited to 2048MB of system RAM, and even if they Large Address Aware flag is flipped, some games are tuned and hard coded to not go over about 2000MB of RAM regardless so that they don't crash. Minus out of that 2000MB the RAM needed to crosstalk textures with the GPU(so, however much your GPU is using, the rest of the game cannot use, since its counted as a single unit in 32bit programs, meaning that if your Vram is at 700MB, the games actual usage of system RAM will be limited to 1300MB), and 32bit exes are a huge reason performance gets hit so bad, and games need a lot of "optimization" so they can run within the tight confines of the borders that have been set for them by windows ages ago. Back when I used to play AION regularly, and even now, when I fired it up, with the 64bit game client running, the RAM went up to 3.5GB of usage from just the game, and load times and texture load lag is nowhere to be found, with 40+FPS everywhere, but on the 32bit client, im limited to about 1.2GB of system RAM(780MB Vram), and the game loading screens take a long ass time. The move to 64bit OSs for consumers happened with vista, and then 7, and game developers are stuck on consoles, which are essentially 32bit. For games to improve anymore than they have already, they need to move to 64bit so they can take advantage of all the additional system resources that 32bit programs are not allowed to access. SSDs are a sidestep for performance increasing when the actual programs themselves are the limiting factor now. If more companies used 64bit programs, they could load more up in RAM(~8000MB/s read/write speeds), and read the HDD/SSD less. SSDs and HDDs become irrelevant in program performance once you can load a majority of the game into the much faster system RAM and not have to read the storage as much.

BTW: this game does not like running with the LAA flag enabled, since it crashes out at 1.8GB system RAM(and 600MB Vram). It also does not SLI with twin GTX 460 1GB cards either. My PC runs BF3, BF4, and everything else I can toss at it awesomely, but this game still runs like crap. I just hope it does not turn out to be another minecraft, where they stop improving performance because they chose a ****ty start for the game code. If they have to jump ship from unity to get better performance, I really hope they do. Think how well Minecraft would do performance wise if they switched to C, or C#?

[pxi]

Now for most other games they are 32 bit for two reasons. first they are multi platform current gen consoles only have 512 mb ram, the pc version has little use for 64 bit, still some people running xp or 32 bit vista.

This is quite wrong. Compiling an executable for a console has nothing to do with compiling it for use under Windows. You are probably not even compiling for the same processor architecture.

In most cases it should be possible to compile the same code to produce either 32-bit and 64-bit executables. At least that has been my experience compiling source under Linux. Generally this isn't done because the 32-bit executable works well enough that no-one complains.

Look at steam's hardware survey. Over 75% of the operating systems in use are 64-bit according to steam. That is plenty of demand right there, considering that increasingly executables are produced for Mac and Linux - operating systems that both have less than a 10% market share.

Edited November 20, 2013 by pxi
Massively underestimated the values quoted for 64-bit OS's (I was just looking at Win7)

[minerman30]

I'm pretty sure that the PS4 has a 1.8 terahertz processor.

Imagine playing dominoes with ten of Mulbin's Munbug XI.

[Sapphire]

1.8 terahertz processor

Processors that are that powerful don't exist yet.

Edited November 21, 2013 by Sapphire

[Tank Buddy]

I recently went full-time PC, and it was well worth the money and time. Hardware is just plain superior. Not much more to say. It's just personal preference.

[RexKramer]

Funny thing is, I have a 5 year old Mac and I can run 150 part ships at 20fps

Me too. I have a basic 2006 MacBook (not pro), runs KSP better than my 1 year old PC. Same resolution, higher frame rate on the 2006 MacBook, still runs better than on the PC.

My 2013 MacBook Pro runs it like greased lightning. I'm only using the max resolution of the MacBook screen, but so far haven't been able to induce lag until my part count goes above 300-400 or so. I don't generally have massive ships anyway, except when several ships are all docked together in orbit.

[Hotblack Desiato]

So as a long time lurker and KSP player, I recently got a friend to the point where he bought KSP aswell. He first tested the demoversion if it runs on his machine, and then he bought it. The point is, he still uses a Pentium IV with 3 GHz and 1 GB ram, with win XP (but I don't know his graphics card, must be one of the last and fasted cards released with AGP-bus. minecraft 1.7 runs at roughly 100 FPS (with reduced settings)).

We will soon add the texture reduction pack, as it runs quite slow and his ram seems to be awfully crowded (and the computer even requested to adjust the size of the swapfile). But he already made it to Mün with Jebediah and a rocket that ha d roughly 50 parts (demo version). Okay, starting up KSP requires patience, he needs to plan ahead since it takes up to 10 minutes.

[Mulbin]

I'm pretty sure that the PS4 has a 1.8 terahertz processor.

Imagine playing dominoes with ten of Mulbin's Munbug XI.

That would be fun... but I'm afraid the PS4 has a 1.6 gigahertz processor... if it had had terahertz it would have taken over the world by now!

Speaking as probably the person who flies Munbug more than anyone here is my setup!... I can fly a thousand part ship with a fairly decent framerate (although in slow motion with the physics slider full to the right)

Buldozer 6 core @ 3.8ghz

8mb DDR 1333

Geforce GTX 260

Not a great setup but better than a laptop! A console wouldn't come close to the processor speed.

Edited November 21, 2013 by Mulbin

[Rarity]

That would be fun... but I'm afraid the PS4 has a 1.6 gigahertz processor... if it had had terahertz it would have taken over the world by now!

Speaking as probably the person who flies Munbug more than anyone here is my setup!... I can fly a thousand part ship with a fairly decent framerate (although in slow motion with the physics slider full to the right)

Buldozer 6 core @ 3.8ghz

8mb DDR 1333

Geforce GTX 260

Not a great setup but better than a laptop! A console wouldn't come close to the processor speed.

Hold on, what's this about a Munbug? Sorry, I haven't been around the forums for a while. Can I have a link? I'd like to see how well it runs on my machine.

[TheIncredibleDalek]

Lol I run Ksp on 1.5 GHz with 512 GB VRAM and I have no issues with up to 250-part beasts... I think that the think that saves me in the end is my 8 gigs of RAM.

[_Aramchek_]

Lol I run Ksp on 1.5 GHz with 512 GB VRAM and I have no issues with up to 250-part beasts... I think that the think that saves me in the end is my 8 gigs of RAM.

Ram quantity has almost zero influence on how the game runs, except in very severe circumstances if you run out. Which wouldn't be likely to happen with even less than 8 gb's of ram.

[boxman]

Ram quantity has almost zero influence on how the game runs, except in very severe circumstances if you run out. Which wouldn't be likely to happen with even less than 8 gb's of ram.

If you have only 4gigs of ram it makes a big difference with larger crafts. Just going from 4 to 6 gigs made the game noticeable smoother even when using the 32bit version.

[_Aramchek_]

If you have only 4gigs of ram it makes a big difference with larger crafts. Just going from 4 to 6 gigs made the game noticeable smoother even when using the 32bit version.

"Smoother" because the game was previously running out of memory is not the same thing as "I can run 250 part ships fine, and it's probably because I have 8gb's of ram.", these are vastly different things.

Ram capacity likely has a negligible, to zero impact on the part count of ships any given computer is able to run.

[Blaster]

Running on a 3.2 GHz Phenom II X2 on an AM3+ board (future upgrade ready), with cores unlocked so I have quad core. I can tell you that going from dual core to quad core on the same CPU has a dramatic effect on performance, mainly because background processes and the graphics driver take a considerable amount of CPU, which if run on a single or even a dual core, doesn't leave enough headroom for KSP to go all out.

[boxman]

Running on a 3.2 GHz Phenom II X2 on an AM3+ board (future upgrade ready), with cores unlocked so I have quad core. I can tell you that going from dual core to quad core on the same CPU has a dramatic effect on performance, mainly because background processes and the graphics driver take a considerable amount of CPU, which if run on a single or even a dual core, doesn't leave enough headroom for KSP to go all out.

And what most people dont realize is that KSP is actually multicore.. It just cant handle doing physics calculations on more than one core.

[boxman]

"Smoother" because the game was previously running out of memory is not the same thing as "I can run 250 part ships fine, and it's probably because I have 8gb's of ram.", these are vastly different things.

Ram capacity likely has a negligible, to zero impact on the part count of ships any given computer is able to run.

I just stated that it will make a noticeable difference if you for example have only 4gigs of memory.

I find it hard to believe as well that he can run 250parts ships fine on such a low end system, but it still has a very noticeable effect if you have no more than 4gigs of ram.

Edit: This was on a core 2 duo 2.5ghz running win7. After adding another 2gigs of ram there was noticeable framerate improvement with same exact ship running stock KSP.

Edited November 22, 2013 by boxman

[Blaster]

I just stated that it will make a noticeable difference if you for example have only 4gigs of memory.

I find it hard to believe as well that he can run 250parts ships fine on such a low end system, but it still has a very noticeable effect if you have no more than 4gigs of ram.

Edit: This was on a core 2 duo 2.5ghz running win7. After adding another 2gigs of ram there was noticeable framerate improvement with same exact ship running stock KSP.

Windows 7 and background services eat up at least 1.1 GB of that 4GB, leaving 3 GB left for memory caching and program use. The program is limited to 2GB due to 32-bit, which leaves just 1GB to caching operations. When the system can't cache files in RAM, it has to dig in the hard drive, which ties up the system I/O scheduler and slows it all down. Going 64-bit and getting to 8GB gives a ton of headroom for everything to play nice.

[MyASASisOnFire]

Running KSP off an SSD with a 5.0ghz CPU, 16gb of RAM, and an overclocked GTX 580.

Game still runs like a pig with hundreds of parts. 32-bit Unity is just not the best engine for something like this.

I have a 660-part 1.25m lifting craft and it takes 30+ seconds to load in the VAB.

Hopefully one day there will be a 64-bit compatible version of KSP...