An Appeal to Fix Water

[WizardlyMouse]

Water is a frame-rate killer for me. I can handle hundreds of parts. I can handle the re-entry effects. These things barely faze my computer. But the water... oh god.

Water destroys my framerate. Launches must be done with the camera facing towards the sky. Plane flying is tedious and painful. Even in orbit around Kerbin, the lag makes docking and other maneuvers frustrating. I've already changed some of the config settings to help with that, but there is still some lag from the oceans, and now they look lower than they actually are, so things end up floating in air, instead of on the surface.

[Killerblonde]

I experience the same problem with terrain in general, particularly Kerbin, the Mun, and Duna (the three places with the fancy terrain additions/craters I believe.) Terrain lag is something that needs to be worked on.

[lajoswinkler]

It's not the water that does the problem. It's the horizon transition.

You can watch the craft from straight up towards the water and the problem is almost gone, but when you try to look towards the horizon, huge framerate loss is evident.

[DMagic]

It's the way that oceans are rendered. They are a separate planet that is combined with the solid ground, causing huge slow downs with weaker GPUs. The only real way to get around this is to keep the ground/horizon out view, alter the settings.cfg file, or stay more than 160km above Kerbin. Obviously it's difficult to always keep the ground out of view (and kind of aggravating), and 160km is pretty high up. The settings.cfg change can usually help, but it's not always enough.

The settings.cfg changes are detailed here, if anyone is interested:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43253-Default-Terrain-Quality-Without-most-of-The-Lag%21

[lajoswinkler]

Then why is the problem almost gone if I look straight down into the ocean? It's obviously not caused by water alone.

[nats]

I dont know about being a frame rate killer but I hate the way the water looks and I hate that line that appears as I get close to it as well. Its one of the parts of the game I hate the most in fact.

[Nostromo]

I have a GTX 560 2gb (which is pretty behind now in GPUs) and I've never had this issue. Are you using integrated graphics (example: HD 4000)?

@nats, I hate that line too.

[jfx]

It's not only water which is broken.

I upgraded from a 460gtx to an radeon 7950 and have considerably worse FPS on/around Kerbin (unrelated to water, performance is worst when looking at the horizon). MSAA brings me down to single digit FPS(!). So my guess is that there is a problem with Unity in general on AMD cards or - more likely - with the way KSP renders planet surfaces.

Pretty sad.

[Dunbaratu]

Then why is the problem almost gone if I look straight down into the ocean? It's obviously not caused by water alone.

It makes perfect sense to me why it would be worse when looking at the horizon.

If you look straight down, how many square miles of ocean are in your view?

Now compare with how many square miles of ocean are in view if you look at the horizon.

There's more ocean polygons on your screen when looking at the horizon.