KSP Performance Question

[henryrasia]

Just a quick question for anyone that knows:

What computer part (CPU, GPU, RAM, other?) does KSP use the most? And are there limits to the performance (as in and intel i9 99999X 10 core or whatever not help)?

Thanks for any answers!

[jduchock]

IBTL !

not sure, but this game did make me upgrade my old rig...and now I am Occulus Rift ready !!

[hobbsyoyo]

Probably the CPU is the most intensely used component. These days, CPUs like your Intel i7 have multiple cores, which in most circumstances act like multiple CPUs to divvy up the processing work. It's a feature that is called multithreading, but unfortunately KSP doesn't make use of this feature. So what's more important than the number of cores your CPU has (whether it be 2, 4, 6 or 8) is how fast its clock speed is (2.8, 3.0, 3.2gigaherz), etc.

For example, having a high clock speed will allow the game to run better because even though a program with multithreading utilization can use all 8 cores of a 2.6gigaherz octo-core CPU to do calculations really fast, a no-multithreading program like KSP can only use the 8 cores as if they were a single core clocked at 2.6 gigaherz, which is pretty slow these days for calculation intense games such as KSP.

Also, while it's obviously good to have a decent graphics card in KSP, it's not as important as it would be for a game like Crysis because KSP doesn't use graphics cards nearly as much as it utilizes the CPU.

Finally, anything over like 6gb of RAM should be enough memory as the game doesn't use more than 2 or 3gb IIRC

*** This is all an overgeneralization

Edited November 7, 2013 by hobbsyoyo