I would like to ask you to configure your computer for advanced players.

[jyy2013good]

Usually see you produce such a beautiful space station, so many staggering number of parts, how your computer is what part of?

[angeldust]

I have an Intel Core i5 2500K with an Raedon R9 270X, which is kind of an overkill for KSP. But I have all the details and Stuff maxed!

What you can try is

a) turn off the antialising, which is a very resource hungry thing to do. (graphics tab)

turn down /off the terrain scatter density and detail. It makes all the trees and rocks on planets, but is also very bad for slow computers.

c) if you are playing a while, then you should turn down the debrise. It eliminats debrises of earlier crafts, which may be sad, but also relieves your PC a lot! (in the general tab in settings)

d)The render quality is also an option to increase frame rates. And of course the shadow cascades.

You can try by switching all these things off, look how it works with a huge ass rocket and then turn up a step or two and see how that works.

Of course, the resolution is also a thing to do, but in my experience has a minor effect on framerates

[John FX]

No Debris helps

I have I7 4770K@4Ghz 32GB 1600Mhz RAM GTX 670 4GB which is way too much for KSP but just right for video editing, which is what the machine was built to do. Even then I still get low frame rates with a lot of parts (300+)

I would suggest the minimum specifications to get good KSP performance at the moment would be to go for a fast 2 core PC with 8GB RAM and an SSD and the best graphics card you can afford.

[celem]

I find performance varies between my machines mainly based on their RAM rather than chipset speed/config.

My main gaming rig is AMD Quad Phenom (4x820). 6GB DDR2 RAM. GeForce GT220 1024MB. This runs crisply up until 500ish parts.

However the game is 'playable' on my aged monolithic cored laptop with 2G RAM. I would say that 2G is kinda low, but as long as I do not let the camera look at kerbin itself (look at the sky) during launches then the fps is acceptable.

On the weaker machine I made a point of killing off a lot of the graphics settings and I keep a clean house with regards to debris/part counts. If you know your rig struggles then help it out.

[Tank Buddy]

Ha! We pretty much have the same build. I have a 4770k too, but why is your clock speed only at 4? It should be at 4.5 default. I have a GTX 660 Ti 3GB and my game is on a Samsung SSD. I don't think you should go all out on a graphics card because KSP in more CPU intensive. Speaking of CPU, it's about time to overclock for me.

[John FX]

Ha! We pretty much have the same build. I have a 4770k too, but why is your clock speed only at 4? It should be at 4.5 default. I have a GTX 660 Ti 3GB and my game is on a Samsung SSD. I don't think you should go all out on a graphics card because KSP in more CPU intensive. Speaking of CPU, it's about time to overclock for me.

It`s very quiet. Not overclocked at all. If we are doing a very heavy project I may overclock it a bit which it can easily do as it is watercooled but I put it back to factory speeds for day to day.

[Kegereneku]

My computer is old enough to run on steam.

Joke aside, I do play it on XP, with a Dual Core 2.2Ghz processor (overclock 10%) and a Geforce 7800 GTX, added more RAM few month ago, more than XP can manage in fact.

I'm planning to change PC someday, before the technological singularity I hope.

[Jagun]

i5 3570K overclocked to 4.4 GHz, 16 gigs of ram, GTX 670 with a GTX 650 for a PhysX card (so in total 4 gigs of VRam since for whatever reason the 650's seems to be used alongside the 670's) and an h100i dual fan water cooler.

[Mmmmyum]

An SSD isn't needed unless you mind the loading times. My Intel i7 3632QM does pretty well, although it does make my laptop a bit hot.

4 GB of DDR3 and a powerful CPU should do the trick.

Full specs of my laptop: 8GB DDR3 @1600MHz, i7 3632QM @2.2GHz, Intel HD4000, and a generic HDD that came with the laptop (not gonna look up the details)

[DrMonte]

I don't think that graphics card is an issue for KSP. Physics is modeled in single core of CPU and there is no way to speed it up only by adding more Hz. All up to date CPUs runs 2-4GHZ that's way all players have issues with similar number of parts unless RAM plays it's role.

[Omniverse]

)))Hardware side:

Ram:

unity is a 32 bit program(so far), so KSP is only able to use about 3.5 gb of ram when running. Mods can cause you to approach this limit and crash the game.

Ideally, you want over 6 gb or ram on your system, so you can always have at least 3.5 free for the game. higher quality/speed ram doesn't hurt either.

CPU:

unfortunately, KSP only uses one cpu core, if you have a multicore system then KSP will only run at the speed of one of those cores. Notably, newer intel cores (i3,i5,i7) seem to do pretty well, but AMD core work great as well, just watch out for the turbo-something feature in phenom cores which interferes with KSP somehow.

Graphics:

Nvidia and AMD... take your pick... either is fine. if you have an amd board you might benefit from crossfire slightly, likewise for Nvidia's Sli.

)))Software/In game side:

there are several optimizations you can enable, for the best performance set the shaders and shadows stuff to 0 and reduce the texture quality.

-reducing the texture quality will significantly improve the fps in all situations (also, for unknown reasons it decreases the initial load time)

-set debris to 0

-other small setting changes

)))mod-based performance enhancements:

-"Active-Memory-Reduction-Mod (TextureCompressor)" this mod compresses textures in the ram after they are loaded, making the game less unstable when a lot of mods are installed, granted you can load the game.

-texture reduction packs for B9, KW, and Nova Punch parts these will make the textures in the respective packs slightly less detailed and save you A TON of ram space, highly reccomended

Edited December 7, 2013 by Omniverse

[tobjv]

)))Hardware side:

Ram:

unity is a 32 bit program(so far), so KSP is only able to use about 3.5 gb of ram when running. Mods can cause you to approach this limit and crash the game.

Ideally, you want over 6 gb or ram on your system, so you can always have at least 3.5 free for the game. higher quality/speed ram doesn't hurt either.

CPU:

unfortunately, KSP only uses one cpu core, if you have a multicore system then KSP will only run at the speed of one of those cores. Notably, newer intel cores (i3,i5,i7) seem to do pretty well, but AMD core work great as well, just watch out for the turbo-something feature in phenom cores which interferes with KSP somehow.

Graphics:

Nvidia and AMD... take your pick... either is fine. if you have an amd board you might benefit from crossfire slightly, likewise for Nvidia's Sli.

)))Software/In game side:

there are several optimizations you can enable, for the best performance set the shaders and shadows stuff to 0 and reduce the texture quality.

-reducing the texture quality will significantly improve the fps in all situations (also, for unknown reasons it decreases the initial load time)

-set debris to 0

-other small setting changes

)))mod-based performance enhancements:

-"Active-Memory-Reduction-Mod (TextureCompressor)" this mod compresses textures in the ram after they are loaded, making the game less unstable when a lot of mods are installed, granted you can load the game.

-texture reduction packs for B9, KW, and Nova Punch parts these will make the textures in the respective packs slightly less detailed and save you A TON of ram space, highly reccomended

This times 1000. Also there was a discussion on Reddit a while back about the differences between AMD and Intel CPU's it came down to AMD's performing better on multicore applications and Intel being stronger on things that ran on a single core. (Other things too but the major differences was that.)

[Soda Popinski]

Maybe look into Ubio Welding to merge parts together. Haven't tried it myself, but may have to.

[Mr Tegu]

I'm not too good with computers, but when I run ksp I've noticed one of my cpu cores goes bat**** crazy (I'm running a haswell i5 4670 @3.4GHz) whilst the other 3 and and the gpu (an old Nvidia 8800GT) are doing almost nothing.

Any ideas why this is the case? I mean roughly 90% of my computer's processing power is wasted, seems pretty stupid to me.

Edited December 9, 2013 by Mr Tegu

[keoki]

Only problem with merging parts is you loose many characteristics, such as heat dissipation, and ability to mount tanks correctly on parts like the TT-70. Welding mostly works on stock parts, and doesn't work on most parts from third parties. It is great for many things however.

[keoki]

I'm not too good with computers, but when I run ksp I've noticed one of my cpu cores goes bat**** crazy (I'm running a haswell i5 4670 @3.4GHz) whilst the other 3 and and the gpu (an old Nvidia 8800GT) are doing almost nothing.

Any ideas why this is the case? I mean roughly 90% of my computer's processing power is wasted, seems pretty stupid to me.

The game is single-threaded, so it runs only in one core.

[keoki]

So I turned all of my graphics down to the lowest setting, and I saw zero improvement in loading or play speed (I have a really fast engineering-workstation-class machine running with a raid 10 ssd filesystem, and 32g of fast ram). However what it did improve was memory consumption, I went from always being at 3.5g for KSP to about 2g. So that means the game has stopped crashing all the time.

It would be nice to see a multi-threaded game running in a 64 bit address space. That way we can use all of our cores, and more of our memory.

Edited December 9, 2013 by keoki

[Mr Tegu]

Indeed, I understand that the game is single threaded, what I don't get is why.

I'm not a programmer but whenever I did finite element analysis (FEA) at uni we would use several gpus to do the calculations cause they're really good at crunching numbers fast. It was all setup for me and ready to go so I have no idea how the programming was done but I really don't see why Kerbal can't do the same, when it comes to the spacecraft themselves, it seems to function as a watered down FEA program anyway.

[bptrav]

Indeed, I understand that the game is single threaded, what I don't get is why.

I've been asking that question about a lot of games for the last 5+ years. A large percentage of games still only use 1 or 2 cores, even though tons of people have 4+ cores now (Steam hardware survey shows about half of their users have 4+ cores, and half have 2 cores).

Squad didn't develop the KSP game engine from scratch and my understanding is that the engine they used (Unity) isn't great at utilizing multiple cores. I have another game that runs on that engine (Endless Space), and that game only uses 1 core as well. That being said KSP seems to run pretty well for me so far, but I haven't built anything with a crazy number of parts yet.

[AlexisBV]

Indeed, I understand that the game is single threaded, what I don't get is why.

Multi-threaded programming is significantly more time-consuming to develop (read expensive, unless you pay your programmers nothing but peanuts and you have no deadlines). Though multi-core hardware is pretty much mainstream now, it's not something I think is taught outside of specialized courses.

[keoki]

Yeah, I don't want to dis the Squad team... it will probably take a major from-scratch re-write using a different game engine to fix this. That isn't going to be fun, and may well be impossible without an influx of cash, and sticker-shock when the game price jumps.

On the other hand, I did some reading in the unity forums, and it seems that 64 bit support isn't (much of) a problem, and being multi-threaded is a matter of having some code that you can hand-off to other processors. I'm no multi-threading expert, but it seems the issue is having real-time-like events that need to be aware of each other in real-time-like contexts must generally occur within a single thread. Otherwise things probably get bogged down with inefficient inter-process communications issues that cause the threading to slow things down rather than speeding them up. Basically any task the game can launch a different program to perform, and have that data come back later without synchronicity, can be easily offloaded onto a different core. the problem is there may not be very many of those things, or it may be difficult to design those things into the game without creating gaping holes for new bugs. Especially if allowing third parties to contribute to the design.

But that doesn't mean I can't wish for it.

One improvement might be to learn a lesson from the guys from Ubio Welding. If a welding-like optimization was done as parts were connected together, you might be able to get the software to see fewer parts as the game was manipulating the joined object. Obviously you are no longer doing as much physics between each connected part, so to simulate reality you would have to continually analyze the cross-object stresses, and when certain thresholds were exceeded, the joined object would need to be partially un-joined to display the results of the physical stress. And by the way, this set of tasks could probably be performed as processes off-loaded onto different cores. It might mean that there would be a slight delay when you do something to make your rocket break in half, but it would mean that more complex rockets would fly with better frame-rates.

But this would probably come at a cost, When you built a new craft, it would probably take longer to show up on the launch pad.

Another way to use threading, which wouldn't help any of us, would to put other solar systems on other cores.

But let's see what we get with .23, where I read that we will be seeing a lot of effort to improve efficiency. My fingers and tentacles are crossed for that one holding some big improvements...

[keoki]

So I'm enjoying crash-free gameplay, now that I have cut memory consumption. But I'm noticing a lot of dropped characters in the user interface, protractor, mechjeb, even in the setup screens. It is to the point that if I didn't know what it said beforehand, the screen would be unreadable. I have to restart the game between each tweak, so it would be helpful to know the answer to this... "Which setting did I adjust that is causing these dropped characters?"

[Guest Brody_Peffley]

Well I build my own parts. CPus and gpus all D.I.Y, My one graphics card is only 8 bit. and runs on windows xp and 2 gb of dram on 20 mhz. Can't play kerbal space program for sh**

[Ascension Islander]

...But I'm noticing a lot of dropped characters in the user interface, protractor, mechjeb, even in the setup screens. It is to the point that if I didn't know what it said beforehand, the screen would be unreadable...

I, too, have this problem, mostly with MechJeb, and would like to know why.

[TYRT]

I was using same computer, you can't do something to make this game "better" while you're looking to a 300+ part vessel. Unfortunately. According to my Observations, KSP' game engines only using SINGLE CPU core.

Edited December 10, 2013 by TYRT