The computer argument

[Nuke]

there has to be a hard limit for how far back the developer is willing to support hardware. 5 years is an eon in computer terms. aaa titles and games utilizing cutting edge tech might support hardware that is 2-3 years old max. things get different in popular games, and indie titles, where it helps to aim for a broader audience. some games you absolutely had to have the current generation gear to get anywhere. but if you expect a 2014 game to run well on a 2004 rig, you may be asking too much.

im going to play with the 5 year mark just to show that it is not totally unreasonable. 5 years ago i was running a core2quad with 8gb ram and a geforce gtx 260 (which btw still runs ksp quite well). the cost of such a rig today is almost negligible. now that cpu is no longer being manufactured, the only one i found on newegg was a referb c2d for $50. there is also an ivy bridge dual core celeron there for about the same and probibly better performance cause its a more recent generation. then the cheapest mobo for that chip is about $37. you can probibly buy/build a rig capable of meeting the system requirements of the game by a wide margin for around $200. that is not a very high bar for entry. some people have phones that cost more than that.

just because you have a dumpster box, or a 4th hand nostalgia rig from the early '00s laying around does not mean that squad is obliged to support that hardware. im not saying you should throw those away, im just saying that if you run ksp on them, you are not going to have a good experience.

[KerbMav]

To be honest, in one of my day dreams I saw NASA sending some programmers out to speed up development of a "better" Unity version for KSP to become 64bit on multi-cores ...

[rtxoff]

I really do not know what this is all about??? The game is at alpha stage. They never said they won't optimize things at some point in development.

Unfortunately there is much work to do for them, complaining about the game performance right now is not very polite nor will it speed up things.

[Vindelle_Sunveam]

I really do not know what this is all about??? The game is at alpha stage. They never said they won't optimize things at some point in development.

Unfortunately there is much work to do for them, complaining about the game performance right now is not very polite nor will it speed up things.

Oh no, do not worry, this isn't meant to be a complaint thread, I just want to see if people can reach a consensus on what could be a minimum configuration for KSP, so we do not have to suffer the elitist players who do not want to receive criticism based on the fact that if other people want to complin about the game, they should better buy themselves a better computer before giving their advice on performance related issues.

It is good to have the feedback of everybody, including both low and High end computer owners and that is why I think we should set a hard limit not to cross when dismissing someone's argument based on his aviaible processing power (or other specs I do not understand).

I personnally think that KSP should be able to run on 2008 mid range laptops, but since I have not enough knowledge, I do not take my advice seriously. And that is why I sat this discussion up.

[rtxoff]

I have some high end computer but right now it does'nt matter because the game can't exploit it's full potential in the current state of development. I don't think it's up to the player to reach a consensus on what could be a minimum configuration. That will alone depend how much resources the finished/polished/optimized game will use.

[Elthy]

I think KSPs scalling with CPU Power is better than in most other games. While most games just require a minimum to run without lags and noone benefits from more CPU Power KSP scales better since a better CPU means more Parts on a single craft. Im glad that due to my i5 3570k @4,2Ghz i dont have to worry that much about part count, but with a slower CPU i would be fine with less parts...

[Raven.]

KSP, as far as a PC game is concerned, is fairly light weight; I am able to play KSP on my Lenovo ultrabook (low end i5, 4 Gb of RAM, and integrated Intel graphics), so I would say that KSP is a winner in the performance category. KSP will perform on the vast majority of "modern" computers without an issue. Adding a graphics card and additional RAM will yield additional performance increases, even if it's a cheap low end graphics card.

On the other hand, I get amazingly irritated when someone expects KSP to run on an old pentium with integrated graphics and 512 MB of RAM and then calls everyone elitist (or other names) when they're told they need to upgrade. I have been called an idiot before because I told this one person that KSP would not run on a ten year old IBM laptop running a Pentium M (I'll be honest, I also provoked it by telling him he needed to take the poor computer behind the barn and shoot it). When I say that KSP will run on most any "modern" computer, I'm talking about computers made within the last three years. Yes, I am aware that some people are not able to replace their five year computer, but this is where I live up to my "elitist" reputation and say that if you want to run the newer PC games, such as KSP, then you need to upgrade to a more modern computer. It doesn't need to be a high end computer, but it needs to be a computer that is capable of running KSP. Me personally, I would say that the minimum to KSP is a Intel i3 (at least 2nd Gen, 1.8 GHz or higher), 4 GB of RAM, and an Intel HD 4000 or better for graphics.

[Nuke]

core 2 duo/quad rigs seem to have reasonable performance in game though, provided you dont run integrated graphics. newish pentium and celeron cpus based on newer architectures (at least sandy) should be fine too. thats based on me running the game on those kinds of machines. but i think support should be limited to cpus currently being manufactured or their performance-wise legacy equivalents. today's low end might be equivalent to a moderate rig from 2 years ago or a performance machine from 4 years ago. im sure a current generation low end machine would run the game pretty well with a low end graphics card.

this game is kind of the oddball in that its physics takes precedence over its graphics. almost every other game the video card is the bottleneck. its important to realize what ksp is asking your cpu to do, all those n^2 algorithms that physics require take their toll. this gets worse with more objects you have to simulate. most games impose limits that prevent you from giving the physics engine too much work, but in this game you can go nuts and give physics a rocket that is just too big for it to handle, so to speak.

[NERVAfan]

For all that, I think it's important to keep KSP's requirements as modest as possible, especially in GPU. The most popular type of PC sold these days is a laptop with integrated graphics, if you exclude those people from playing it would eliminate a substantial potential customer base. This is more important for KSP than most other games, as it can appeal to people outside the traditional "hardcore" gamer market who are less likely to already have a powerful gaming PC.

I totally agree (as someone who plays KSP on a lower-end Walmart laptop).

In fact, this is the only game I play that's newer than 2008 (and in fact most of my favorite games are much older - Carnivores, Diablo, Diablo II all from the late 90s-2000 era).

EDIT: But I don't build really big ships, either. I try to stay under 100 parts on pretty much everything, and the SLS parts have let me reduce that even further (I may have to change that when I finally get around to big manned missions to Duna, Jool, Eve etc)

Edited May 18, 2014 by NERVAfan

[deltalambdamu]

I understand both sides of this. For the longest time, I played games on a computer not built for games [/storyofmylife]. I never told you guys the story of how a few years ago (3?) I quadroupled my computers video memory by replacing the video card with an 8MB one. I understand that KSP willn't run on a 512 MHz Intel P2 and 256 MB RAM (but I might try it anyways). But I also know that a $1600 rig will be too much. I built our current PC on $600, reusing old parts like the keyboard/mouse, and monitor. And it plays many games very well (minus the video card being my bottleneck). And it's the first time in my life that the computer can play more than three games smoothly, and new ones at that!

On out last computer, the only games I could count on playing smoothly were: Quake 2, Panzer Commander, and Jane's WWII Fighters (all from the Win 95-98 era)(thanks for reminding me to get DOSBox to play Duke Nukem). Heck, even lightweight (read: standalone) games ran choppy.

[Vonar]

My computer is from 2010-2011, I play on a Intel I5-2500 cpu that clocks at 3.3 ghz, and I have 24 gb worth of ram of which 16 is use able because I have the 32 bit version of windows 7. At the end of the day it probably cost me around $800-$1000 to set up and I skimped on a lot of stuff that I either used second hand or bought and installed as a later upgrade when it became obvious that I needed it.

In all honesty though a 2.5 ghz intel core, with 6 gb worth of ram is probably a minimum specification for a game like KSP. Especially with multiplayer coming as a core feature as you know there will be trolls out there who will deliberately attempt to flood local space with garbage and create a 1,000 plus part kessler syndrome in a attempt to destroy your wonderful space station creation that took you 8 to 10 hours of game play to build.

[Hydrazine_Soup]

Ksp's biggest flaw is running on a 32 bit engine, and that issue doesn't have anything to do with the game developer itself since they aren't using their own engine, if you want to have better performance just install any linux distro, unity 64 bit can run on Ubuntu 12.1, and Ksp benefits quite a lot from that

Also remember that Ksp is still in a very early stage of development

I have issues running 1000 parts ships too, my 8320 has a poor sigle threaded performance, even after being clocked at 4.5GHz

Vonar said:

My computer is from 2010-2011, I play on a Intel I5-2500 cpu that clocks at 3.3 ghz, and I have 24 gb worth of ram of which 16 is use able because I have the 32 bit version of windows 7. At the end of the day it probably cost me around $800-$1000 to set up and I skimped on a lot of stuff that I either used second hand or bought and installed as a later upgrade when it became obvious that I needed it.

In all honesty though a 2.5 ghz intel core, with 6 gb worth of ram is probably a minimum specification for a game like KSP. Especially with multiplayer coming as a core feature as you know there will be trolls out there who will deliberately attempt to flood local space with garbage and create a 1,000 plus part kessler syndrome in a attempt to destroy your wonderful space station creation that took you 8 to 10 hours of game play to build.

The 32 bit version of Windows 7 will let you use 3.4 GB of RAM.

Edited March 5, 2020 by Hydrazine_Soup

[Javster]

Hopefully the requirements won't grow as the game goes on because they'll do some optimising.