Less memory usage by using OpenGL

[vexx32]

Your syntax is correct.

For whatever reason, it seems your video card drivers and Unity's implementation of OpenGL aren't playing nicely. OpenGL with Unity is very hit-and-miss when it comes to some video cards -- some work wonderfully, others are absolutely atrocious.

[DartBoris]

@DartBoris im surprised its only starting to slow down at 400 parts. For OpenGL, it's usually lower than that (250-350), but the part difference isn't that much XP

That is about when it slows down for me, 250-350.

But I am also running quite a few mods, including Kerbinside which REALLY slows down the frame rates with large vessels.

More than part count actually docking matters for me. I can make three 50-part ships , dock them to each other and lag to hell. Something is bad with optimization. Or my mods.

Or make 400-part spear , full of solar panels,batteries and science and have green timer.

Also , for some reason , any ship lags at altitute 45 to 30 at kerbin. No idea why (tryed tweaking water render options)

Tryed playing with nvidia options , the most helpfull one for me is setting "pre-rendered frames" to 1, freeing some CPU

Also , AFAIK unity's physics is singlethreaded , making i7 with virtual cores suffer (dont know about new 4xxx and 5xxx series , but on older ones disabling hyperthreading helps)

Stuff like moving ksp to ramdisk or separated core does not help a lot, new unity's multithread physics may help.

[cantab]

If I remember rightly docking connections in general have a greater performance penalty. I know some people have edited their saves to "fuse" them, removing the docking abilities, on ships or stations where there's no intention of undocking.

Conversely the physicsless parts are thought to have less performance penalty, which is why Squad have increased their number.

[djnattyd]

Something strange is going on in regard to the way OpenGL is done with KSP. My GPU supports OpenGL mode as evidenced by the Triple Buffer option in the CCC panel but it doesn't load KSP at all in OpenGL mode. Doesn't matter if it's 100% stock or a nodded game, once the load screen pops up, KSP hangs and has to be Ctrl+Alt+deleted from existence.

[User Unrelated]

My game won't even start with the opengl flag... I just get a white flashing screen and the program quits...

[Fieel]

Does it works on 32 bits?

[burn.prograde]

Hi there, I am using this opengl method and first of all i want to say, thank you so much for the memory savings! My one complaint is that i like to look things up while i play kerbal. Whether i use alt-tab or alt-enter to get to my browser, whenever i go back to kerbal my screen is slightly offset to the bottom and it appears to be in non fullscreen mode. When i try to alt-enter back to kerbal, my game freezes and i have to manually close it. Has anyone else had this problem or knows a fix or better method?

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I've also added -popupwindow to my KSP shortcut, which keeps the window centered when it's in focus.

[Troubletcat]

Woop! Thanks so much for this, don't need to use active texture management on my install with around 30 mods anymore!

Also;

Does it works on 32 bits?

Yes, it does.

[burn.prograde]

I've also added -popupwindow to my KSP shortcut, which keeps the window centered when it's in focus.

Where exactly do you add that prompt?

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I got KSP through Steam, so I open the game's properties menu from my library, click the "set launch options" button, and add it just before %command%, so the whole line is as follows:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Kerbal Space Program\KSP.exe" -force-opengl -popupwindow %command%

[User Unrelated]

So I've done a bit more digging into this...

OpenGL appears to be on version 4.5 right now...

My graphics card, from some loose reviews I found online, appears to only support up to openGL 4.0

I don't know what to do about that, or if it's actually my problem, or what...

But I'm still having pretty bad memory crashes all the time.

EDIT:

I just stumbled across this page

http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2g2onw/launch_option_force_opengl_crashes_my_game_cant/

Where the user claims to have3 solved his problem by adding a second "-" in front of "-force-opengl"

So now it is "target" --force-opengl

Well, I just tried it... and what do you know? It works!

That's weird...

Might want to add that to the OP, I'm sure I'm not the only one that it'll work for.

I'm down to about 1.3Gb of RAM usage on the main menu!

That's spectacular!

I will do some FPS testing and whatnot a bit later.

EDIT EDIT:

Hm... 2 scene changes, and I crashed?

Support thread because I have no idea what's goig on, and it probably has nothing to dow ith the content of this thread

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/101985-Thought-I-was-running-out-of-RAM-but-I-don-t-appear-to-be

Edited December 5, 2014 by User Unrelated

[djnattyd]

OpenGL appears to be on version 4.5 right now...

My graphics card... ....only support up to openGL 4.0

Mine, as per the spec page at AMD, only supports OpenGL 3.3

But then it also says it can do accelerated SSAO... It bloody can't at all. SSAO turns everything into a slide show and not a particularly good one.

Then again, it is only a Radeon H(opelessly) D(efunct) 3450 so what can I expect?

[CatastrophicFailure]

I've been using this for a few weeks, and other than no shadows, it's been working well. Until tonight, it just stopped. I can't get to the main menu. It gets as far as the "loading" graphic in the bottom corner, stays on that for a while, then the screen just starts flickering. Memory usage drops out to around 300k at the same time, if I try to alt+tab I get the not-responding-wait-or-close dialog, also flicking back & forth, hitting "wait" does nothing. It was working just fine last night and I didn't do anything with it except trying to run the regular .exe.

[theend3r]

Yay! Tried it and my constantly crashing 3.5GB RAM KSP went to perfectly stable 1.9GB. No gfx glitches, no crashes.

[rkman]

it affects the SIMULATION speed

Can confirm: a 58 part rocket sitting on the pad makes the clock jitters between green and yellow in DX, same rocket same situation in opengl the clock is solid yellow. Reason for me not to use opengl in spite of saving a GB ram.

[Motokid600]

Is there any way possible to get atleast some anti-aliasing?

[LuvSicGrl]

My graphics card supports version 4.2 does that mean i can't play?

[LuvSicGrl]

Alright, I ran the game in compatibility mode for windows 7, everything worked perfectly

[PPR]

I was trying the new .90 and it was visually glitchy in Opengl, but worked okay without it. Has anyone else had the same experience?

[Airlock]

I was trying the new .90 and it was visually glitchy in Opengl, but worked okay without it. Has anyone else had the same experience?

Try running OpenGL in windowed mode. I'm having problems with it in fullscreen.

[xcorps]

Is there any visual feedback that lets you know you are actually in OpenGL (like text or anything?)

[PPR]

It mainly seems to affect the loading screen visuals, but the <ALT><Enter> fix seems to work.

[Maelstrom Vortex]

I run a 2.0 ghz i5 with 4gb available graphics memory on a nvidia 550ti and augmenting motherboard setup. 16 gb total ddr3 ram.

My experience with openGL was that it dramatically slowed down my game experience on the 64 bit version of the game compared to direct draw, I'd say 1/10th to 1/4 the speed. Probably good for those with system memory constraints, but if your computer has the horsepower the direct render is likely superior.

[GunTuga]

On 0.90 Its very visual glitchy indeed, might go back to 0.25 ...