Questions about mods and game stability.

[Bob Jub]

From what I can observe, the more mods I stack, the fewer frames I can expect to see. And I can forget about using 64bit KSP with most mods as the game will crash- a lot. While 64bit KSP runs more smoothly on my machine, I'm guessing the mods that aren't compatible with 64bit instructions are causing issues. Are these fair observations? My specs are as follows: Win7 64bit, 6core AMD processor @3GHz, 8GB DDR3 ram, and a GTX 470 1280 GDDR5

[NathanKell]

You're guessing wrong. In fact, KSP Win x64 is quite broken, and either (a) doesn't catch stuff (which seems unlikely) or uses some 32bit pointers (and thus crashes to desktop when there's an exception involving them). Check the stickied Mods and KSP 64 thread in Addon Support.

You can verify this quite easily by trying each mod in isolation; they all will work (please, point me to one that doesn't). It's just when there are enough mods that you're using more memory than can be 32bit addressed, and *something* throws (heck, I've had the kerbals in the VAB cause a CTD!) then the whole thing goes kaboom.

Besides, if your guess were true (it's the mod's fault) then (a) they would also crash KSP 64 in Linux (they don't), and they'd have to be compiled for KSP 32bit, rather than, as we are mostly doing, x64.

[Bob Jub]

So this is an issue with KSP Win 64? And may I infer from your statement that Linux 64 would be a more stable platform? Also, could you please address my statement on the- more mods = more lag, I'm understanding that mods will increase RAM usage, and 32bit programs are locked at 4GB ram usage.

[taniwha]

Linux 64 is very stable. I have gotten a couple of crashes in 0.24.2 (one hell kraken, the other a wierd lockup I didn't investigate), but other than PNG related stuff (for which there is a patch: see the linux compat thread), and some PEBKAC* issues, I've experienced no (or every few) Linux 64 issues since 0.19.1.

Do note, however, that this is with Nvidia and nvidia drivers. Last I checked, nouveau was too slow (prior to clocking support), and I hear AMD and KSP do not get along.

* I had a very old 4000000kB process memory limit in effect, so 64-bit did me no good until I found and removed that limit.

[Red Iron Crown]

IME plugin-based mods do have an effect on performance, with the magnitude of the effect being roughly proportional to the complexity of the calculations the mod does. This is very noticeable on my old and slow PC.

Parts mods have virtually no effect on performance aside from initial load times.

[NathanKell]

If a mod does stuff on Update or FixedUpdate or OnGUI (or anything else that runs per-frame) then it, by adding more stuff to do each frame, will slow the framerate.

[cpast]

You're guessing wrong. In fact, KSP Win x64 is quite broken, and either (a) doesn't catch stuff (which seems unlikely) or uses some 32bit pointers (and thus crashes to desktop when there's an exception involving them). Check the stickied Mods and KSP 64 thread in Addon Support.

Couldn't it also be c) there are bugs in the Unity player (which I'm assuming has substantial native code components [such as PhysX], and isn't entirely written in .NET)? I thought that was most of what the crashes were.

[NathanKell]

If that were true, stock KSP Win x64 would be crashier than it is. Since it's, remarkably enough, decently stable, it appears to be an issue only when the stack gets filled, and/or RAM usage is high enough that addresses are outside the 32bit space.

[weeble]

I haven't really noticed any serious frame rate problems and I have most of the mod packs installed and use 32 bit. I usually run between 2.6 to 3 gb even with stupid large rockets/stations/bases. My computer is roughly similar except for the GPU as yours is about 3 or 4 years newer.

Are you playing w/ your settings optimized? Are you using Advanced Texture Manager? If you're still having problems try setting your desktop for performance. Windows 7 and 8 use pretty intensive graphics so that can hog some resources too.