Video RAM requirements for KSP

[Redchrome]

I've been fiddling with computers for a long time, but never played many 3D games assiduously until KSP. So until now the only thing I cared about with regard to VRAM was whether it supported my desired resolution at 16-bit color depth or better. Haven't had to worry much about that since about 2000.

With all the fancy textures KSP uses for models tho, I find myself needing to run 1/8th-res textures in order to get decent performance. I've got an OSX 10.10.1 box with 12GB RAM but only 256MB VRAM. I just found out that the OSX version is only 32-bit, so that's pushing me to switch over to my Linux box (and 64-bit KSP), which has a faster CPU. I'll want more RAM for it tho, and probably an upgraded video card.

Based on people's experiences, how important is VRAM size? I'm thinking of getting a card with 2GB VRAM. Is 1GB good enough for now, even if you have all the fancy textures turned on? I'm still thinking of getting a 2GB VRAM card, just for the sake of future-proofing (especially with a 4K monitor).

I did some searches for this, but there doesn't seem to have been a really good discussion of VRAM requirements for KSP, and why. All the discussion is about regular RAM requirements.

On a side note, does anyone have a suggestion for a good video card for Linux and KSP? Preferably something not too noisy, so low wattage may be a desideratum.

[MartGonzo]

What to buy depends on what you want to use it for.

If KSP is going to be the only game you play then get something cheap that will run KSP well like a GTX 750 Ti (good budget card), 1GB VRAM will certainly be enough for KSP, not sure about after it switches over to the unity 5 engine though, vram requirements will probably go up as more will be done on the graphics card.

If you want to run other new games then 1GB is really the bottom end and will run most modern games but only just, 2GB is now standard, for future proofing you will need at least 3GB of VRAM.

The main reason VRAM doesn't get discussed around here much is because KSP has a lot lower requirements on that score than most other current games, unity 4 doesn't use much in the way of graphics card features.

[cantab]

On the Linux side I strongly recommend an nVidia card. Their proprietary drivers are reliable and perform just as well as their Windows counterparts. AMD cards by contrast underperform on Linux, whether you use the proprietary or the open source drivers.

I have a 750 Ti and it's easily up to running KSP. Heck, it'll handle most games on decent settings at 1080p, but don't expect to game at ultra HD res on it. It's also very power efficient so all but the most miserly PSUs will handle it. I would say that a 2 GB card is worth getting, many current games will have issues with 1 GB. All 750 Ti's are 2 GB but if you're considering a cheaper 750 or even 740 some of them are only 1 GB, I'd avoid those.

[Redchrome]

Thanks for the feedback.

I used an nVidia proprietary driver about 10 years ago, and wasn't really happy with it. Admittedly I had a pretty funky setup, with two different CRTs running at different resolutions and refresh rates, and the nVidia driver didn't allow me to tweak things quite as hard as the stock drivers did. (I used to write my own video modelines to drive my monitors to the highest possible resolution at the minimum acceptable refresh rates - discovered that I stopped seeing screen flicker at about 81Hz). With LCD monitors these days (effectively fixed resolution, no refresh flicker), I won't be doing the same things to monitors that I used to, and I'm sure the drivers have gotten better over the years.

It used to be that much of the Linux community frowned on the nVidia drivers because they were closed-source and therefore made kernel crashes effectively impossible to debug.

This article discusses the performance of some of the latest Radeon cards with the Linux open-source driver. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeon_12nov&num=1

I'll take it all into consideration. Thanks again!

[electronicfox]

As others have discussed, Vram isnt so important for KSP. I used a 1gb HD5770 (Untill last week when I upgraded to an r9 270x 4GB for work purposes) and never had any problems running the game, or most newer titles.

[Red Iron Crown]

I can attest that stock KSP runs on a video card with as little as 128MB of VRAM if you dial the settings down.

[LameLefty]

I play KSP on an early '11 MacBook Pro. My dedicated GPU has only 256MB of VRAM and I can play just fine with half-res textures and 4X anti-aliasing. Now, to be sure, I don't fly 350-part battleships and build giant bases, but it's perfectly playable, even with fun stuff like TextureReplacer's new reflective visors on EVA. In the past I've played with clouds and stuff from EnvironmentalVisual Enhancements, though I'm not doing that currently.

Yeah, I'm sure it'd look a lot better with a newer system but it works, looks just fine, and I have fun. That's enough for me at the moment.

[Guest]

Build a cheap PC with an i5 and a 750ti - will be enough for KSP + graphical mods.

[Robotengineer]

I thought KSP self-disabled with less than 500Mb of VRAM?

[Groot]

VRAM doesn't seem to be a huge problem for all Unity games.

[Red Iron Crown]

I thought KSP self-disabled with less than 500Mb of VRAM?

Definitely not. It ran on my ancient Dell laptop with 128MB of VRAM. "Ran" is a bit of a stretch though, more like "walked" or "crawled".

[Slugy]

1Gb is plenty for KSP (and all modern games with textures turned down), having said that another vote for the 2Gb GTX750Ti here.

If you wait a week or two the GTX960 will be out - which might shake prices around, and may well be worth buying.

BTW, those Phoronix numbers should be enough to warn you away from AMD on Linux, the modern card performance is dismal.

[Redchrome]

1Gb is plenty for KSP (and all modern games with textures turned down), having said that another vote for the 2Gb GTX750Ti here.

If you wait a week or two the GTX960 will be out - which might shake prices around, and may well be worth buying.

BTW, those Phoronix numbers should be enough to warn you away from AMD on Linux, the modern card performance is dismal.

Thanks Slugy,

I don't know what good performance is, especially not for things like KSP. Some cursory looking over various articles shows that for games which don't work the graphics card so hard (which is KSP from what people are telling me), having a high-end card doesn't make so much of a difference. This is good, because it means I can optimize for things like quiet operation rather than memory size or rendering speed.

I'm still pretty sure I want 2GB of VRAM, for the sake of being able to drive a 4K monitor and have some degree of future-proofing.

For the same reason I'll get an extra 16GB RAM, because it's cheap and I've never regretted buying twice as much RAM as I thought I needed.

I'm still enough of an old Linux geek to mistrust closed-source drivers. I'll have to compare how well the nVidia open-source vs. closed-source drivers work. It's obvious that the closed drivers work better, but how much that matters for KSP remains to be seen.

What do people use for figuring their frame rates in KSP?

- - - Updated - - -

Build a cheap PC with an i5 and a 750ti - will be enough for KSP + graphical mods.

Already got the quad-core i5 (from /proc/cpuinfo: Intel® Core i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz ); just need better graphics and a bigger monitor.

[soulsource]

I'm still enough of an old Linux geek to mistrust closed-source drivers.

I'd advice against buying an nVidia card if you plan on using open source drivers. Thing is, nVidia doesn't contribute much (up to a few weeks ago: not at all) to the open source driver development. For this reason the nVidia open source drivers are still rather buggy compared to the AMD and Intel open source drivers, which are mainly developed by the respective company.

See for instance:

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA GeForce Linux Performance At The End Of 2014

If, but only if you really want to play games using open source GPU drivers, I'd recommend to get an AMD card of the Southern Islands generation (HD7750-HD7970, R9 270, R9 280, R7 240, R7 250). Sadly the open source drivers for the newer Sea Islands series is still buggy, misses some OpenGL features and delivers worse performance than the Southern Islands driver.

The Northern Islands and Southern Islands drivers meanwhile reached a rather decent state, performance-wise:

Radeon Gallium3D Moved Closer To Performance Parity With AMD's Catalyst In 2014

I'm playing KSP on my Radeon R9 270X using the latest open source drivers, and usually the limiting factor regarding FPS is the CPU. There's one exception, and that's Aerodynamics FX, which can cause quite drastic FPS drops, so if you're using FAR, you might want to turn that setting down with the open source drivers.

If you plan on running open source drivers, consider to install a rather recent Linux distribution (or to install unofficial updates for the GPU drivers from a third party source - on Ubuntu there are several PPAs offering the latest mesa version). The performance of the radeon open source driver improved drastically in the last 6 months.

AMD's Open-Source Radeon Linux Driver: 2014 Was Incredible

Nevertheless a word of warning: Not all games run on the open source graphics drivers. Mesa is now OpenGL 3.3 compatible, but some games require OpenGL 4.0, and those can therefore only be played with the proprietary drivers. There's good news for AMD users forced to use the (really bad) proprietary drivers nevertheless:

AMD Catalyst Linux OpenGL Driver Now Faster Than Catalyst Windows Driver In Some Tests

But: If you aren't strictly opposed to using proprietary drivers, I'd still recommend to buy nVidia. Not that the proprietary nVidia drivers would be particularly good, but they are still much better than the proprietary AMD drivers when it comes to stability.

Edit: AMD also announced something great, regarding their latest GPU generations. Starting from Volcanic Islands, both, the open source, and the proprietary driver will use the same Kernel part, which will be completely open source and (probably) maintained within the upstream Kernel tree. This will simplify switching between both drivers greatly. Sadly the older GPU generations will probably not be ported to the new kernel driver.

AMD's New GPU Kernel Driver Could Be Too Late For Linux 3.19

Edited January 22, 2015 by soulsource
Added source for radeon changes 2014

[KerBlam]

I use the proprietary nVidia Drivers, and everything works flawlessly. Just sayin.

[Guest]

Already got the quad-core i5 (from /proc/cpuinfo: Intel® Core i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz ); just need better graphics and a bigger monitor.

Then i would definatly look into the 750ti and the 960 (nvidia, latter released soon) - perfect for even more demanding games and cheap. Won't drive anything more demanding than KSP at 4k - but that doesn't seem like a problem for you.

[_Aramchek_]

I'm still pretty sure I want 2GB of VRAM, for the sake of being able to drive a 4K monitor and have some degree of future-proofing.

Two gb's is not enough for 4k now, realistically, let alone in the future.

I just upgraded from a 2gb 670 to a 4gb 970 and have to say it surprised me that the upgrade increased performance as much as it did, and I think it is partially due to having that extra 2gb's of memory.

This is at 1440p, not even 4k.

I get about 20 fps more with this card, we may need to start rethinking just how gpu heavy KSP actually is.

I have the same cpu you have, overclocked to 4.6ghz, my advice is to overclock yours as well, it makes a huge difference.

If you run linux, do not believe anyone who says otherwise, go Nvidia, AMD's linux drivers , open sourced or not...are terrible, this is not hyperbole either. They will give you headaches and underperform.

If you run windows, either will do, but go for at least 3/4gb video memory.

I would try and find a used 4gb 670 over a 960, better yet, go for a 970 or a 290, it is worth the extra money, especially if you want to go to 4k, anything less and you will need to upgrade again next year anyway, the 960 is only really meant for light-medium high duty 1080p.

Edited January 22, 2015 by _Aramchek_

[soulsource]

Just to clarify my previous post and to make sure that I'm only recommending AMD in the case one is desperate to run open source drivers, the quality of Linux GPU drivers, as far as I can judge it, can be ranked as follows:

Edit: Beware, this list was written in early 2015, below is some updated information:

• Best is definitely the proprietary nVidia driver. It has some issues with desktop integration, but the outstanding performance, the stability, and the fact that it eats pretty much any shader code, no matter how wrong it is, make up for this easily. The lack of desktop integration can get annoying if one switches monitor configuration (I mean: number of active screens, relative position of screens,...) frequently, as it requires you to restart the X11 server, but for a static screen configuration it really doesn't matter, as one only configures the screens once. It's the driver with the biggest number of working games.
• The second rank goes to the open source drivers for AMD and Intel. They are reasonably stable and have excellent desktop integration. Nevertheless both drivers are less performant than proprietary drivers for the same hardware (for Intel that means: less performant than the Windows drivers, as there are no proprietary drivers available for Linux). In the case of AMD the performance difference depends on the game being run, but an educated guess would be, that the open source drivers give about 2/3 of the proprietary driver performance. Also, the open source drivers are at the moment only OpenGL 3.3 compatible, what means that some games will not run with them yet. Furthermore, they are quite a bit more strict regarding proper shader code than the proprietary nVidia drivers. As many developers use nVidia (for obvious reasons), it happens rather frequently, that games ship with incorrect (meaning: not conforming to the GLSL standard) shader code which will fail to run on any but the nVidia drivers.
• Then there's a long empty space...
• The second last rank goes to the (edit: legacy) proprietary AMD drivers. While there have been many improvements, and there are a lot of improvements planned, they are (still) a piece of *beep* and should in my opinion be killed with fire. Honestly: They might meanwhile have good (aka. comparable to nVidia) performance, but there are many, many bugs regarding desktop integration. Where the lack of desktop integration with nVidia means that you might have to restart your session if you plug a second monitor, with AMD it means that if there's a discrepancy between the screen configuration as set in the cataclyst control center and the desktops screen configuration: BOOM. Not immediately though, that would be to easy. No, everything will seem to be running fine. Until a few days later you'll try to play a certain game, and suddenly strange shapes will start to appear everywhere. Or, you might want to watch a video, that for strange reasons causes flickering colours somewhere outside of the video player window... Such issues can afaik only be fixed by deleting the /etc/ati folder and reinstalling the driver... Also, while this driver is a little bit more tolerant regarding errors in shader code than the open source drivers, it's not as tolerant as nVidia, so basically it can lead to the same problems as the open source drivers.
• Last rank in this list goes to the open source drivers for nVidia. While they still are much more stable than the proprietary AMD drivers (what's not very difficult), simply performance is somewhere between very low and nonexistent. They are good enough to display a GUI for installing the proprietary nVidia drivers, but sadly that's basically all they are good for at the moment.

Update, 2017-02-19: Some things have changed meanwhile, and I'd like to give a short update.
First of all, the old, proprietary AMD drivers (fglrx) are no longer relevant, except for really old hardware and exotic use cases. AMD has stopped updating them to recent X11 versions, and therefore they do not even run on most modern Linux distributions without a lot of ugly (and potentially insecure) workarounds.

AMD recommends desktop users to use the open source drivers instead, which meanwhile have full OpenGL 4.5 support, and are in almost all games at least as fast as fglrx was, in many games they are faster by quite a bit. For those who need OpenGL compatibility contexts or OpenCL 2.0 (if you don't know what that means, you don't need it), AMD has published a new semi-proprietary driver called AMD GPU-Pro (not to be confused with AMDGPU, what is the name for the kernel module used by all AMD drivers for GCN 1.2 hardware and newer), which offers those APIs, but typically (with a few exceptions, I only know of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Bioshock Infinite) delivers lower performance than the current AMD open source driver.

Anyhow, nVidia proprietary drivers are still definitely the fastest, but the AMD open source drivers are quickly catching up.

Then there's Vulkan, a new low level graphics API that might become important in the future. The proprietary nVidia drivers and AMD GPU-Pro both ship a well working Vulkan implementation, and Intel released an open source Vulkan driver as well. While AMD promised to release an open source Vulkan driver at some point, that has not happened yet. Luckily, the community (mostly Bas Nieuwenhuizen and Dave Airlie) stepped in, and now there also is a quite functional (but not yet complete, and also not yet as fast as it should be) open source AMD Vulkan driver.

Edited February 19, 2017 by soulsource
Update some information

[cantab]

Agreed. IMHO unless you're a Free Software purist (in which case why are you playing KSP instead of a Free game ) or involved in Linux kernel development there's no reason not to use the proprietary driver with an nVidia card.

And for what it's worth the years I've been using the proprietary nVidia driver have mostly been spent running two monitors at different resolutions. The nVidia settings tool is very capable for setting this up and the only problem I had was one program that would pop up a small window in the "void" space on the desktop.

[Redchrome]

Agreed. IMHO unless you're a Free Software purist (in which case why are you playing KSP instead of a Free game ) or involved in Linux kernel development there's no reason not to use the proprietary driver with an nVidia card.

And for what it's worth the years I've been using the proprietary nVidia driver have mostly been spent running two monitors at different resolutions. The nVidia settings tool is very capable for setting this up and the only problem I had was one program that would pop up a small window in the "void" space on the desktop.

I think KSP is the first video game I've bought in probably 12-13 years. Also, I played the free demo for almost 100 hours to be sure I really wanted to spend money on it. Lack of docking ports in the free game is really what made me upgrade.

Thanks for all the advice about drivers everyone. I might very well give the nVidia card a try, and I'll look at 4GB cards again. I remember that in some ways the proprietary driver was easy to set up (but this was also back in the days when I was writing XFree86 config files by hand, and like I said, even writing my own monitor modelines), and the lack of tweakability made it less than what I wanted at the time. I don't screw around with software and hardware for fun anymore (nor need to), so tweakability is less important.

Does anyone know if the nVidia drivers support monitor rotation?

Support it without X restart?

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Two gb's is not enough for 4k now, realistically, let alone in the future.

I just upgraded from a 2gb 670 to a 4gb 970 and have to say it surprised me that the upgrade increased performance as much as it did, and I think it is partially due to having that extra 2gb's of memory.

This is at 1440p, not even 4k.

I get about 20 fps more with this card, we may need to start rethinking just how gpu heavy KSP actually is.

Thanks, that's really helpful.

I have the same cpu you have, overclocked to 4.6ghz, my advice is to overclock yours as well, it makes a huge difference.

The stability of the hardware on this particular box is a bit marginal, so I'm disinclined to overclock it. Thanks for the anecdote tho.

I would try and find a used 4gb 670 over a 960, better yet, go for a 970 or a 290, it is worth the extra money, especially if you want to go to 4k, anything less and you will need to upgrade again next year anyway, the 960 is only really meant for light-medium high duty 1080p.

Ok. Looking over the Newegg prices tho, 4GB cards cost more than I want to spend right now. 2GB cards are within what I'm willing to spend, at least on something where I'm not sure what kind of results I'm going to get.

[cantab]

Does anyone know if the nVidia drivers support monitor rotation?

Support it without X restart?

Does for me, I just flipped my screen inverted using the xfce display settings tool. The nVidia settings tool, which I find more powerful for multi monitor setups, also has rotation options though I don't know if they take instant effect.

[Redchrome]

Does for me, I just flipped my screen inverted using the xfce display settings tool. The nVidia settings tool, which I find more powerful for multi monitor setups, also has rotation options though I don't know if they take instant effect.

Cool. Thanks a lot for that. Web browsing might be better on a vertical screen, watching movies/TV is better on a horizontal one. Might be interesting to try KSP on a vertical screen layout.

[bv1]

I play KSP on my oldish laptop which has an Nvidia GeForce 8400M GS GPU with a whopping 128MB of video memory.

[Kerbin Dallas Multipass]

1 gb is probably enough for KSP in its current state.

I just online shopped for a new graphics card the other week (got the gtx 750ti) and I couldnt really see a price difference between 1 and 2 gb versions, so It's not really a question.

Future versions of KSP or its framework (unity/dx11/opengl) might eventually make better use of graphics card memory. Forcing dx11 on the game shows that it already kinda badly works.

[Redchrome]

Update: I may have found why my performance is so pathetic. If I can get this fixed (help!) I might get decent performance on my current system (tho I may want to go to 64-bit Linux for more mod-memory headroom).

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/108458-Support-OSX-0MB-VRAM-detected-in-Player-log-%28-GL-Detected-0-MB-VRAM-%29