Best actual (Oct 2017) desktop PC for KSP

[George Kerman]

The time has come to replace my I5-6400 8 GB RAM GTX 950 (2 GB) with something that would run KSP smoothly even when I spend the whole Sunday building & launching 1000+ parts crafts in RP-0.

I wanted to ask you from experience, what do you guys recommend/think it's the best desktop PC config on the market that gives you the best KSP experience possible? I was looking at possibly Ryzen 7 1700X, GTX 1070 8 GB DDR5 256 bit, 64 GB DDR4, 1 TB SSD. I got no budget in mind but it's gotta be within some reasonable limits. As with rocket building, I don't wanna pay double for the product just to get an increase of 100 dV.

[Chibbity]

Originally posted by internetrules:

Originally posted by Chibbity:

Single core/thread performance is most important for KSP. Graphics card hardly matters.

Have heard some complaints about Ryzen and KSP, so I don't recommend that.

i feel like the graphics card will probably matter if he is going to be running extreme texture mods.

Hence the qualifier "hardly."

Anything even remotely current should be fine, even with tons of visual mods. KSP performance issues can almost always be traced back to a CPU bottleneck, specifically single core Mhz performance. Most KSP graphical mods cause increased CPU load rather than GPU load anyways.

(Also texture mods aren't even really a "graphics card" issue, they are a VRAM/RAM issue.)

[invision2212]

i wouldnt build a PC around KSP instead find the most current demanding game and built it off of that.

i can run games max settings with no isssues but kerbal on the other hand will bleed your CPU dry while your GPU sits there waiting for calculations to happens.

my hardware is pretty outdated now

AMD 8120
radeon 7970 OC to 1050mhz
32gigs ram

and it still runs the most current games at max settings.

i boot up kerbal and its a much different story, i will get 60 frames as long as im not tearing through the atmosphere and all the effects going, or my craft is just freaking massive.
it will dip into the 20's when this happens, depending how big the craft is.
1000 parts and forget it just throw the pc out the window lol

[George Kerman]

Idk why all you guys think 1000 parts is just outta this world. Partwise, this was my biggest creation, almost 800 parts:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=813786101

Indeed, it did run pretty bad in the beginning, but not throw your PC out the window bad. And as a single stage, see above, 560 parts which only caused me problems on take off from Kerbin and upon landing on Laythe. And my I5 cores only have 2.7 GHz and I got no SSD atm.
That's why I'm saying, I don't think it's a stretch to assert that a Ryzen 7 or a Threadripper with KSP installed on SSD will probably do decently well, at the latest after the AMD engineers work on their RAM speed.

But yeah, it's probably wiser to go with KW Rocketry and such and have the least amount of parts that do the job.

[invision2212]

but what is your frame rate on those 800 part crafts?

if i was to load that id get 10FPS at best

[George Kerman]

That was probably similar and less (on the launchpad). Don't have that craft anymore to check it out. But hey, for the other 560 parts craft it went pretty smooth outside of atmosphere, and that's where you spend most of the time usually.

Anyway, thanks all for the input.

[internetrules]

Originally posted by George Kerman:

That was probably similar and less (on the launchpad). Don't have that craft anymore to check it out. But hey, for the other 560 parts craft it went pretty smooth outside of atmosphere, and that's where you spend most of the time usually.

Anyway, thanks all for the input.

also something we should have asked at the start of the thread. define at what FPS is "smooth" cuz most of us here at the PCMR define it as 60FPS minimum

[Vault Crawler]

I don't think I've ever played KSP at 60fps. I have an old clunker I've started assembling in 2007. It runs fine but I usually keep my ships under 100 parts. 200 is my max. Above that and it's unplayable.
I think 1.3 has better fps than 1.2, but it could be the mod clean-up I had to undergo when 1.3 came out.

Anyway, I'm playing with SSTU now, and it really helps keeping those part counts low.

[Operation40]

KSP is an amazing game, but let's face it, Unity engine is not known for high performance..
all parts are loaded like mods out of the gameplay folder and all textures from all planets are kept in memory at all times.. sooo.. yeah..

when it comes to PC buying/building I always recommend go for the best value for your buck.. last year's latest and greatest is this year's sale item.

[George Kerman]

So, after I've done my homework, I come back with an update in case someone will read up on the topic in the future. The best CPU atm for KSP seems to be the I7-8700K with the best single core performance and very good multi core performance. OC would even bring it around 5.2 - 5.3 GHz. But, after seeing the prices on RAM, GPU and power that these crazy new age tulip farmers have caused, imma delay my purchase. It's not a budget issue, it's just dumb imo to buy a whole system right now.

[Astronaut]

Originally posted by George Kerman:

The time has come to replace my I5-6400 8 GB RAM GTX 950 (2 GB) with something that would run KSP smoothly even when I spend the whole Sunday building & launching 1000+ parts crafts in RP-0.

I wanted to ask you from experience, what do you guys recommend/think it's the best desktop PC config on the market that gives you the best KSP experience possible? I was looking at possibly Ryzen 7 1700X, GTX 1070 8 GB DDR5 256 bit, 64 GB DDR4, 1 TB SSD. I got no budget in mind but it's gotta be within some reasonable limits. As with rocket building, I don't wanna pay double for the product just to get an increase of 100 dV.

I'd reccommend 8gb for ksp (3.21 gb or something) and mods, which for me take up 1 gb of space but you can play with 6 gb, i use windows too. also as far as I know it's only possible to transfer your saved game to another computer if you go on the web and make your save available for downloading or something like that, or just put the ksp folder on a data stick.

[Semaj]

If you're going to wait to buy, wait til this summer. You can get your hands on a Volta GPU and that 8700k. Btw, I don't think a 6 core processor is getting up past 5Ghz... 7700k will manage that, but with custom cooling.

Edit: I guess people are managing 5ghz with the new Intel stuff, but you need enthusiast cooling. Also you wouldn't really need 5ghz anyway, my rule of thumb if you want your processor to last, don't go above 1.35v with an i7, might be different values for other generations other than Skylake though.

[RoofCat]

I suspect they will sooner develop true multicore gaming, than make cores capable to support KSP with every imaginable ship setup.

[internetrules]

Originally posted by RoofCat:

I suspect they will sooner develop true multicore gaming, than make cores capable to support KSP with every imaginable ship setup.

what do you mean by true multicore? do you mean all the cores could act as if they were just 1 core?

[RoofCat]

all the cores using all their potential.

And don't dig too deep into multicore technologies - I know they aren't easy. It was just a comparision of two unlikely things - which infinity is the smaller one kind of stuff.

[George Kerman]

So, I come back with an update for the posteriority. After now having one of the best commercial config that is reasonably priced:
I7-8700K
32 GB DDR4
1080 Ti 11 GB
256 GB SSD (Win 10 and KSP are both installed here) + 2 TB HDD
Intel Optane 32 GB
, I'm quite disappointed by the very marginal increase in performance / smoothness that has given me in KSP. It's all about the number of scene changes that you do. After sufficient scene changes, it's getting really annoying and I'm still observing that one sec delay when the garbage collector is running. So.... not really worth buying something better to play KSP.