Computer question. Need moar powar?

So playing kerbal space program (curse you people for introducing me to this addicting time suck that is playable while holding a baby that only wants to nap while held! no, wait, I meant to say thank you!) I'm running into lag. when ships get too many parts, too much docked at the space station, etc.. and it's crazy annoying.

Here's the question, I don't know what is the limiting factor ie. video card, processor, the fact that I don't have 6x SATA, memory, etc... so here's what I got:

i7 quad core, don't remember exactly which one, but i'm going to guess 2.66mhz? I have not overclocked this though I have a monstrous heat sink. This is a very early i7, maybe 6 years old
12gb ramm (6x2gb) corsair dominator, I think 1600mhz
250gb ssd for main drive, not cluttered with junk because that's on other drives, not an insanely fast SSD but certainly faster than my old HDD
GTX550Ti 2gb card,

Current motherboard can support double the ramm, 2way SLI at 16x, but like I said it's 6 years old, no 6x sata, likely aging hardware since it's been running 80%+ of the time since it was built

I get some lag on games if view distance is cranked to max with all details set to max, I'm assuming that's a videocard limitation, but Kerbal space program (where did that thread go, anyway?) has physics for every individual part, is that more of a processor thing? I'm not super techy with programming either, so is it maybe just a software limitation that can't be overcome with more power?

So, upgrade any key parts? videocard, maybe? motherboard/processor upgrade? It's probably time for an overhaul, but i'm not in a big hurry. I think this is the first game that has given me problems since I built this, though I have upgraded a few things since then

What is this kerbal space program you speak of

Stepping up from the 550Ti to an old 560 would be a pretty decent jump, or a pair of them. What can you get a 760 for now?

If your motherboard will support SLI, keep the 550Ti for a "PhysX" card and run a heterogeneous dual card set up, with a more powerful GPU handling the rendering. http://www.nvidia.com/object/physx_faq.html

I'm living vicariously through you, my "gaming" PC is a Evga nForce 780i Motherboard a Geforce 7900GT GPU, e6850 Core 2 Duo, and 6 GB of Corsair XM2 DDR2. Still has IDE hard drives.

• Lee

Actually forget all the PhysX stuff, I googled, all of KSP physics calculations are done via CPU, so there's your answer. Though I'd expect even a first gen i7 to handle quite a load. Just how taxing is this game?

• Lee

Haha I'm pretty sure you have a 2.66Ghz CPU. A 2.66Mhz CPU would have sucked in the late '80s

GHz, MHz, whatever it takes..

In reply to ryanty22:

https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/ sandbox space program game. Build rockets, go places, do science, and try not to kill anybody.

I would suggest this guys' videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuww0F1fXiM&list=PLD603D8234AE51EF0 He screws up a lot, it's funny. Also somewhat instructive since the game isn't very complete tutorial-wise

In reply to GameboyRMH:

yes Ghz! My bad.

In reply to bibdaddylee82:

It's not particularly taxing, but I think the complexity is exponential because every component of the ship has it's own physics. If you build a huge mega-ship in space it gets pretty laggy.

Ok here's a screen shot:

the ship has a lot of tiny components, not very efficient, but it's my first try at a giant thing. There's the processor load on the right, it's not particularly stressing it would seem. Maybe my problem is just video rendering after all, not physics? I think the 700 series cards are dropping in price pretty good now. I'll look into that maybe.

If you notice the rendering issues with that sort of CPU load, it would point at the graphics card being the bottleneck.

Keep in mind most games (and applications in general) aren't multi-threaded, once you peg 1 apparent core (looks like you have a quad-core with hyperthreading, so each core can process two tasks at once and appears as two to the OS) the process can't use any more resources no matter how many cores you have.

But CPUs are almost never a bottleneck with games, unless you're running them on top of an emulator. Graphics cards on the other hand get outdated really fast. A 2.66 4-core is a fairly high-end CPU.

What are your core temps running for your CPU, and with an aging board like that, do you have any popped electrolytic capacitors? Everything is likely SMD and sealed on top, but still possibly be bad.

What are your core temps running for your CPU,

according to ASUS PC probe, i run 45-50C while playing KSP and watching videos. Never really goes about 50C.

with an aging board like that, do you have any popped electrolytic capacitors?

no idea

Is KSP lag a problem you can solve by throwing more hardware at it, or is it just a design flaw of the simulation engine? I was under the impression that it was more of the latter.

I just started playing it myself, haven't built anything that big yet. I did manage to land my first Kerbal on the Mun in the wee hours of the morning though! I don't have any ladder technology yet, so getting the Kerbal back into the lander after he planted a flag was a bit of challenge -- he had to run and jump for a few minutes before being able to hang on.

(forgot to take a screenshot with the flag, doh)

In reply to codrus:

Yeah it may be a limit with the game, but I'm thinking old hardware doesn't help. I run into limits with minecraft cranked up with mods, but I'm fairly sure that's a video card limit.

I'm thinking I need a video card now, but the weird thing is the vid card is probably the newest component on this thing, maybe 2nd newest

Also I think simulation central needs a KSP thread

edit: done

Back to the computer question, it seems GTX 770's and 780's are still crazy expensive, is the 750/760 noticeably slower? All of them probably kick the 550's butt I suppose