Lag is ruining KSP - any ways to improve performance?

Question

I've been to the Mun countless times and at one point had 3 bases, 6 landers, and 8 rovers operating there. I've sucked all of the science points out of Kerbin, the Mun and Minmus. I got rid of all but one base and now the remaining base has 8 kerbals working there, 5 of the 8 rovers are there, along with 2 landers, refueling tanks and spare parts. I'm getting a maximum of 7 FPS, so nothing more can be added and still have the game be playable.

I have a big space station orbiting Kerbin with 14 kerbals living there and an even lower frame rate (3 FPS!), and all of it's science instruments are now useless trash.

Keep in mind that I have a decent PC with a 3.03 GHZ I7 processor, nVidia 470 1 GB video card, 6 TB of storage and 24 GB of RAM (I know, KSP can only use 4 GB). If the 64-bit version weren't so unplayably buggy, performance may increase enough to hold my interest a bit longer.

If the lag wasn't so bad with the high parts count at my base and space station I would just expand them and create some awesome rocket factory in space for the fun of it.

Of course, considering that lag is so bad that docking to my space station is 100 times harder than it was, and landing at my Mun base is nearly impossible now, Building upon them is out of the question. Not to mention the bugs. It seems the only time I need to use quicksave now is to defeat buggy performance.

So anyway my question is this: Lag, rather than gameplay is ruining the game for me. Is there anything I can do to reduce the lag?

Answer 1

Lag caused by high part counts can be reduced by merging parts together with the part welding plugin.

Answer 2

Go into the Settings menu and increase the "Max Physics Delta-Time per Frame" slider.

That way the framerate will no longer be bound to the physics engine. When there are too many parts in the current scene, the framerate will stay normal but time will slow down instead. That should make the game more playable in these situations.

But still keep in mind that the KSP engine simply doesn't support bases with several hundred parts.

Answer 3

Part count and ram usage are causes of lag.

For part count problems, I'd suggest becoming a minimalist. I have several very ugly ships because I never made them pretty by adding cosmetic things to it like lights that serve no function, or fake windows etc. Also, don't go crazy with struts. Other than that, do things like use one large monoprop tank instead of 6 small ones in symmetry.

For RAM usage, you can use a mod like Active Texture Management which compresses all the texture files when the game loads. Not as big of a difference as using less parts, but it helps.

I would also really suggest using Linux 64-bit. My Linux version runs much better than my Windows version on the same machine. I use Kubuntu. Easy to install and KSP works right away.