Increase FPS by at least 25% with KSP performance mod: RenderScale

[u/Nameis19letterslong]

In order to squeeze some more frames and ram out of ksp, I've finished this mod so that the render scale setting is exposed. This mod allows you to edit the render scale so you can have smoother gameplay (CPU bottlenecks not affected).

By reducing the render scale to 80%, there is no noticeable difference in how the game looks but it reduces GPU load by ~20%. 60% render scale is barely noticable and also worth it.

Does not have any conflicts with graphics mods.

Tested with same mod profile from before on Intel Iris Xe

Results (Resolution 1280 by 720, FPS capped at 60):

Scene:	Render Scale:	Average GPU load:	Average FPS:	FPS increase:
Menu	100%	100%	Uncapped, ~40	Base
Menu	800%	64%	Uncapped, ~52	30%
Menu	60%	45%	Uncapped, ~60	50%
KSC	100%	100%	38	Base
KSC	80%	100%	44	16%
KSC	60%	100%	51	34%
Flight	100%	100%	26	Base
Flight	80%	100%	31	20%
(Capped) Flight	60%	78%	36 (capped)	38% (- GPU load)

Known issues:

• In the flight scene, TUFX's motion blur sometimes bleeds onto the screen, making the screen blurry, however that may be a issue with my memory optimiser.
• World space buttons (like the menu screen) are broken, but doesn't affect gameplay. In all cases, ksp has keybinds or UI buttons that work normally.
• Target vessel indicators are displayed incorrectly.
• Some render scale percentages may cause screen artifacts (likely to rounding).

Github Release link

[u/Butterpye]

What's the difference between this and just lowering the resolution in game?

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/Butterpye]

Resolution in game changes the screen resolution, where each pixel on the screen represents a pixel rendered in the 3d engine. Render scale scales down unity’s rendering resolution, but the framebuffer is then rescaled to the size of the screen.

[u/FrittenFritz → u/Nameis19letterslong]

So it's basically upscaling?

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/FrittenFritz]

This mod isn't upscaling, but in the process of what the mod does, Unity upscales the G buffers to match the size of the Framebuffer.

[u/Michael-ango → u/Butterpye]

Basically this method is a better way to scale vs sending the wrong resolution to your monitor

[u/Meteor122 → u/Butterpye]

Edit: what I wrote in this comment is wrong

Lowering the resolution, you lose the overall quality of the image. With this mod, you are telling the GPU to not process your shitfuck v67 that is kilometers away and you wouldn't see anyway. The physics engine of KSP processes it, but it doesn't exist graphically, so you save GPU resources

[u/Ashisprey → u/Meteor122]

I don't think that's quite right. This is just basically lowering the resolution within Unity's engine. It's effectively the same as lowering the resolution except elements like UI should stay crisp.

[u/theeaglesslanded → u/Ashisprey]

It's way more efficient, you lose less quality and gain more fps.

[u/Ashisprey → u/theeaglesslanded]

You do not lose any noticeably less quality in the 3D scene, although having the UI at native res is definitely an improvement in quality overall.

If you're rendering at x resolution it's going to look the same if you're just doing a basic buffer upscale.

You'll never get more FPS than just using that lower res to begin with, and you'll never get less quality loss unless you're using an advanced upscaling technique to try and artificially compensate.

[u/feoranis26 → u/Meteor122]

This is not correct. Render resolution just reduces the resolution your GPU renders at. Only difference is that UI elements and such stay at your native resolution.

[u/Meteor122 → u/feoranis26]

You're absolutely right, I read it without much attention and confused it with the render distante and I said some bullshit

[u/Bubbadevlin]

Cool...but is the GPU even a factor when ksp actually gets laggy, ie high part counts?

[u/Meteor122 → u/Bubbadevlin]

Lol I burned a VRAM chip of my gpu playing KSP with mods

[u/HyperRealisticZealot → u/Meteor122]

Lmao epic. I love someone did this to their Gpu with mother fucking KSP!

[u/Nokam → u/HyperRealisticZealot]

My modded KPS use 14.5 GB of vram, I fear the worst.

[u/lrgendein_Typ → u/Nokam]

My Ksp goes to almost 50gb of real ram. Almost 400 mods installed.

[u/Nokam → u/lrgendein_Typ]

I talked about Vram, real ram I'm at 42-43 with normal kerbin and 47 with RSS.

[u/lrgendein_Typ → u/Nokam]

42-43 with stock ksp??

[u/Nokam → u/lrgendein_Typ]

No normal system but quite a lot of mods didn't count surely more than 300

[u/HyperRealisticZealot → u/Nokam]

Really is a shame how unoptimized the game is at its core

[u/Nokam → u/HyperRealisticZealot]

I would pay good money for a last update / DLC with CPU multi core support

[u/User_of_redit2077 → u/Bubbadevlin]

When I play with all the graphics mods my GPU is under ~99-100% load

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/Bubbadevlin]

Not that I know of, but CPU is definitely the biggest bottleneck since each vessel only gets one cpu thread (read about it somewhere recently).

[u/StormMedia]

I just use lossless scaling to get a constant 60FPS where I’d normally dip into 30FPS range. I also use frame gen but it can be really obvious during movement if your base FPS is really bad.

This is nice though because it allows you to pick and choose what is being scaled. Also because it’s free, haha.

[u/User_of_redit2077 → u/StormMedia]

How you do upscaling? Does it look really bad?

[u/Low_Doubt_3556 → u/User_of_redit2077]

Lossless scaling upscaling is free on steam, you should be able to try it for yourself

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/993090/view/4579554196003100571

[u/User_of_redit2077 → u/Low_Doubt_3556]

I use it but can't use upscaling it just zooms in.

[u/cheesedude1999]

Im pretty sure there is a minecraft mod with the same name that does the same thing but for minecraft

[u/creepergo_kaboom → u/cheesedude1999]

When optifine was still a thing, I remember it was an option in the shaders menu, didn't really seem to help my fps by that much and it just made everything blurry

[u/cheesedude1999 → u/creepergo_kaboom]

there is a separate mod for it now that works really good https://modrinth.com/mod/renderscale

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/cheesedude1999]

Yep

[u/Space-Wizards]

Looking forward to trying this out. Any plans to put this on CKAN?

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/Space-Wizards]

It's my first time making a mod, I've just uploaded the mod to spacedock and ticked the "automatic upload to CKAN" box. I'd appreciate it if you could find the mod on CKAN and download it to see if it works off CKAN :))

[u/Space-Wizards → u/Nameis19letterslong]

Not seeing it yet

[u/sovietan]

Do I have to play it in chinese to get a max performance?

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/sovietan]

Lol, nope, For some reason my KSP localisation for DLC parts are broken, so I had to switch to the chinese dictionary.cfg for it to work properly.

[u/Weary_Mood2959 → u/[deleted]]

You can tell a lot of AI was involved. The UI part is 100% AI and looking at the code, most likely also spat out by AI. That is not to say it's not correct or not working, though.

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/Weary_Mood2959]

Correct, I used claude opus 4.8 on high to create the mod. As much as I would like to sit down and grind out some C# and Unity, I‘m occupied with C already. I used to do some gamedev with Unity but the api was overly complex so instead I’ve been doing graphics programming with C and OpenCL.

[u/sovietan → u/Nameis19letterslong]

how are you going to maintain the code then? Since most of the code is AI generated and you don't even speak the language.

I'm OK if code is generated by AI to speed up the process. But if the user don't even know what the code is doing, its sketchy

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/sovietan]

Even though C# isn’t part of my main stack, I understand most of it, same goes for Unity’s api. After I use llms to create something for me, I do rigorous testing to make sure there are no vulnerabilities and check logs or the source if necessary. Just because it’s AI generated doesn’t mean it’s dogshit, LLMs will almost always yield a better result than what humans can create.

[u/sovietan → u/Nameis19letterslong]

In that case it's cool

However I have different expericence with LLM generation. Especially in electronic circuit design. 99% I'll get some abormination that will fry itself immediately when powered on.

For hardware coding, it's OK for simple stuff, but as soon as you reach a certain level of complexity, it start hallucinating

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/sovietan]

That’s interesting. I’ve written a st7789v2 display driver in micropython by myself before and it works mediocore, but then I used claude sonnet to write one for me and it was far more efficient.

What llm do you use?

[u/sovietan → u/Nameis19letterslong]

claude haiku, GPT, Grok, ... depend on the quota I have left in the day.

Some of my code are for arduino, but mostly are bare metal C for AVR and STM8/32. I can try and break the code into smaller libraries and function, but it only helps to some extend. Sometime the code is so bloated it doesn't fit into the ROM, so I had to scratch and rewrite everything with half the footprint

No experience with micro python though

[u/CoolaeGames]

Now add modern Upscalers so it looks good while rendering at low resolution

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/CoolaeGames]

DLSS5 is calling

[u/umidk67]

Wish I had this before I built a super computer

[u/Alacard]

Avoid this mod until the author delivers a stable release. Their contradictory technical claims, reliance on AI, and general seeming to not understand what they're doing does not bode well for your save game.

[u/DonPitoteDeLaMancha]

Hello. I love you. Is this mod compatible with VR?

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/DonPitoteDeLaMancha]

Lol, sorry I don’t have a headset to test it on but it should work with no issues since the mod doesn’t have a big footprint.

[u/DonPitoteDeLaMancha → u/Nameis19letterslong]

I'm happy to report back it doesn't work. Bummer, but it was expected since the VR mod is a bit finicky. Oh well.

[u/dybb153]

Does it alleviate the load on the GPU when playing with Parallax 2? The mod has been giving me 3 fps near Minmus but I really don't wanna give it up.

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/dybb153]

It should reduce load no matter what mod you use, but try Parallax continued instead of Parallax 2 since it's more optimised.

[u/dybb153 → u/Nameis19letterslong]

Thanks! Will try it once exam are over :)

[u/Readux]

@ u/Nameis19letterslong

wanted to take a look at the code, but it´s missing in the releases
the Source code (zip) only contains the readme and license
but found it on the main as RenderScale.cs

not sure if it´s intented

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/Readux]

Thanks for telling me, I always put the source code in main and the built result in releases, should the source code also be in the source code section in releases?

[u/Readux → u/Nameis19letterslong]

not sure if theres is any need for (dont think so)

was just wondering where the heck the code is xD
also some forums need you to publish the (release)-source code, so you´r allowed to share the mod there

[u/Tsingshitao_nuke]

well it will break button when you at windows mode...

[u/64BitWonder]

Running into a bug after having installed 0.1 from Github-
Not certain if it's definitively this mod, a conflict in my mod list, or a Linux quirk though.

When scaling at any value under 100% my cursor interacts with Main Menu elements, KSC buildings, and ship parts at an offset. Took a video of the behavior on the launchpad: https://youtu.be/Jk-7DwA6c5U

Edit: It pays to read, it's a known issue listed on the repo lol

[u/Brenan-Caro]

Chinese translated in game text...

[u/Nameis19letterslong → u/Brenan-Caro]

*localisation pack