are seamless transition really needed ?

[AstroKevin]

Hello !
Okay, so, first of all from my understanding of how KSA works, i have a small problem with seamless transitions.
I've been playing KSA with release day, but i'm totally unable to load more than the earth and the moon with all settings set to minimum, otherwise it just stops.

The problem: i use an ASUS Tuf Dash 15, with 16gb of ram, an RTX 3050 Ti portable with 4GB of VRAM.
But it's clearly not enough.

I totally understand the fact that my computer is far from the high-end, but being a 2021 mid-range doesn't make him a brick neither.

I'll go straight to the point: from what i could understand, KSA actually load every planet's texture for seamless transitions; that's a really nice feature, but being able to choose to use it or not could be a way to greatly improve the experience for mid-range users.
As of now, i have to play KSA with way less quality than i can play KSP with graphics mods.
Honestly, it's a little bit frustrating to play GTA V Next Gen with mid-to-high settings and not being able to properly load KSA.

and honestly, i would hapilly trade seamless transitions for higher resolutions and a more beautiful experience.

On the other hand, after looking up the game's files, i do also think and hope there's way for a better compression. Let's take earth_diffuse.dds:

i'm far from a pro, but creating a 3D earth model in blender i had to use a highly similar files for the normals, textures and heightmap. I understand we're talking about a video game and my assumptions might be wrong: but they are way too heavy, even more for live rendering or seamless transitions if they are even partially loaded on a permanent basis.

Once again i'll talk with my personnal experience, but with similar resolutions and i little bit more compression, earth's data could clearly fit under de 100 to 50 mbs, whicch would greatly improve the gameplay experience in visual quality.

anyway, thanks for reading me !

 

[UriahGnu]

Have to remember, KSA uses a custom framework BRUTAL built on Vulkan, not an established game engine with a tons of abstractions, virtual textures and all the bells and whistles something like UE5 has. Currently texture memory allocation is basically static, and while very efficient for transitions, you are correct everything is loaded into memory, but that is not necessarily going to be the case.

Dean and some devs have mentioned future plans for what I believe is a sort of texture streaming pool, where textures could be loaded/unloaded dynamically, and there are plenty of options in Vulkan for optimizing this, and I have no doubt they will, as the planets themselves are fairly well optimized, it is just that the framework stuff takes time to build out.

I do this they will need to prioritize this at some point, as it is going to drastically reduce the potential audience and cause frusteration in the long term, but in the short term a minor price to pay for how they are developing the framework.

 

[Nuke]

anything less than 8 gig is not mid range in 2025. i dont even recommend anyone go less than 12 gig on a gpu.

not to say they cant stream textures and maybe help the lower end hardware.

maybe there is something they can do with texture formats. i think there are formats better than the old s3tc formats from the '90s (despite ms's renaming of them in their dx standards, they are the same formats). there are newer formats that can get down to < 4bpp for some applications.

some gpus may support better formats, so having all the textures come in a lossless format, then generate and cache compressed versions optimized for the available hardware may give some more headroom.

 

[UriahGnu]

anything less than 8 gig is not mid range in 2025. i dont even recommend anyone go less than 12 gig on a gpu.

8 GB is higher than the majority of Steam users own, which by definition is on the higher end, mid range just a five years ago was 4-6 GB VRAM, and currently the average is 6-8 GB, 10 GB and above is high end.

But VRAM isn't the whole picture, there are cards with considerably more VRAM that has much worse performance, like the RTX 3060 which is very popular mid range card, while the 3070 has 8 GB but is a far better card.

For more accurate numbers than Steam survey look at min and recommend requirements for average AA games still being well under 8 GB VRAM, and the protests that have occurred when studios have tried to raise recommend above 8 GB, most players simply can't afford that.

My 3070 doesn't have any issues running most AAA games, and struggles with KSA due to the early state of BRUTAL framework development, which will improve over time.

 

[Nuke]

i can agree with wanting to aim a little low for performance targets. good scalability is how minecraft will run on anything but will still let you throw cpu/gpu power at it if you have it. i still consider 8 gig to be the start of mid tier though.

there are exceptions with low end or previous gen cards getting more memory than they originally shipped with. they might work well here, or other games with big textures, but its just a gimmick to upsell old surplus silicon. same with low-mid tier offerings from amd/nvidia (especially the latter). they are often an older architecture rebranded as a more modern one, rather than simply being down-binned. going with an older higher tier card may actually be better than those, even an intel gpu is an upgrade.

 

[UriahGnu]

Oh I very much agree with that, especially with all the Neural Core garbage. Regardless, KSA does need to target mid and low tier cards. An important thing to remember is a lot of the KSP audience is the lowest of the low end, students with a cheap laptop, I was in 2011 and modding KSP it got me started in professional flight simulation. The other day an educator asked about buying bulk licenses for installing on dozens of literal potatoes. KSA simply can't survive targeting expensive hardware in my opinion.

 

[Nuke]

laptops are going to be your biggest problem definitely. perhaps some of the beefier amd apus. ive been really happy with the performance of my steam deck when im pretty sure its a generation behind my actual rig. the practice of putting well matched memory closer to the cpu die actually nets you a lot of performance, it makes the ghost of grace hopper smile.