EXTRAS
minimum and recommended requirements on PC
Kerbal Space Program 2 is making its way onto Steam Early Access, and it’s not short of critics. Despite the fact that the game is popular, its requirements are once again in wide controversy because for the graphic quality it offers these are very high. What happens is that the game itself does not seem very well optimized and therefore Intercept Games wanted to come to the fore to calm things down by promising optimizations that reduce them, but at the same time, offering updates on them. What requirements does Kerbal Space Program 2 ask for now?
If you like this game you will know that its Sandbox is constantly being improved and optimized, but the designers go one step further, stating that the game has “literally unlimited potential”, something like StarCitizen. The problem, and what many complain about, is that the game graphically isn’t “to rave about” for what it asks for, so Michael Loreno has come out to explain certain key issues.
Kerbal Space Program 2, very high requirements, although it really asks for less
If you set some minimum or recommended requirements, the logical thing is that you do it to guide the player about the PC he will need to play it at any resolution and any framerate. But if you fix it and then they’re really higher than what’s really needed, what good are they worth? Well, Michael Loreno explains it:
Hi Kerbonauts, this is KSP Community Leader Michael Loreno. I’ve connected with several teams within Intercept after gathering feedback from the community and would like to address some of the concerns that are circulating regarding KSP 2 performance and minimum specs.
First of all, we must apologize for how the initial release of the hardware spec communication went. It was confusing and distressing for many of you, and we are here to bring you clarity.
TLDR:
The game can certainly be played on machines below our minimum specification, but because no two people will play the game exactly the same way (and because such a sandbox physics game creates literally unlimited potential for players to build anything and go anywhere), it is very difficult to predict the experience an individual player will have on Day 1. We have chosen to be conservative for now, to manage player expectations. We will update these spec recommendations as the game evolves.
It is understood that the game continues its development course, which is unfinished, but with that said, let’s see what its new requirements are and then continue with Loreno:
Minimum requirements (1080p LOW)
- CPU: Intel Core i5-6400 or Athlon X4 845
- GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070 Ti or AMD RX 5600 XT
- RAM: 12GB
- Storage: 45GB
Recommended Requirements (1440p High)
- CPU: Intel Core i5-11500 or Ryzen 5 3600
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3080 or AMD RX 6800 XT
- RAM: 16 GB
- Storage: 45GB
Having said this and knowing that we will be able to play it with a worse PC than what is advertised, Loreno wanted to comment a little more about it:
I’d like to provide some details here about how we got to those specs and what we’re currently doing to improve them.
To address those who are concerned that this specification will never change: KSP2’s performance is not set in stone. The game is continually being optimized and performance will improve over the course of Early Access. We’ll do our best to let you know when future updates contain significant performance improvements, so keep an eye on this space.
Our determination of the minimum and recommended specs for Day 1 is based on our best understanding of which machines will provide the best experience in the widest possible range of gaming scenarios.
In general, each function goes through the following steps:
– Make it work
– make it stable
– Make it work
– Make it modifiableAs you may have noticed by now, different features are living at different stages in this list at the moment. We are confident that the game is now fun and complete enough to share with the public, but we are entering Early Access with the expectation that the community understands that this is a game in active development. That means some features may be present in non-optimized forms to unlock other features or areas of play that we want people to be able to experience today. Over the course of Early Access, you’ll see many features make their way from Step 1 to Step 4.
Here’s what our engineers are currently working on to improve performance during Early Access:
Terrain optimization. The current terrain implementation meets our primary goal of displaying multiple octaves of detail at all altitudes and across multiple biome types. We are now hard at work on a major overhaul of this system that will not only further improve terrain fidelity and variety, but will do so more efficiently.
Fuel flow/resource system optimization. Some of you may have noticed that adding a large number of engines affects the frame rate noticeably. This has to do with CPU intensive fuel flow and Delta-V upgrade calculations that are exacerbated when multiple engines are powered by a common fuel source. The current system works and is stable, but there is clearly room for performance improvement. We are re-evaluating this system to improve its scalability.
As we move into Early Access, we expect to receive a lot of feedback from our players, not only about the overall quality of their gaming experiences, but also whether our game is meeting its goals while running on their hardware. This post will give us a much better idea of how we are tracking in relation to the needs of our community. With that being said, please keep sending your feedback and thanks for helping us make this game the best it can be.
Little more to add. These requirements for Kerbal Space Program 2 should be changing and getting closer to reality, so it is possible that before launch we will have new data about the PC that we need to play it decently.
