Mosfet wrote:

gamadh wrote:

Source of the post I have an i5 processor 2.80 GHZ, RAM 8.00 GB, windows 10 64 bit, and still no more than 20 FPS

My specifications are in my signature, and I have ranges between 20-50 FPS. The GPU makes the difference in SpaceEngine.

in my SE 20 FPS is the maximum, the normal rate is 10 to 5 FPS on my PC

probably. I had an old laptop that i used to play space engine 0.9.7.0 and it worked but lagged when i tried to use a spaceship.

FWIW Mesa adds support for 3.1 OpenGL compat. I'm pretty sure though 3.3 compatibility will never be supported, so would be nice if SpaceEngineer have used core profile. For what it worth, mixing old OpenGL through compatibility is frowned upon.

Can my PC run Space Engine?

i7 7700 @4ghz
16gb DDR4 @2400mhz
GTX 1060 6GB @2100mhz/4500mhz

Just kidding my PC runs Space Engine like a dream =P

Meanwhile, [url=https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=a0c8b49284efe736849c0a45920ad0a1bbd8d93d]3.1 OpenGL compatibility landed into Mesa some hours ago.[/url]

/me still waiting for SpaceEngine to start using core context instead of some obsolete OpenGL functionality that's not even supported everywhere, and frowned upon.

My own recent experience tells me you can get great performance with SE even with a very borderline computer/graphics card so long as you don't use procedural textures at all. You can create your own planets fairly simply with text hacks in .sc files. You won't be able to fly over terrain and all the bells and whistles but you can still get tremendous videos of space objects out of it with those hacks. And on top of all that, it runs like a champ with a terrible Radeon 4200 integrated card and probably worse than that. It's the procedural textures that cause the program to crash. Think of it as a trial version of SE.

I'm thinking about getting this one.

Any advice? I know most people will likely advise me to try for a custom built system, but I have gone that route, and wound up wishing I hadn't. I just wanted to quickly get a decent PC for the money, and after shopping around I ran across that one I linked.

One potential problem that I foresee, is the nvidia graphics. I have had to intentionally roll back the graphics driver on my last PC due to the newer nvidia drivers being incompatible with SE. Is that the case with all model drivers, or just that one I was using? SE is probably the #1 reason why I wanted to get a decent PC finally, after all these years, so if this PC won't work, then I'll have to go with a different one.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Looking at its specs, I can say that it a good PC option. Try to check the reviews as well before buying this one. Do you have any other PC that you considered aside from this one? 

justjam wrote:

Looking at its specs, I can say that it a good PC option. Try to check the reviews as well before buying this one. Do you have any other PC that you considered aside from this one?

Thank you for your response!

I considered a few more, but this one was the least expensive, for what I would get. My most sought-after spec is the VRAM, and that machine has the most I could find for the price. The PC I linked also has a $500 gfx card in it (mostly because of the VRAM), and the AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Processor is fairly expensive also, at about $200. The case would be at least $200. I feel like I would get an okay deal with that. The more I'm looking at it, the more likely I am to go ahead and grab it.

Looking at it, it doesn't have a DVDrom drive though... I didn't notice that. It's not a total deal-breaker, but...

I merged your topic with this one because it's fundamentally the same.

Apollonius wrote:

Source of the post  had to intentionally roll back the graphics driver on my last PC due to the newer nvidia drivers being incompatible with SE.

I haven't seen this problem since a while with Nvidia drivers, I don't think it should really affect your decision.

Apollonius wrote:

Source of the post it doesn't have a DVDrom drive though... I didn't notice that. It's not a total deal-breaker, but...

It's quite a common occurrence with recent PCs, I'd say also with notebooks. Consider that external USB-3 dvdrw drives may cost 30 dollars or less.

Mosfet wrote:

I merged your topic with this one because it's fundamentally the same.

Apollonius wrote:

Source of the post  had to intentionally roll back the graphics driver on my last PC due to the newer nvidia drivers being incompatible with SE.

I haven't seen this problem since a while with Nvidia drivers, I don't think it should really affect your decision.

Apollonius wrote:

Source of the post it doesn't have a DVDrom drive though... I didn't notice that. It's not a total deal-breaker, but...

It's quite a common occurrence with recent PCs, I'd say also with notebooks. Consider that external USB-3 dvdrw drives may cost 30 dollars or less.

Thank you very much for your help, and I'm sorry for the duplicate post!

And I have decided to go ahead and get the PC I linked. It's supposed to arrive within a week! I'm really excited, I've never owned a real gaming machine. I have never actually been able to fly around on a planet in SE, let alone enter galaxies without crashing. I already have a newegg tab open, full of external DVDr drives. :p I'm also now looking at VR headsets like the Oculus rift, and other cheaper models. I can use them with that PC! Thank you again!

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this but it does relate to PC hardware and running SE.


I just had been doing some tests on my nephew's PC to get an idea on requirements over my own slower PC for my upgrade.

I just want to know what actually limits the terrain and texture loading speeds if all settings are equal.

I have max settings and also testing LOD2 via the console and my gtx 980 struggles a lot at LOD2, get large pauses I put this down to lack of VRAM because it only starts misbehaving once it's full which is pretty much as soon as I start SE, on LOD2 anyway.

The CPU is FX 8 core at 4.1Ghz. 8GB of system memory, on win 7

My nephew's PC has 1080, i7 6700k stock speed, 16GB of ram and win 10

Now the overall performance is a lot better, can run LOD2 without much noticeable performance drop.

I however have a noticeably slower texture and terrain loading even when LOD1 and with headroom in the VRAM, it is actually slower at LOD1 than my PC at LOD2 despite the poor performance, mine still loads terrain/texture quite a lot faster.   I can't see what would cause this on the newer system. CPU usage is minimal, VRAM although still peaks at 8GB quiet easy in many areas still drop blow 8, sitting around 5-6GB so there is room to spare.  

Both were run off a portable drive so they ran the same config and test location.  I would of expected the newer PC to load terrain and textures faster considering that the FPS and smoothness is a lot better and has some spare resources unlike my PC with is at it's limits virtually all the time.

So what hardware possibly OS wise factors could slow down terrain/texture loading?

I might also mention on the newer system I had issues with some keys and menus not always responding. The console key stopped working all together after a while and many of the menus once open the close button would not work unless I pressed it like 10+ times.  I rebooted it a few times and same results.

vlad01 wrote:

Source of the post So what hardware possibly OS wise factors could slow down terrain/texture loading?

Not enough video memory. You need at least a 6 gigabyte card for Lod 2!

SpaceEngineer wrote:

Source of the post At LOD 2, engine generates 2.2 GB of textures, 10000 nodes, but reserved limit is still 20000 (so again, 6 GB graphics card will be enough). Reserved limit can be raised in the config, but I don't see purpose for this. Nobody playing at LOD 2, it can be used just for taking extreme screenshots from a stationary point. Because loading time is huge, about 5 minutes. Note that framerate is much lower than at LOD 1.5 and LOD 1 - because graphics card needs to render 10000 meshes with a set of unique textures each.

That doesn't make sense though.  It was slower loading on the 1080 compared to the 980 which has 8Gb even though it was faster with response and frame rate and had at times spare VRAM which also showed the same slow loading. That was my question, why is would be slower on a much faster PC?
Eg same scene.

980 4GB   50 FPS and loading time of 10-15 sec  (LOD 2)

1080 8GB   90FPS , took 30 sec + to load same scene (LOD 1 or LOD2)

That led me to the 2nd question, what actually limits loading if the PC is more than adequate for rendering/computing tasks.? 



I'm sure I have worked out the answer to both these now anyway.

I found the issue had something to do with win 10, at least this install as the faster PC also had a win 7 installation on another drive, which then I tried again, SE loaded the same speed as my own slower PC, the issues of non responding keys on the keyboard and menus also went away.


On the 2nd question, I found settings in the main config that allows to adjust terrain/texture loading outside of what is allowed in the graphic setting panel.  The time per frame allowed for texture/terrain generation and also another of how many allowed to be generated at the same time I think?

I had found a real time loading required 100ms and 64 tiles on my PC.  Default is 50 and 4.   I think this really depends on the PC specs on how far you can change these.



I was able to get my system to almost load everything real time but at a large cost of performance of FPS.  dropped to about 8-20 fps, but the loading was almost instant ever to far distant terrain.  I will be playing around which these again on a faster PC to see what sort of improvements I can get without loosing too much frame rate.

So all good, answered my own questions in the end.






EDIT:  I could be wrong but it looks like the 50ms config is the max time window per frame allowed for tiles to load to ensure fps doesn't drop below the 50ms frame time value because I noticed 50ms = 20fps min, 100ms = 10 fps etc...  So you can increase it to allow more tiles to load but at cost of min fps.  You can increase the tiles loaded to the point to fully unitize the available time window.  I found it to be 8-9 on my PC without any loss and much faster loading.   So if I got this correct you could set the tiles higher on a faster PC while leaving the max time per frame the same so theoretically achieving faster loading without loss of performance.   

Space Engineer will probably need to confirm this but sure seems like that is the way it works.

This computer runs SE okay at 1080p, however if I wanted to improve I am not to sure what parts to replace or add. Here are my specs:

Processor: Intel Core2 Quad CPU  Q9650 @ 3.00 GHz, Installed RAM: 8.00 GB, 64bit OS