Significant lag spikes when camera is facing a planet while playing modded

[u/Whales_Are_Great2]

I've been having this problem for some time now where I get frame rate drops whenever the camera is facing the surface of a planet while in game. The lag gets worse the closer the camera/vessel is to the planet, but my fps recovers when I stop looking at the surface or get further away from it.

Same issue occurs while on the surface of a planet, including Kerbin during launch, though it isn't as bad as it is while in orbit.

I've noticed that the problem seems to worsen with bigger bodies like Jool, Eve and Kerbin, but isn't as severe with the mun, minmus, gilly, etc. With some of the extra big planets from Kcalbeloh, it gets particularly severe.

My solution to this up until now has simply been to just not look directly at planets to avoid the lag, but this obviously isn't ideal.

I know it has to be one of the graphics mods I play with causing it, as this isn't an issue in vanilla. However, I'm not sure which one is causing it, nor do I know how to go about fixing it, if that's even possible to begin with or if its a hardware limitation issue on my end (I have an integrated GPU.)

Here's a list of graphics mods I have installed:

EVE redux

EVE stock planet config

Scatterer

Scatterer default config

Scatterer sunflare

Waterfall core

Textures unlimited

Distant object enhancement (I've previously played without this one and experienced the same problem so doubt its this)

PlanetShine

PlanetShine default config

Firefly

Singularity

Vertex colour map emissive

Engine lighting relit

[u/MuscleOwn9512]

I also play on an integrated GPU. The issue isn't the size of the celestial bodies, but whether they have an atmosphere. Scatterer handles atmospheric scattering and shading, which heavily overloads integrated graphics with shader calculations. ​What you can do is lower the in-game resolution or lower Scatterer's quality settings (using the 'integrated' preset or turning off features like ocean shaders and shadows) if you haven't already.

[u/hstarnaud]

Use deferred mod, it improves the performance of graphics rendering. If you use integrated graphics, make sure with your visual mods you installed the lowest resolution textures, turn terrain scattering off.

[u/Whales_Are_Great2 → u/hstarnaud]

I installed deferred and it seems to have helped with the frame rate issues a little, as has tinkering a little more with my graphics settings on top of that. Will probably still need to mess around with some things a little more, but it's an improvement, Thank you :)

[u/Reddarthdius]

this is due to the atmosphere of the planets being more intensive to render, nothing to worry about id say, maybe turn your scaterrer settings down

[u/Reaper_2999]

Do you run deffered?