It IS asparagus staged ._.
In fact, .18.4 gave me a large fps boost on large crafts and my station.
KSP 0.18.4 has been ported into the new Unity4 engine but has yet to make use of the new features such as GPU offlloading and multicore processing etc. When KSP's code has been updated to make use of these new features we should see some major performance increases.
duna
KOSP