Rex

I flew in VR for about 2 hours, and the map looked good to me. Keep in mind that I flew with only one unit on the map, the one I was flying, but I didn't notice any stuttering. I predominantly flew through the two big cities, London and Paris, and I shot some stuff as I went along, but the map is smooth in VR on my hardware. At least without a lot of units on it.

Totally exceeded my expectations! London is excellent, and the density of Paris is stunning. Within the first hour I flew through the London Bridge, buzzed Windsor Castle, then went to Paris and did the same with the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triumph. There are so many beautiful, detailed things to destroy! I even learned something ... I had no idea that Paris had a Statue of Liberty-type statue next to a bridge, but I spotted it while flying low over the river. I can't wait to bomb the @#%^ out of it. Just kidding. It's totally a job for rockets. The only things missing to make you feel like you're actually *IN* 1944 Paris, are the white flags and rude waiters. Aside from that, it feels pretty damn close. I'm running a 2080Ti in both VR and on a 5120 x 1440 Ultra-Wide 49" monitor, and the models are sharp with FPS in the range of Normandy 1.0. Anyway, outstanding release. Just superb. And while I really appreciate the discount, It's such a massive upgrade to Normandy 1 that it's an entirely new map altogether, and I would not have balked at paying $60 for it. Anyone griping about paying < $20 for it is nuttier than a squirrel's turd, IMHO. This map was definitely worth the wait. Great job, and thanks for creating it. It has already begun to increase my enjoyment of DCS.

Damn, I almost thought it had been released this weekend. I refresh the DCS News page numerous times/day to see if this has been released yet, and DCS teased me a couple of days ago with a news item saying "Get Ready For Normandy 2!" Well, I am ready, and I'm not rich, but I could not care less how much it costs, because whatever they're charging is too little. I mean London? AND Paris? Holy #@$#$ing #$@$@$! Can you even imagine how time-consuming and tedious that has been. And I still love Normandy 1. Just the other day I found Mont Saint-Michel ... couldn't believe they had it modeled in detail. As for me, I'll re-buy Normandy 1, Re-buy Channel 1, Re-buy Persian Gulf, Re-buy South Atlantic, lose my existing missions, lose my virginity again (yeah ... "again" ... that's my position and I'm sticking with it), dance at your third-cousin's wedding, and eat my own pinky toe if that's what it takes to get this released. Name your price, I'm paying it ... even if I gotta shake my money-maker to do it. Please, take my money. Soon. The sooner the better. Thank you.

From the latest release notes: Ground units. Units dying with agony do not burn after explosion - Fixed. Uh thanks ED for, uh, you know, making the units dying in agony, uh, you know ... burn ... after ... explosions. I was getting rather sick of the units dying with agony, not ... you know ... burning. Glad we put this whole non-burning in agony episode behind us.

Got it .... yeah, I have a DD1 for iRacing (because the DD2 was perpetually sold out for a year). I stepped up from a T300, so I imagine it's like that difference in quality. I smell what you're cooking.

There's still 5 hours and 51 minutes left in April 10th in my timezone. It could still happen!

Nah, this is what they said in the release: "The pre-order [is] currently planned for the 15th of February, 2023. Once the pre-order begins, we anticipate the F-15E to be released into Early Access a few months later and perhaps sooner." I get that it could still slip, study-level mil aircraft have to be mind-bogglingly complex, and are probably never truly "done", but if you pay close attention, I think you'll find that RAZBAM has been telegraphing the release date all along. Check this out ... F15E CFTs can hold 10,400 kg of fuel in total. Get rid of the trailing zeros, flip the numbers before and after the comma, and that makes 4,10, or 4/10 ... April 10th. But wait, there's more. Each PW F100 engine puts out 23,770 lbf in full afterburner. Take the numbers before the comma, and what do we have now? That's right, 4/10/23! BOOYAH! We're almost there, oh ye of little faith!

I mainly fly jets, I’ve just recently begun flying the warbirds and can’t dogfight without trashing the plane because I have no idea where the pull limit is until it flips inverted and heads for the ground. The Concorde, the Space Shuttle, FFB sticks, Tabasco Cheese-Its, all gone. What is the world coming to? Not saying it’s all negative. We’ve identified two or three dozen new genders, so at least we’re heading in the right direction on the stuff that matters. Alas, I’m not real keen on used joysticks. Is the Bruner stuff just as “good” as the old sidewinder FFB? Is it the same thing?

^ Fixed that for you. Your initial version was impossible, Mr. Putin, the United States of America has a robust, competition-driven market that is the envy of the world.

I'm having great difficulty flying warbirds without pulling into flight departure. Warbirds are the one area where lack of FFB is really a handicap. For me at least. Has anyone found a flight stick with good enough effects that let you know where the pull limit is on the WW2 planes?

IS IT HERE YET??!!!! It's April, and technically *could* be here, so is it? Is it here yet? I know you're getting sick of the question, so let me rephrase it: Here yet it is? Or yet is here it? If not, is it almost here yet it is? I'm aware that you cannot be specific, so how about this .... on a scale of 1 - 1000, with each number representing the number of days from today that the module will be ready, what number would it be? I'm not asking for the hour, minute, or second, or anything crazy like that. Or maybe you can reply, and the number of characters in your reply can indicate the number of days remaining until it's available? How about the $20 trick? Would the $20 trick work? You know that thing where if you slip Vegas hotel clerks an extra $20, they hook you up with room upgrades ... if I slip you a little sumpin-sumpin, will the module appear faster for me? Would be pretty cool if I could zip around these other guys, handing out AMRAAM suppositories like Tic-Tacs, while they point at the monitor screaming "but ... but .. whaaa ... what .... who ... HOW does he have it already?! !" Come on, fellas, together we can make the dream a reality. Do you hear that sound? That's destiny calling. Pick up the phone. PICK UP THE PHONE!!! So yeah, anyway, is it here yet?

Oh wow, awesome. This util is how I launch DCS and this looks sweet!

With that being said, I found another set of benchmarks which would support your conclusions in some gaming titles: http://www.redgamingtech.com/does-intel-hyper-threading-hurt-gaming-performance-i9-9900k-analysis/ BF5 is about 5 frames faster across the board with HT disabled, and with DX11 it is massively faster with Max settings ... 163FPS with HT off vs 131 with it on.

I don't think this is true. At least not always. Highly-CPU-intensive tasks usually benefit from SMT to some degree. Handbrake is one of the most CPU-intensive tasks you can run, and even it benefits from SMT a little bit. Some CPU-bottlenecked apps run worse, but most run a bit better. I may be off, but if I had to take a complete stab in the dark, the DCS render threads are probably somewhere around Cinebench or Blender, with the logic cores probably in the Geekbench neighborhood. I think DCS has to pull from RAM quite a bit, and it needs to talk to the GPU, network cards, disk drive, etc. This would yield enough idle cycles to make SMT beneficial.

Per DCS, it seems to depend on how many cores/threads you have. From the MT FAQ: (emphasis mine) I imagine most people have fewer than 33 cores, and thus should leave HT on? It looks like the logic threads will use all available cores, but the rendering threads will use a max of 8 P-Cores if Hyper-threaded. At least in theory, I supposed everyone's MMV.

It even made my 1,500 unit Omaha Beach scenario marginally playable by doubling the framerate! This is my entire "master" D-Day mission which I always reduce from before actually playing. Same Game-Master view from the beach for roughly the first 5 minutes of the mission. Single-Threaded: 11-03-2023, 16:01:32 DCS.exe benchmark completed, 4874 frames rendered in 294.985 s Average framerate : 16.5 FPS Minimum framerate : 11.8 FPS Maximum framerate : 51.0 FPS 1% low framerate : 5.2 FPS 0.1% low framerate : 2.4 FPS Multi-Threaded: 11-03-2023, 16:10:30 DCS.exe benchmark completed, 9213 frames rendered in 272.282 s Average framerate : 33.8 FPS Minimum framerate : 25.5 FPS Maximum framerate : 45.9 FPS 1% low framerate : 7.9 FPS 0.1% low framerate : 5.8 FPS Not bad for 300+ Higgins Boats, every WN Strongpoints, Troop Ships, LSTs, Allied Bombing Campaigns, Artillery Batteries, etc.

Yeah, I'm finally pinning my 2080Ti, which used to be difficult to do as the CPU rarely let it get there. I see the GPU @ 100% as an extremely positive thing. Your GPU is finally getting to use it's full performance, whereas, to this point, the CPU has been the limiter.

I loaded up a mission that I struggle to get 30fps on, and I was hovering in the 90s with runs to 120 (the max refresh for my monitor and the FPS limit I set). It's running everything significantly faster. I have an 8-core/16-thread CPU, and I used to never see more than about 15% CPU utilization MAX during DCS (given that most cores were idle), but now it's using 70% of my CPU, which means I'm maxing out numerous cores. My 2080Ti finally sees 100% utilization too. While it helps VR to some extent (I had one VR session glitch down to like 11FPS, but most held 40-80), from my testing, my monitor (5120 x 1440) sees a much larger benefit. I gotta be honest, ED didn't seemed super-optimistic that MT was going to be a huge deal, so my expectations were fairly low. I figured they'd throw some damage-model tasks to a couple of other threads, and call it a day. I figured it would help a little, but not be overwhelming (kind of like when iRacing threaded their damage models). After a couple hours of use, however, this seems like a game-changer to me. Really nice job, from what I've seen so far, it finally makes those multi-core gaming CPUs worth the money, and it lets the graphics cards use all of their resources.

Dear sweet mother of HeyZeus the dancing giraffe, please tell me that EA has nothing to do with any of this.

sorry just saw this ... sure, I'll generate one

This keeps happening to me and it's driving me crazy. Did you ever find a cause? Sometimes I can recover it by doing a CTRL+S, and sometimes it will CTD.

I have trouble flying warbirds due to lack of FFB. In the heat of battle I tend to pull too hard because I can't feel any buffeting or resistance (beyond the stick springs). Do you mind if I ask which stick you use?

I have a work-in-progress "base mission" for Normandy which is just some trigger zones, labels and markers that I created in the "Draw" feature. (example attached). Question: Is there a way to import drawings into an existing mission? I tried making it a static template, but that didn't work, and the template contained nothing.

That's comforting ... somewhat. I think. You'll excuse me for being a little jaded, though. If they sell, they'll lose the ability to fulfill that promise. "Even ardent supporters of the company were immediately skeptical that Facebook’s business model could rot the foundation of Oculus’ VR ambitions with invasive user-tracking and ad serving. To assuage such fears, Facebook, on behalf of Oculus’ founder, Palmer Luckey, promised in no uncertain terms that users would never be required to log-in with Facebook to Oculus headsets, nor would developers need to do so to develop content for those headsets. It was the day of the announcement of Oculus’ acquisition that Luckey took to the Oculus community on Reddit to offer explanations to angry supporters. “I guarantee that you won’t need to log into your Facebook account every time you wanna use the Oculus Rift,” he said in response to a Redditor asking if he could at least promise that much. Yesterday the company demolished that promise when it announced that it would begin requiring all new users of Oculus headsets to log-in with a Facebook account starting in October, and that existing users would also be required to log-in by the end of 2022 if they wanted to retain full use of their headsets. "

I'm not knocking your decision whatsoever. To each their own. I don't use Steam for DCS (I personally don't want ED to take the 30% haircut), but I do use it for some games (I could give a frig less if EA takes a 30% haircut, or a 90% haircut for that matter). That said, I often worry about having so many games under one tent. If Steam's servers go down, or they go out of business, there's going to be a whole bunch of things that I can't play. A few weeks ago I couldn't launch anything until I updated Steam, and the update server wasn't in good shape (at least from my network), leaving me without my content for maybe an hour ... admittedly not long ... but enough to realize "oh crap, I have so much tied up in that thing that if Steam has a bad hair day, I'm out quite a bit of my content". I get the convenience, but centralization is kind of a double-edged sword. One company could take 20, 30, 50, 100 of your titles (and thousands of your entertainment dollars) with them if they go down. I mean, if you worry about such things.