Gents.. First of all, sorry for the late reply. We have been struck with COVID, and it was not funny.
As for the problem, I followed your advice... the shader errors are gone. thanks for that.
As for the crashes, they initially seemed to persists with the same error. Even after setting the power plan to "Best Performance".
Then I moved on and in the Nvidia settings, i created a profile for DCS, also setting the powerplan to "Best Performance".. still no joy
Then I got an epiphany..... Thinking about Flappie's OC remark. Turns out I have the Aorus engine running for my graphics card and have the OC set to autoscanning. Looks like the app scans for OC opportunities during gameplay and adjusts the OC on the fly. turned it off and have been flying a few missions without crashes. Interesting enough, the iRacing frameskips I had seem to be gone as well.
Thanks for the suggestions, pointers and help. I hope the above can be added to the "things to check" if someone runs into a similar issue.