MadKreator

These are the type of newsletter we ( most of us) like! Progress update on the things we want the most. A little bit of description of why or why not or at least an approximation of where things stand. It all sounds great. Hoping for an amazing year for ED, DCS and all of us who thrive on what you bring us. Can’t wait for things on this list to come into fruition!

Processor, mobo and ram..I’d basically buy newer versions of exactly what you have.. even my couple generations old build( in signature), runs dcs and every other game no problem… I would recommend 64 gigs of ram though at 3600 mhz at least if sticking with ddr4 . I’ve had some missions and map combos in dcs run over 40 gigs by itself, dcs likes a lot of memory and faster is better lol Personally I think an i9 is way overkill for games. My ( now outdated) 11700k only runs at about 9% in dcs, and almost never over 20 in anything else I play. I ran a 2080s on a 3440x1440 just fine, only struggled a bit when I went to a 5120x1440. Then I lucked out and got a 3080 from a buddy who had a spare laying around unopened.. Just got the 4080 to start the next upgrade process but my system doesn’t struggle so I may wait until 14th gen. I’d go with the core first, then shoot for a bigger gpu and power supply if necessary later on. 30 series are a big step up from 20’s and they’re back to normal prices and available and they don’t disappoint if you want to save a few bucks over the 40 series. You can make $1000 work fine but maybe hard pressed to include a gpu in there, especially if going for LGA 1700 12th/13th gen equipment. I would try with your gpu and see how you fair by upgrading the rest. Going from a 6th gen to 11th gen for me was a huge step up in dcs performance and ability. DCS need processing power much more than graphical at this point in time. Even with my setup and a 4080 capped at 60fps( because I use helios on a touchscreen and it makes the gauges smoother) some missions will still drop me under that due to the processing/ cpu bottlenecks dcs has. Freeflight, uncapped with almost all graphics maxed it easily pushes in the 130-150 fps range but when that drops below 60 when dcs starts thinking about things, well, that tells you something

I bought the 4080 a few days ago, was headed out the door to Best Buy to pick up, she says oh wait I want to go…(damn.. busted). I pick it up, she asks “what on earth is that thing, how much was it”. I quietly mutter $1200… she looks at me and says.. “ you sure do love your computer stuff don’t you” . Quick and painless LOL ( truth is she’s a really good person and neither of us care what the other wants to buy) But i still get the WTF look.. must be a baseline thing wives are required to do

Personally I’d go with the WW hotas Max package with the f-18 throttle. Just because those couple extra hats/ buttons on the stick will definitely come in handy.. especially if you get into flying the a-10lol I use a vkb gunfighter ultimate and I’m very very happy that it has the few extra controls like the hotas max.. I have the Orion 1 f-18 throttle and I do really like it, never felt the need to change it out for something different. I will say that the WW simapp pro software is junk IMO. Use it to update and calibrate things and set switches /levers how you like and the lighting level of the throttle, then never turn it on again unless you havre to lol Also go into the dcs export.lua after you install it and delete the two lines of code it writes in there. It messed with mine, and many others, game performance. You wont get stick vibrations or the a/a, a/g light turning on and off but the wonky performance hit isn’t worth it… for me and in my experience anyway.

I just told my wife that you cost me another $2000…. She gave you the “ I’m NOT f’ing impressed” look j/k ..that’s awesome. Soon enough I will take the plunge, after I get done paying taxes

@SharpeXB on a quick side inquiry. According to your signature 19-13900k @6.2.. Does it push that with the ASUS Ai overclock? Or do you have the know how to manually tweak that.. Impressive number in my book! Every time I see you post and read your sig, I can feel the dollars falling from my wallet sooner than later lol

I don’t have any issues fps wise since I cap mine at 60 anyway so helios gauges move nice and smooth, allowing me to crank the graphics and such up and let me run ssao and sslr without any noticeable difference. ( averaging in the 85-100 range normally) I can definitely see the cpu binding in almost every scenario. When my fps starts dropping below 60 around heavily active airports or large missions, its for sure not the graphical side lol

Same here. I found in the other civilian flight sim, that I only play in VR now, that I actually have better performance and better visuals with dlss turned off. In pancake I turn it on and it seems to help, but not so much in VR for me. DCS I only play in pancake because I like seeing all of my controls and helios screen etc. So I’m excited for the feature, even though at this point graphics wise, on my system I don’t really need it. I am curious, and strictly curious, of whether if dlss was implemented right now, would there be any benefit. Or if Multicore/ multithreading would need to be implemented first for users to see any real improvement with DLSS or FSR. @SkateZilla? Maybe there is too many variables to know for sure

Sounds like a good selectable option to me! It would definitely add an extra element of strategy to a SP campaign. MP may be tough to pull off for the general servers, but more focused ones, groups that host specific campaigns/missions like Tactical DCS or any squadron really ,It could very well be a good implementation! Personally when I hop on multiplayer, I like to find an objective work with people in there, if anyone is willing, do my thing and then I’m usually done for the evening. Very rarely do I continually play for hours on end. But it could open up a whole new world of “hardcore” servers. On a single player campaign I would 100% activate a feature like that. Assuming the opposing AI side would follow suit as well.

I would have guessed Scandinavian / Norwegian, along those lines. That coming from my American ears. I imagine a viking size beast of a man.. Johan Hegg of Amon Amarth comes to mind lol

For the zoom in and out, invert the Z axis, just as you did the pitch. There is a place in opentrack to adjust the curves/ sensitivity and such.. A week ago I could have actually helped when I was playing around with it lol Now I deleted it so hopefully someone else will chime in. But it can be done for sure

Don’t forget to check out WinWing hardware too. Very good bang for the buck, although starting at double the price of the x56… vkb and virpil if you want to really dive in lol I love my vkb and winwing stuff.. ai track is a good intro to head tracking although it is laggy in comparison to others. I will say that if your webcam will do 60hz + it will be much better but honestly pales in comparison to how smooth trackIR is( since its camera is 120hz) . I’ve tried about all of them from the free-est of free, to modified ps3 eye’s with various head units, hat clips, powered units up to well, track IR, and it was well worth the money ( even though I bought it used on eBay, and use a third party wireless “ the puck” head unit, also from eBay). Upgrade your controls first, then dive into better head tracking ( or all at once if you prefer). Just my opinion of course on the whole matter. People are happy with what their happy with and nothing is wrong with that! - I should add that trackIR is smoothest when the game is running a solid 60fps, or 120fps.. In between or below it does get slightly jumpy/ stuttery with fast movements.. a little bit but not much.. I can run dcs in the 100fps range pretty easily but I cap mine at 60 just so track IR and Helios run the smoothest they can. The ps3-eye versions of head tracking would be smoothest at 45fps and 90fps in game( 90 hz camera), I would assume.

9 AM here, I got all day lol

haha finally did this.. You are a god-send! no more dumb ass bushes!

This is interesting. I use helios as well, and every thing on all of my profiles works just fine in regular f1 or alt f1 with no modification.... I have my helios code in the export.lua at the very top of the list.. I wonder if that causes dcs to export differently. I haven't changed anything on any of my profiles.

I love my 4080 FE , I have no regrets buying it. I came from a 3080xc and the 4080 obliterates it lol DCS still has many more bottlenecks which don’t yield as good of performance increase as other games, as of right now. But it did improve nonetheless. fs2020, cod, battlefield etc I saw huge gains in performance in pancake and VR. You wont go wrong with either.. you play a bit more for different cooling solutions, more lighting, and maybe a bit of overclock, which you can do with msi afterburner anyway, to any card, if you feel so inclined. with my quest2 , although not the greatest, I can just put fs2020 on high-end with dlss OFF in vr and its very smooth and looks great, large cities being the exception and heavily lit night time. Of course on a quest you cant see much difference between high and medium anyway. But the 4080 really brought vr to life for me. I still prefer dcs in pancake with my widescreen and helios though.

That would be fun! However as Rob10 said, the campaigns are probably locked… you may be able to do it with free ones from the user files download section, but it would be up to the creator whether you can modify it or not

This would be great… Several months ago in one of Wags’ f-16 videos, while he was in the ME there was an extra tab at the top that said “Dynamic Mission”… maybe, just maybe, the plan is to integrate the DC logic into single missions as well Or maybe the logic is being applied to single missions and then expanded to full campaigns.. they do sort of go hand in hand. Maybe not at all, who really knows. But it is something I would like to see as well.

I’m just over 500 gigs on my dcs OB install. Bought a 2TB drive just for games. DCS is welcome to have it all LOL

Yes! Very happy they found a way to implement this sort of thing. Hopefully it will carry over to other standard missions/ campaigns in the future. That would definitely help clientele with mid-lower end pc specs to enjoy the game without being a slideshow on heavy scenarios

Thank you for that explanation. While it ( the display brightness differential) can be annoying, I wouldn’t call it game breaking. We are very fortunate to have the export ability at all, and ED allowing 3rd party software, such as Helios to further add to that. I hope someday it will be looked at, until then, carry on! Looking forward to a great 2023. Thank you for all you guys do for us!

I like the idea of unit culling that are out of range but logically and mathematically they are still there and functioning so not to just put system performance in the can, but let the campaign progress in real time. Then I’d assume that as you get “in range” they will fully render and be 100% active units. Sounds like this is a much needed thing for all missions and campaigns

I read the other day its mostly the type of anti-aliasing that DCS uses. fs2020, for example uses a different kind, TAA, which i guess applies antialiasing to the entire screen as opposed to each individual object and it severely reduces the shimmering. Hopefully the new game engine will have some of these more modern settings when it comes out. But I don’t really know, could be any number or combination of things

4080 is a beast, very happy with mine! Came from a 3080 and, while dcs performance increase is marginal during missions ( not because of the card, because of the rest of the bottlenecks in dcs) the4080 blows the 3080 right out of the water on every other game by a long shot. I did see a good improvement in VR on both DCS and MSFS 2020. Much more of fs2020 than dcs. Granted I’m using a quest 2 but I left all of my high/ maxed out pancake settings the same, just turned off terrain shadows, and put the regular shadow setting to flat, and it purrs right along at 90 fps, 11ms frametime, and it seems to hold very solid. That was in one of the a-10c premade missions, not just freeflight. Headset is on x1.4 resolution in oculus, and in the OTT all I did was set the FOV multiplier to .8 ( since the fov isn’t great in it anyway) but I’ve had that setting for a long time. I do run msaa at x2 and anisotropic at x16, textures high, water high, clouds ultra, civ traffic medium, dirt/flare on, cockpit displays 1024. Makes me want to step up and get a reverb g2. I don’t fly in vr much because I’m a graphics kinda guy. I love the looks on my 5120x1440 monitor and with the quest2, looking like an original xbox at best, it’s really tough for me to enjoy it ( and the shimmering drives me nuts). Now I’m trailing off subject…. The 4080 is awesome… If you have a varjo aero, you prob want a 4090, but if you want to save that bit of cash to put toward something else, the 4080 is far, far from a bad choice! Never tried anything with AMD but from the video comparisons it seems to be great as well.

Check out the videos in this post. Goes over some good tip with WMR, open XR toolkit etc, and some tuning.. granted he’s doing it on MSFS but the idea is the same. The OP also figured out that part of his issue was in fact the usb not supplying enough power and added the usb pcie card and fixed his connection issues. I use Quest 2 so none of this applies to me but I watched them and seems to give a decent rundown of setting up the headset, windows, WMR, and open XR properly.