Tea-Pig

Oh how I wish I'd seen this thread a few months ago. I've just been reading it thinking it's exactly my experience: expensive new system, works great with everything except DCS which is a stutterfest. And for me the solution was the same: wipe DCS completely and reinstall from scratch (I didn't wipe Windows). So I'm leaving this comment to bump up the thread and hope it gets noticed by some other stutter sufferers.

I've made some Authentikit stuff and the Mosquito throttle is on my to do list, right after I finish the current Heli collective project. Authentikit stuff is brilliantly designed and generally features ball bearings, adjustable friction and damping so the feel is better than you might think. It is plastic of course and can be a bit flimsy but if something breaks you can just print a replacement part. If you want things to assemble as easily as in the videos you need a decent and reliable printer and know how to set it up and calibrate it accurately, and this is I think the biggest challenge. It's very satisfying to use stuff when you've made it yourself.

The South Atlantic map seems to divide opinions. Some reviewers praise it for offering something different and amazing terrain, some criticize it for apparently patchy quality and poor frame rates. Most reviews are older than recent updates so may, or may not now be invalid. As a potential purchaser it's hard to not see the lack of free trial as a lack of confidence by the developer in their product. In the absence of consistently good reviews I can't see that I'll buy without a trial.

Thanks for clarifying @BIGNEWY. Like others, I had a yuk knee-jerk reaction to the thought of having to have some bit of Google spyware just to play DCS but on further research it seems quite innocuous really. And the free trials are a very nice and generous feature of DCS.

Well if it's just for website access then I think I'm going to give it a go. My Facebook and Steam accounts have both been stolen in the last couple of years. Facebook were worse than useless and showed no interest at all but Steam did manage to recover my account with them. I've got a lot more invested in my DCS account and wouldn't want to lose it.

Does this not defeat the whole point of 2FA, or are we taking the view that hackers wouldn't have DCS installed? Also, if I enable 2FA on my account, does that mean I have to fart around with a phone every time I launch the game or is it just for account access?

Thank you to @The_Nephilim for taking the time to look through my log. I've run several benchmarks and apparently my system is pretty good for its spec. The page file thing is a new one for me. Something else to fiddle with in the war against stutters. In the meantime it seems I have made some very significant improvement. The prolonged and most objectional stutters seem to be gone and the frequency of the micro stutters seems to be down from about one every ten seconds average to just occasional, so still a bit annoying but no longer hideous. Unfortunately my expectations from recent tinkering were pretty much zero and I stopped being methodical and trying one thing at a time. I did a load of stuff together and don't know what exactly is the significant bit. In a fit of disgust I deleted DCS completely, intending to never play it again. Everything went, game, saved games, control mapping, the lot. I think the level of disgust might be an important factor here as it really makes you want to get rid of every last vestige of the game. The next day the thought of never flying the Mosquito (even though ED have totally screwed up its ground handling), or the Skyhawk, or the FW190 was too much and I installed it all again. I've done a load of cleans and repairs before and my installation wasn't very old but maybe a good ol' clean out and reload reaches the parts that clean and repairs don't. While it was downloading I found there is a new Nvidea driver so I updated to that. Then I went through the stuff suggested by @Flappie in this thread and copied as many of them as I could. I've been through this before but did it again. The bit about HPET seemed a bit scary so I kept away from that. There's also a VR prerendered frames setting in Nvidea which sounds like the sort of thing that might reduce stuttering but doesn't. I had it set to 3 and changed it back to 1. I uninstalled Process Lassoo. There has been much talk of core management issues but I think a lot of it only relates to Intel CPUs. I never got any improvement from my AMD so I got rid of Lassoo and any botch up settings I might have made. I've also done something with Windows power management. Not sure what I've done but my PC now just restarts when told to shut down so I've obviously screwed something up. I had this service disabled previously with no noticeable effect. I re-enabled it and set everything to max performance but seem to have done something more to it. And the result of all this is like a night and day improvement. Definitely not just a hopeful placebo effect. Almost no stutters in menus or when paused, and just a few dropped frames in game, usually when something happens like fire a weapon or look around quickly. For the first time I feel like I'm actually seeing the sort of results that my expensive system should be capable of. Got the eye candy dialled up now, shadows, AA, clouds, textures all up and still running pretty smoothly. Hopefully it will stay that way.

Back in December I bought a new and very expensive PC to replace my pretty decent 3070/5800 based system, in the hope and expectation of finding the best possible performance in DCS and then upgrade my VR headset to something better than my Reverb G2. The new PC has all the stuff: 4090,R7-7800x3d,6GHz RAM etc... What has followed has been three months of frustration and disappointment. While the new system has indeed perked up MSFS and IL2, the performance in DCS is barely better than my old system, possibly actually worse. The problem is stuttering. Apparently random micro-stutters and longer, prolonged stutters too. These stutters occur when playing on any map with any aircraft and seem unrelated to the complexity of the scene or the graphics settings in DCS. They occur with the game paused, and EVEN ON THE START MENU PAGE. I have spent many hours searching for a solution, both here and elsewhere on the web, and slavishly tried every suggested fix mentioned. DCS settings, PC power, Hotplug, Core affinity (maybe only for intel?), disabled antivirus, windows priorities, game mode on/off, disconnect from network, remove USB devices, rolled back to 2.8, etc etc. Nothing seems to make the slightest difference. The general performance of my system seems very good. I can get good framerates in VR with reasonably high settings even in cluttered scenarios, but the continual stutters just ruin ruin everything. I get the impression that I might be unusual in that I'm getting stuttering when paused and in the start menu, so maybe someone can suggest something new? Thanks in advance to anyone who tries to help. At the moment I feel like I'm at the end of the road with DCS. dxdiag.txt dcs.log

Replacement Reverb cable came today and fortunately seems have fixed things, so I'm spared having to decide on where to go next for a while at least. I still feel tempted to try a Pico4 though.

My Reverb G2 has just died. I'm hoping it's just the cable, but if not then I too will be looking for something to replace it. There doesn't seem to be an obvious successor to the Reverb. Perhaps the Pico4 is close, and so cheap (£299 on Amazon at the mo) it might be daft not to try it, although the setup for DCS looks to be not exactly straightforward (26 page thread on here). Or maybe stepping up to the Aero? Seems like a safe, mature option. I see people saying it's only(!) £8-900 now, but the Varjo shop says that's without VAT, and it needs a lighthouse (£150?) And it's 90Hz refresh only. What eye candy compromise is going to be necessary to achieve 90FPS given that it's hard enough to get 60 for the Reverb? Or a Crystal? 8% off at the mo. Some rave about the visuals, others rant about lack of comfort, poor build quality and traumatic software. Or a Bigscreen Beyond? Why is it $999 in the US but £1149 in the UK? And three months delivery? Or choose to re-join the Zuckerman data mining empire with a Quest xxx? After tasting the Meta idea of customer service when my Facebook account was hacked and stolen.... not for me. Or maybe just get a cheap Reverb off Ebay to tide me over until the muddy VR waters become clearer.

Well thanks for saving me a dose of Googling... Hope the build goes smoothly. Please let us know. I think I'm going to try to be patient and improve my limited knowledge before taking the plunge, unless anything irresistible appears in the sale season.

So if you don't mind me asking @frostycab, what's the final damage to your bank account?

Ah, @frostycab, you say you're an idiot with specs but you're apparently still well above me. At my level of knowledge a 4090 is just a 4090. Maybe an Asus is a bit better than a Zotac but I wouldn't really know. I just thought I'd mention the Stormforce because it seems like pretty good value, but you clearly have some specific stuff in mind. And thanks @LucShep for the suggestion to upgrade my existing. Maybe I'll go that way but a 4090, CPU and power supply puts me well on the way to the cost of a new setup.

I'm reading this thread with great interest because I'm in a similar situation. I have a Ryzen 7 5800/RTX3070 based system and it's not cutting it for me. I could upgrade it with perhaps a 4070TI or 4080 for £1000ish but somehow I think I'll always regret not going all in and getting complete new 4090 system. For what it's worth Stormforce have some pre-built systems with very close specs to what is being proposed here. The three year warranty attracts me away from building a custom system. I'm feeling drawn to the Prism 6308 at £3300. https://www.stormforcegaming.co.uk/product/prism-6308-rtx-4090-intel-i9-13900k-powered-by-asus/

Pure gold. Many thanks for this. Hunting for the stupid mouse cursor has been one of the most annoying and fun-spoiling things about DCS for me and this plug in is making it at least tolerable.

I would think you could use Joystick Gremlin to do this. I haven't got an x56 but it's worked for me on several other sticks.

I'll add my my voice to requesting the track record/replay system gets fixed. Surely this is a fundamental core part of any flight sim.

In my opinion the Mosquito is rather easier than the Spitfire to take off in, so if you can manage the Spit then it's unlikely to be your technique that's to blame. Perhaps your prop pitch is stuck in coarse or the throttles are not opening fully and that's preventing you from accelerating to rotate speed.

Thanks for this thread. Sorted my problem.

I've got a Warthog too, at least the throttle half of it, but I've also got devices from the likes of Crosswind and Logitech so I decided to invest my time in learning a software that can talk to any device rather than Target which appears only to be interested in Thrustmaster products.

I don't see why the same technique would not work for trims, or indeed anything else that would benefit from a ramped start. I'm a newcomer to Gremlin myself, and indeed to DCS too (prospect of a Mossie hooked me in). Never really felt the need for fancy joystick management with IL2 but DCS is a whole different beast. I just got a warthog throttle specially for the Mossie (split throttles) and the eclectic selection of locking switches is making me learn more Gremlin tricks.

Sorry, I didn't see this thread and went and started another one when I should have just posted here. Hope it might help.

If your joystick doesn't have a convenient axis for brake control then this might help. Took me a little while to figure this out so I thought it was worth sharing.

Just worked for me too. Thanks.