MoleUK

Just a stab in the dark, but the RT problem could be a vulkan problem? Quad view won't work with vulkan at all, unless ED take steps to implement a specific solution. From my understanting the way the C130 developers got RT working in DCS was via a vulkan renderer that then translated back into DX11. They might need to take specific steps to get that working with quad view. Mbucchia (developer of OpenXRtoolkit and quadview) touched on it here: As for stuff not appearing right, that is also something that can happen on a wider scale with quadview. Sometimes the terrain etc can appear the wrong resolution or shade of brightness.

Reducing LOD below 1.0 starts to cause some visual issues/quirks. Because the LOD's seemingly aren't standardised from module to module, things can start to appear incorrectly. Disappearing pylons etc, or some helicopters almost disappearing entirely. It's a bit of a mess. And if the OP's 5080 is running into this problem, he's only one tier below the fastest GPU money can buy atm. So upgrading the PC might also not work out. Ideally ED would split up the settings so we could pick and choose which planes/modules we want to be rendered in high quality and which we don't. Or just even separate the detail setting on the module you're flying from all the others. This would help with performance, rather than have them all running on the same setting. But that's been on the wish list for years.

I swear windows really does hate DCS. The list of windows tweaks that do appear to help fix DCS performance issues continues to get longer.

Yup, I also have an ALC1200 and also experience stutters when players join/disconnect/reslot. However in my experience this has only ever happened on servers using non-dynamic slots, and only when that server is typically experiencing higher load. But it's never been 100% consistent and I have barely been playing for the last 6+ months. I'd be very surprised if it is a problem on the user side (or user side hardware even) rather than something server side or inherent to the game, but with DCS all kinds of weird jank and performance quirks are possible.

It being down to audio driver issues would be interesting. I have seen some users report disabling audio in device manager fixed some freezing issues previously. They were using a Realtek ALC1200. I believe Helldivers 2 recently had stutter issues after updating their wwise audio as well. Windows has always been finnicky with audio stuff.

Yeah imo it's unlikely to make much/any difference. I will note again that servers that use dynamic slots (and only dynamic slots) tend to suffer less from this problem overall I think. On servers that have both dynamic and non-dynamic, while role select is open on the non-dynamic slots you will get stutters when players join/dc. If you switch to the list of dynamic slots, the stutters stop. At least last time I did testing on this. I'm guessing the role select/join/disconnect stutters only overspill into general gameplay when the server starts to chug. Which again might be avoided entirely if the server only uses dynamic slots to reduce the strain when the list refreshes. But whatever way ED have the UI refreshing stuff just seems to be problematic if it's causing hiccups for modern CPU's/servers.

I never did monitor network usage spikes during the stutters when players connect/disconnect/reslot. While I can say that every single person connected to the server gets the stutters at the same time when this is happening (and this has been the case for years), I can't speak to how the severity of the drops might differ between machines. Never tested it. Some hardware/software setups might recover from the stutters quicker tho for sure. Mine are fairly minimal, except when role select is open. If you leave role select open the stutters when players join/disconnect/reslot get way way more severe. Which again says to me it's more about the game itself not being optimised well for long lists or refreshing the UI, in the same way that it really struggles when refreshing the list of MP servers. This is probably completely unrelated and is a shot in the dark, but is there any chance that the machine that suffers more severely from the stutters (the 9800X3D) also have 1-2 CPU cores pegged at 100% CPU load even while idle on the main menu? This is a known bug/issue, but I don't know if it's been connected to actual performance problems directly. If it does show that behavior, please check if your wifes machine suffers from the same bug or not.

Gotcha, got my wires crossed there.

The stutters when players join/disconnect is very intermittent. It will only happen on some servers, and only some of the time. You mentioned using your wifes machine earlier, you might want to try having both machines logged into the same server at the same time if possible. You will likely see them both stutter at the exact same moments. A server like growling sidewinder for example is far less likely to have any of these join/disconnect stutters, but a more busy server like 4YA will have them more often. Particularly if 4YA are still using non dynamic slots, I haven't checked in a while if they're still on the old slots or not.

Oh, and there is one other MP specific stutter bug to be aware of. It was partially fixed earlier this year/last year (it was VERY bad for a while), but it's not gone entirely by any means. Sometimes ground units taking damage from certain munitions (or certain units being damaged at all) would also cause server wide stutters. Mavericks in particular were bad for triggering them. These stutters when ground and naval units were taking fire would also show up in track replays in a repeatable fashion, so it's possible they affected SP just as badly. But generally the more complex the MP mission and the more ground units there are the more the odd performance issues start to stack up. Keep an eye on the chat feed for AI units being killed that coincide with the stutters, as well as players joining/disconnecting/dying. You might see some of them match up.

The X3D's also perform much better at 1% and 0.1% lows. Unfortunately stutters in DCS in VR are notoriously tricky to track down. It can be memory, vram, third party monitoring overlays/apps (CPU temp monitoring, RTSS, MSI afterburner etc), antivirus software, the CPU itself, BIOS settings (or bad BIOS versions), the GPU or specific GPU driver versions, issues in the VR software itself, wireless problems if playing in wireless VR, usb problems if over USB. And then there are the DCS bugs and server side performance issues. That's without even getting started on in-game settings. Just got to go through it all to track them down. It does get frustrating. The stutters when players join/disconnect you can at least rule out as something you can't control. It happens to every user connected to the server when it's happening, not just you.

Possibly. But even 1 CPU core shouldn't be struggling with stuff like this, I suspect it's more a poor implementation than it is a single threaded problem. You can also see the game struggle to update the list of MP servers, and when initially choosing a role on joining a server with lots of slots. And even when you aren't getting stutters when players join/disconnect during general gameplay, if you keep the score tab/player list or role select open you will start getting them when players join/dc. You can see it struggle to update/refresh the player list. Something causes the CPU to come to a standstill or hiccup if only momentarily. They could all be unrelated to eachother, but they all feel symptomatic of a single problem imo.

That's an old bug/performance issue, you can't fix that client side as it's not your hardware that is the problem. ED need to fix it. It can also occur when players die and are automatically slotted into new aircraft, or when they manually change slots. Doesn't happen every time, seems to start happening when a server starts getting overwhelmed. Could also be down to server specific slot blocker stuff as well, but i'm skeptical about that. I took this footage over a year ago (timestamped to show the join/dc/reslot events lining up with stutters), and it was far from the first time that the join/dc/reslot stutter issue cropped up for me. Servers that only use dynamic slots seem to suffer from this issue less often, presumably because the game/server is not refreshing hundreds or thousands of slots every time someone joins/dc's/reslots. Theoretically the game should be more than capable of refreshing a list of slots even if it's thousands of them without a performance hiccup. But whatever way ED implemented it (before dynamic slots were introduced) wasn't designed to handle that many slots in MP, at least at a guess.

The point here is that it can happen with perfect frametimes. The animation errors won't necessarily show up on a frametime graph at all, they will just show visually. Because they aren't frametime stutters.

Just to add, some users report that it happens inconsistently on DCS start. ie starting the game up 5 times in a row will result in mouse polling above 125hz causing problems 3 or 4 times out of 5. Also, reducing the polling rate to 125hz does not entirely "fix" the problem. You will still see the frametime react to mouse movement at 125hz, just not in a way that impacts overall visuals at that point.