MoleUK

This one definitely isn't fixed, as it routinely shows up when mouse polling is set to above 125hz. But only for some users. I don't know of any fix other than lowering the polling rate for affected users. Though generally speaking, some more CPU intensive games can struggle with polling rates above 1000hz. And mouse polling issues in DCS did seem to disappear for years until it's (somewhat) recent return.

These issues still remain with shadows off afaik. Not just in the F-5 but in many modules.

Settings/Options > Gameplay. It's on the right side of the screen: Spotting dots. Just under labels and above birds.

Yep just gotta hope it arrives in a somewhat timely manner. Some of the assets in DCS (trees in particular were really bad for shimmer) just really benefit from anti-aliasing. It's particlarly bad in VR, where the jaggies are extremely in your face and you have to pump the resolution to absurd numbers to get past it. Or you just enable DLAA and take the tradeoffs. It doesn't help that MSAA has never worked particularly well in DCS in my experience either, some have said it's due to the switch they made from forward rendering to deferred.

J and K both harm the spotting dots considerably with DLSS enabled. Particularly as those dots fly in front of cloud cover, as DLSS doesn't like that contrast at all. With just DLAA enabled, the impact isn't anywhere near as severe. Rolling back to the older non-transformer presets (C or F iirc) will also help the dots appear a bit better, but with obvious visual tradeoffs. Ultimately ED should give us the option to disable DLSS/DLAA from running on the spotting dots altogether, in the same way they have the MFD's. That's the only real 'fix' for this one. In the meantime, try settling for just DLAA. If that's still too negative an impact, go back to MSAA.

Others have run into this problem before. There's another recent thread floating around on it but can't find it. There is also a VR specific problem where the opposite happens, where opening F10 leads to the lighting going way too bright for a while. It appears to be HDR misfiring at a guess. Not the type of HDR found in monitors or in the system settings etc, it's the lighting technique used in gaming to brighten/darken scenes as you transition between light/dark areas. The kind of adaptive lighting/gamma system they have has always had some odd quirks imo, I wish we could disable it in the options.

Cheers, that's a good tweak to have available.

On some quick testing, it appears the spotting dot cap was increased from 100 to 1000. Compare the track with 900 ground assets in the distance vs 1000. This is a massive improvement, though I would have liked to seen it raised to 9999 (or several thousand) if possible to avoid any potential problems. Still, for most missions this should be more than fine. The only edge cases are likely to be missions with lots of infantry, as afaik each individual infantry model is assigned a dot. So hitting 1000+ units within a 80km by 80km square and hitting the dot cap becomes a bit easier if using mass infantry. Something for mission makers to keep in mind at least. new co alt test 900 abrams 70km behind air dots.trk new co alt test 1000 abrams 70km behind air dots.trk

For anyone following along, from ED's newsletter on the 18th: "Spotting dot rendering is being reworked to change the maximum number of dots that can be rendered simultaneously." https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/news/newsletters/b975d20c465e6c77afbdea6bce7a2b59/ Good to hear a fix is in the works. When it arrives, I will do some test runs and update the thread with the results.

That option is already available, just set them to off. There's a reason none of the larger MP servers force it to off, mind. Customers don't want to fly it that way in MP for the most part, and those that do can already launch 0 spotting servers. All that aside, it would be nice to see a fix arrive for the spotting dot cap bug/issue eventually. As my 'fix' is far from ideal.

Keep your LOD slider at 1.0 or above, setting it below 1.0 will result in disappearing ground and air assets. Also follow the steps to reduce global object draw distance here: Doing that will keep spotting dots appearing properly for the most part.

@Taz1004 Sorry for the ping, but just incase you haven't gone inactive: I've been using this since you first put it up as it's so damn useful. But I've had to reduce the text font size even further to try and reduce the size some of the server spam can take up on the screen. And even then it's not really enough. I noticed in the gameMessages.dlg file there's also some values for line heights and some H/W/X/Y values. Has anyone tried altering these to see if we can get the initial messages to appear further up? That way they wouldn't obstruct the view quite as badly. I'd much rather just look up to read the messages than have them overlap right in front of my face.

Visibility bump as this remains an issue. I think a few Contention regulars settled on 30km object draw distance to avoid dots disappearing. I also found an old video I took of the dots disappearing as I turned my head in their direction (and thus more distant ground objects came into the FOV), I recorded it in July 2023 so the problem is at least that old and possibly a fair bit older. Though I did find a forum thread claiming the dots disappearing was a new problem introduced not too long before May '23: That timeframe would roughly coincide with the introduction of the MT build (March '23). Some users I talked to did claim that the ST build had much better dot visibility and they stayed on it as long as possible, so it may be this problem was in fact introduced with the MT build of the game.

CPU cores being pegged at 100% (1 with SMT off, 2 with SMT on afaik) while on the main menu is actually an old problem that pre-dates this recent bug. But when those 1-2 cores were pegged at 100%, the other cores would mostly be idle and temps would be normal. Though I do wonder if the core pegging problem is related to this new spike in usage, as I never believed it was normal behavior. But it is long-standing. Thread on the core pegging here: I have always felt that there was something very off about the menu/UI performance generally in-game, something is using waaaaaay too much CPU time. But it's just a gut feeling I've had for years now. Just look at the way the game can absolutely chug while refreshing lists on server select, or when role select is open in MP servers. Ultimately it doesn't matter too much if it's only limited to the UI/Menu performance. But we have seen problems in the UI spillover into general performance problems before, when players joining servers (or just reslotting) cause a server-wide stutter due to the role select menu refreshing it's entire list.

It won't really affect hardware, modern CPU's will downclock to keep from getting damaged. And many are designed to run at 90c+ just fine. All it's currently doing is increasing CPU usage for no good reason. But it's almost certainly reducing performance in-game due to the increased CPU usage generally.

5800X3D here, I wasn't monitoring the temps on menu before but I was monitoring CPU usage. Before patch, two cores would peg to 100% usage constantly, with very little usage on other cores. So overall almost always around 13-16% CPU usage with SMT on. I never thought the two cores stuck at 100% was normal behavior, but it's been that way for a long time and is a widely reported problem/behavior. After patch on menu, CPU usage is all over the place. Lots of sawtoothing. Overall usage up to mid 20's to 30% usage, so it's definitely increased the load significantly. In a high airflow case that's resulting in 60c just on menu, which is high vs other games where I frequently only hit 60c+ in gameplay if that. ETA: I found some old SS's, I was previously idling on main menu at like 35-40c at worst.

Hah, seems the main thing might just be a fresh Windows reinstall. Though my install was only a month old, a reinstall (via ISO) still did the trick. A full windows install can nuke/delete a lot of things. But I have reinstalled all the previous mods/third party software and all the performance tweaks and it's all still fine atm. So I have no idea what problem it's fixing, but at least your issues are fixed as well now.

I put in more info on the latest post here. I absolutely cannot guarantee that rolling back to Win 11 23H2 will solve the long loading times for you, and it requires a total deletion of the boot drive so it's not a small step to take. If you do want to give it a crack, you can follow the steps outlined here to grab a 23H2 ISO to see if it works for you. Let me know if it does, but again please only take this step if you are fine with doing a full windows reinstall and losing the data on that drive.

Incase it does help anyone else: I've been on Win 11 24H2 since Oct last year, but due to a screwup on Microsofts end anyone who installed 24H2 via USB Media creation in October/November were stuck on that particular build and couldn't update. The only way to fix it was to completely reinstall 24H2. I kept putting this off, as DCS and all other games were working fine and I didn't want to delete everything on the boot drive. I took a break from DCS in Febuary/March (when everything was still working fine), and I finally finally relented and totally reinstalled 24H2 so I could keep getting security updates at the beginning of April. I also did this install via USB Media creation. Whatever went wrong for me was in that recent install of 24H2, whether just a bad windows install or something else. But the ONLY app/game that seemed to have issues with that new install of 24H2 was DCS. Everything else worked fine. Which to me would point towards a specific issue in the latest versions of 24H2 rather than a bad windows reinstall. And switching to 23H2 didn't just fix the freezing/CTD's, it also appears to have fixed the long load times. So it may be a wider problem, idk.

So, while I was experiencing a lot more than just long load times (CTD's and freezes as well), I just rolled back from Win 11 24H2 to Win 11 23H2. All problems are now gone. CTD's, freezes on main menu and server select, freezes on coalition select, and more importantly to this thread the long load times are gone too. Since my problems were more severe, it may not be related. But it could be that a recent 24H2 update is causing more problems generally. I had only installed that version of 24H2 at the start of April, all other games worked fine. Only DCS had problems. I installed it via usb using the media creation tool, which has caused issues specifically with 24H2 installs in the past.

I have now moved from Windows 11 24H2, to Windows 11 23H2. It has fixed all issues. No CTD's, no freeze on coalition select, no huge freezes on server select menu. No lockups on main menu. The mission loads (to both MP and SP are now extremely fast, no hanging on terrain load or net sim post start for minutes at a time. My DCS install, BIOS etc all remain the same as they were on 24H2. My overclocks/undervolts and XMP etc are all re-enabled, all SSD's and hardware is the same. So, in my case it was the very latest version of 24H2 that was causing all the issues with DCS. Potentially it could have been a bad install, but given some of the issues other users are seeing I suspect 24H2 has some new problems with DCS that have appeared in the last month or two. For now I will try and keep my system locked to 23H2. ^ See above mate. While I can't say moving to 23H2 will solve all your problems, it did mine. Doing so does mean deleting everything on the windows drive, so it's not a trivial. And potentially you will need to prevent it from auto-updating back to 24H2. Everything running great for me atm tho, will keep updating and reinstalling all my old software and see if the issue returns.

It's inconsistent. Either I get a quick load, or I get a loooong load with pauses on the terrain loading steps and on net sim post start for MP. I also see in task manager that DCS is sometimes put into 'efficiency mode' and it will also sometimes list the DCS process as 'suspended' during these loads. As well as listed as 'not responding' for periods of time. During the long loads, 2 CPU's are typically pegged at 100% usage with nothing else really going on. So I'd agree that it looks like a CPU issue. But I also now have a bunch of CTD's during loading screens, and various freezing issues. So my problems might not be related.

Spikes when players connect, disconnect and reslot is a problem with the slot system. On servers that only use dynamic slots, it stops happening. Doesn't take many non-dynamic slots to be active for it to start being a problem either. The same spikes happen but much more severely if you have role select open when the players join/disconnect/reslot. They won't happen when the dynamic slots page is open though. That's not something you can fix on the client side afaik.

I don't currently have the game running as admin, but I have noticed reference to the temp folder in the logs. Might be related to this bug? Just tried deleting the DCS temp folder but no change, still hanging on coalition select with 2 cores pegged at 100% usage. At least when it doesn't CTD during load. Game bar is necessary for the AMD CPU's that have two CCD's, but mine isn't one of those. I still think either it's a scheduling problem, or something is causing a loop in the main sim thread, which will then peg 1-2 cores (depending if SMT is on or not) and the other cores remain idle since nothing is really being rendered, so no work for the rendering threads. Just a guess though.

Yeah unfortunately it's only worked the once for me. I have noticed occaisionally it's listing DCS as in 'efficiency mode', despite the active power setting being high performance. Even manually setting the DCS process to 'high priority' in task manager doesn't necessarily fix it. It's why I think it's something to do with windows flagging the DCS process incorrectly in some way. If you enable SMT, you will go from 1 core at 100% while the game is frozen, to 2 cores locked to 100%. And it will seemingly stay that way for long periods of time. When I connect a server like HBCW or Contention, the two CPU cores will stay locked to 100% the entire time i'm frozen, till i'm kicked from the server due to a login timeout.