Aapje

Yes, they do. If you haven't, I suggest reading the Rhino manual. It's really very good and tells you a lot about how it and the software works, even if you don't have one yourself.

Having fixed Virpil grips would be great. That's a major downside if it was to remain an issue. Anyway, I still expect that it'll be a rough ride for the early buyers, but let's hope that the software is at least stable, so you can successfully fly missions with it. If the effects are merely not up to par with the Rhino at first, that is much less of an issue than if the stick starts doing weird things.

@rapid The software desperately needs the ability to have per-plane settings. Although I guess you can make it work with the importable settings, by saving multiple profiles and loading the right one manually. And it's not all that helpful that he compares it to the Brunner. We desperately need a Rhino comparison. But it's a waiting game now. In September, we should see a flood of reviews and info.

I suspect that the biggest difference in the military version is that the rockets will have more accurate specifications. The exact performance of the rockets is big secret, since you want the opponent to accidentally get too close to escape your rocket, or fire from too far away, since they are afraid, rather than know exactly how far away they should stay. Modern rockets is almost certainly the biggest upgrade that the old planes got.

FFB is a particularly big improvement for helicopters and non-fly by wire planes like warbirds or the F4E. So I would suggest going for that. What you can do, is to build a FFBeast yourself. Then almost all of the spending is online or can be done locally, so you avoid most of those huge import fees. So instead of getting a very overpriced product due to excessive taxes, you can get something much nicer that is not much more expensive that what we would pay. So value for money is going to be much better. But it will require a decent amount of work on your part, like finding a machine shop to make the housing & finding a cheap hoverboard/scooter and salvaging the motors from it. So you have to enjoy taking it on as a project and you need some technical skills. The Rhino is also an option, but you will have to import the motors, which are probably going to be taxed a lot.

@oCMANo The eye tracking in current headsets is not of the quality that it can actually track that accurately. Nor can it necessarily adapt quickly enough when you move your eyes. So this is unlikely to be a good idea for everyone, although we all differ, so it can work for some people.

Sorry to bother you again, but do those 'other grips' include the left-handed version of the Alpha? On the IL-2 forum we have a guy who would like a left-handed grip, but he also has some (other) complicated demands about the grip.

Looks like a useful change

Any more detail than 'new version'?

I think that people who get a 14900 do stress their system. Worst off are those with little tech knowledge who get a prebuilt and who might not even know about this, as they don't follow the tech news.

^ Exactly. They have a choice between a class action lawsuit over false advertising, or trying to delay the degradation long enough so the CPU fails after the extended warranty and they can deny your claim. They chose the latter.

I think that it is unwise for Virpil to do so, since they would be hurting their own customers. And they are not actually a very big company, so I don't see how the legal fees would ever be worth it, even if it would cost them a few unit sales. I also think that there is little ethical issue with 'hacking' hardware that you own.

Nothing wrong with that, when most gamers do little other heavy processing than gaming. Being great at what really matters, perfectly fine at anything else, for a great price, makes a good product.

I wonder if Moza's issues with the Virpil passthrough is also a firmware limitation or a hardware issue.

Basically, games tend to not really be able to use a lot of cores effectively, but love cache. Especially simming games. The reason why that is so, is because games do a lot of the same thing. For example, if the game runs at 60 FPS, then the game has to make a new frame every 100 milliseconds. And a lot of that is used by the GPU, so the CPU has a fraction of that. In that time, the CPU has to calculate the new world state, convert that into updates to the 3D-model, which it then has to hand over to the GPU for actual rendering. The things that the CPU does for every frame is often called the gameplay loop. If the code and data for the gameplay loop is in the cache of the CPU, it can work very fast and efficiently, because it doesn't have to bring in the data from the relatively slow RAM. And you tend to get very consistent FPS. For example, you can have 60 FPS where some frames take 150 ms and others take 50 ms, or you can have all frames take 100 ms. The latter will feel much smoother. It turns out that the extra cache for the X3D-CPUs means that the code and data for the gameplay loop fits in the cache much better, so it works great for games. The end result is that those X3D-CPU's are very efficient at gaming. In contrast, if you buy a 14900K over lets say a 14600K, then you get a relatively small cache increase from 20 to 32 MB. This is not really enough to fit most gameplay loops, so the CPU has to work very hard in an inefficient way to compensate. This is one reason why the 14900K uses so much power. And you also pay for 2 extra performance cores and 8 extra e-cores, that do very little for you, in gaming. In contrast, with the 7800X3D, you get 104 MB of L2/L3 cache. So that is more than triple what the 14900K has. And despite the 7800X3D only going to 5 Ghz, it tends to beat the 14900K at up to 6 Ghz, in benchmarks. The 14900K is brute forcing, while the 7800X3D is much more designed around what is useful for games. The end result is that it is much cheaper than the 14900K (both in manufacture and in sales price), runs cooler and uses less power. And to get back to your question: VR is really not all that relevant. The above is true for both flat and VR games.

Does this require a hardware change or is this a software thing, so already built/shipped bases will get this as well?

The question is how the desk mount solutions will deal with the weight and the forces. Especially if people want to use long desk mounts. But interestingly, Monstertech does advertise their long units as working with VPForce: https://www.monster.tech/en/product/joystick-hotas-table-mount-long/ It's in the dropdown as an option.

Me neither. I'm running Intel right now, because when I wanted to upgrade, that made more sense. But now things are different. And in a while they can be different again.

You can save a lot of money by getting the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE cooler instead. I personally prefer the non-RGB memory that is very low for use with air cooler, since you have less risk of it not fitting. The non-RGB vengeance is OK, but you can also look at the G.Skill Flare X5 64 GB and G.Skill Ripjaws S5 64 GB kits (look for 30 ns cas latency or better). And I haven't bought a sound card for a long time, but a dedicated card will have less interference. But is it worth the extra cost and reduced airflow? Your choice

All over this forum you see that the 7800X3D gets recommended way more than anything else right now, which makes sense, because for gaming, it is hard to fault it in any way over the competition at this time (price/perf, perf/watt, heat and degradation).

@Gunslinger52 I think that you are referring to Smart Access Memory (SAM), which you should enable in the BIOS if you get an AMD system. Intel has pretty much the same thing, but they call it Resizable BAR. It most typically has a fairly small effect though. Usually a small gain, but some games can have a small loss. Don't know the exact effect on DCS. It's way more important to make sure that memory overclocking is enabled in the BIOS (EXPO or XMP).

@warmachine79 You may have an asymmetric face, so your eyes are a different distance from the center.

It's a bit hard to imagine that they first would spend time developing for the obsolete SteamVR API and would then do it all again for OpenXR. My guess is that they developed for SteamVR internally, to test the headset, and then decided to release it, since doing so is fairly straightforward. Especially since they left out eye tracking.

It's difficult and costly for them to have to add them after the fact, which is why I would like them to be added to the base package.

Sure, but it's an issue if you don't have a 3D-printer or something else to pilfer from; and a very small cost for them to put a few extra caps in the package. But I haven't heard that they did.