Aapje

They haven't. The product doesn't meet their targets yet and it is thus just a prototype at this point. We still have to see whether they can make it good enough to sell.

@LucShep Ultimately, I think that the quality of the product is key, and a positive image is fairly marginal. People will buy the better product, even if they dislike the company, unless they can choose for similar quality from a more sympathetic company. The bigger issue for Intel and Nvidia is that the complacency and hubris led them to stop listening to consumers, which makes their products worse and worse, and that mindset is not easy to shake when it gets baked into the company. Even once the company starts losing market share and needs to change course. Just look at how Intel keeps refusing to make a long-lasting chipset that can support many generations of CPU, even though this is a big selling point for AMD. And Nvidia seems to believe that then can just keep adding more multi-frame generation to make people upgrade, rather than give people what they are asking for (more VRAM, more real performance and good drivers).

I think that SteamOS is the premiere Linux platform for gaming, and no one is going to play DCS on a Steam Deck. So most other types of games make much more sense to make Linux-compatible than flight sims.

Elgato is now selling keypads without the stand, which looks like an interesting option for a home cockpit. They are available in 6, 15 and 32 key variants: https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/stream-deck-module-32-keys https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/stream-deck-module-15-keys https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/stream-deck-module-6-keys Do any of you guys see a place for this in your home cockpit? Here is a picture, btw.

The front paddles are buttons, not axes, so you are never going to get a smooth application of braking using them.

The X3D-chips lag behind the regular CPU's, so realistically it will probably be 1.5 years before they release those.

The biggest gain would be in fewer microstutters: Note that I would first upgrade to 64 GB.

No clear information about this on the Discord.

@Rechs You can get the FFBeast as a full build, and from what I can tell, the support doesn't seem any worse than the Moza and probably also the Brunner. With Brunner the issue seems to be that they focus primarily on civilian airline professionals who tend to fly other sims, and as a result their DCS support seems to be lacking and there is no guarantee that they'll improve. The designer of the FFBeast is from Poland, so I don't see what the issue is with the place of origin. We also have another person building these devices who is Ukrainian (GVL224), but I think that he lives in Germany at the moment. AFAIK there is a higher tariff for Switzerland (Brunner) than for the EU, and the shipping should not be any more expensive. For Americans, getting stuff from Europe should be easier than getting it from China. Note that both of these builders are active on the DCS forum.

It's going to be hard to compare, given the custom facial gasket. The FOV is going to be even more dependent on your facial features.

The old force feedback systems were very weak and the instructions from the game to the FFB joysticks were rather poor. The new systems have way more power and use telemetry-based FFB, for much better quality. However, it is still an immature field. But a big advantage is that you can also use it for regular planes if you tire of helicopters or want to fly airplanes as well. Aside from acting as a cyclic, they can mimic both traditional sticks, but also the more modern force sensing sticks. The most mature options right now are the VPForce or the FFBeast (more power) bases. Both provide DIY kits if you prefer to build them yourself. Those are both top tier 'man in shed' operations. If you want to mount them to the right of you, replacing your current stick, running without an extension, you shouldn't need a huge amount of power though. The regular 9 Nm one by VPForce should be fine. There is also Moza who make one as a 'real company,' but they are struggling a bit with getting the software right. In the future companies like Winwing and Virpil will release one too, but better not wait for that.

Doesn't that cost at least $10k? I wonder why you didn't give the FFBeast a shot first? They go up to 45 Nm or perhaps even higher for about 1K in euros.

Not that I know.

You need to keep in mind that the marketing from these companies tends to be aimed at unknowledgeable people, in part to cut down on support costs. It's not actually there to give you the best advice. An unknowledgeable person might use a cheap air cooler and then it would indeed not do well. Any liquid cooler is better than the cheapest air coolers. But explaining the difference between a good and a bad air cooler is much harder than just telling people to get liquid cooling. So that means the support call can end much quicker, which saves them money. Furthermore, it prevents support calls in the first place, when people get a liquid cooler instead of a bad air cooler. Again, that saves them money. Not you, them. However, the quality air coolers are actually very good, and are perfectly sufficient for efficient processors like the 9800X3D. And they have many advantages: Durability Reliability Safety of your system in case of failure (an air cooler with a broken fan still works decently well, while a pump failure on liquid will cause overheating fast) Ability to fix/maintain it Price A lot of people have suffered from issues when water cooling and have gone back to air. And if you don't have a super-hungry CPU (like the 14900), then you typically don't need liquid. Basically, the top three air coolers in this list are awesome products for an amazing price: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/cpu-cooler/#W=0 PS. These big air coolers do tend to overhang the RAM, and I always get low-profile, non-RGB RAM to prevent clearance issues.

The 9950X3D has two compute chiplets, with 3D-cache on one of them. The game should entirely run on the chiplet with 3D-cache, because otherwise things actually get slower/more stutter, since sending data between the chiplets is very slow. That is why the 9800X3D and 9950X3D perform almost equally, even though the 9800X3D has only one compute-chiplet. For gaming, only one chiplet tends to matter. The 9900X3D has two chiplets of 6 cores, again with one chiplet having the 3D-cache. So when running games, that would run on the chiplet with 3D-cache with only 6 cores. If you get a 9800X3D, then you actually run on a 8-core chiplet, and 8 is more than 6. So we don't talk about the 9900X3D because it's a CPU with a very limited use case: a person that runs both games, and productivity software that can take advantage of many cores and benefits little from the 3D-cache, but can't afford the 9950X3D which is good at both, so they get the 9900X3D, which is worse at both. I strongly suspect that most buyers of the 9900X3D lack technical knowledge and buy the wrong product for their use case.

We had forum members report a much improved situation with regard to stuttering, after going to the 9800X3D.

Nice to hear that you fixed it.

I don't see how this is possible with the 4090 pricing. Also, the 5800X3D is only available 2nd hand at inflated prices. I would suggest: get the 5700X3D + 64 GB of DDR4-3200 C16 + 5080 (or 2nd hand 4080 if you can get a good local deal).

With digital signals, it doesn't necessarily work like that. What you are describing is more what you expect with analog signals.

Sounds more like a cut cable, that sometimes makes contact.

It's a bit strange that you act as if you disagree with me, but what you state does not go against what I said at all. I never said that militaries wouldn't use consumer games, but that they wouldn't use them without an organized training structure, which would make it impossible for them to go: "these pilots just play the game in their own time on their own PC, nothing to do with us, we didn't violate any EULAs" Operation Flashpoint/ArmA is another example next to DCS of a game with a military variant. In general, the military has a limited budget and scope that often cannot compete with mass market software and hardware, and it's not uncommon for the military to lean into that, or to simply have individual solders replace their official kit with mass market products.

Governments are going to have carefully organized training programs, not going to tell their pilots to play a bit of DCS on their home system.

Perhaps get a piece of wood and use a bit like this to make shallow holes in the bottom so the wood doesn't slide on the carpet as easily? https://aliexpress.com/item/1005006877486507.html And then fix the TPR to the wood.

The person I responded to, suggested that it was impossible for Razbam to sell a module for use in a commercial simulator, because the EULA forbids it. So I think that it is a perfectly reasonable response to then suggest that it is in fact possible to ignore a EULA. Just because this is obvious to you, doesn't mean that it is obvious to them. Not everything is about you, and it is in fact not necessary to get offended when things are said that seem like a waste of words to you, but may not be so to others. It's also not evidently true that ED would be able to enforce their EULA in the jurisdiction of Ecuador, also because picking a fight with a government organization can result in the judiciary of that country protecting their own government. Your claim that this is a random non-sequiturs is thus wrong and your attempt to police what I write is also quite rude.

All of that is true, but it is also a bad way for ED to approach this situation. Let me explain. Transactions between companies and consumers, and among companies, are actually only partly governed by law. I would argue that assumptions, implied promises, feelings of entitlement, feelings of obligations, reputation, and such play a major role. In fact, very few customers read the end-user agreements, so the idea that consumers willingly enter into a contract that is defined by the end-user license, is actually quite hard to defend. I think that a much stronger case can be made that the actual expectations of consumers are more defined by things such as how the product is marketed and what is considered a fair deal for that kind of product, than what the lawyers write in the document that almost no one reads. In practice, we also see that consumers rarely go to court to demand remedial action, but more often choose to boycott that company, or to try to cause reputational damage by leaving bad reviews or complaint posts (which we regularly see on this forum). And conversely, we also see that companies very often change their behavior when lots of people get angry at them, even if the company is legally fully in the right according to their EULA. And my experience with business to business sales is that this is actually very prevalent there as well. Lots of companies have expectations beyond what they are actually entitled to according to the contract, but they also rarely go to court if the contract is violated to some extent. So I think that it is a trap for companies to get too invested in their contracts/EULAs. It's more of a tool to prevent them from getting taken advantage of in the most egregious ways, but in most cases, what matters more is to retain trust. With regard to ED and the consumer, I notice that a lot of people express a loss of trust in ED due to the Razbam situation. And I think that ED should concern themselves more with regaining that trust, than adhering to the law in a way that best serves ED's interest. And the best way to do, is to keep the Razbam modules in DCS, with proper support/development. So in that sense, the cases are very much linked, since ED cannot meet the expectations of many of its customers without a good resolution in that conflict.