Voyager

I didn't get that from his video. To me it sounded more like this was a surprise to most of the AMD engineering and potentially its own leadership. Right now it is under performing on average, but it is also very inconsistent as well. Some games it is great. Others it is not. Something is wrong, but I do not think AMD knows exactly what yet. Probably the best bet is to wait until January, see what the driver updates and game specific benchmarks show and decide then. Baring the world burning, I don't see us having the same persistent stock shortages that we did during the Ampere generation.

I used the CH Pro Pedals for a long time. They're solid but the mechanism does tend to cut the wire to the toe breaks. MFG Crosswinds are definitely in the "buy once cry once" category. I expect the Virpril and WinWing ones are as well. That's about the only bright side to being in the hyper niche catagory. Things are expensive, but most of them are built to last forever. When it's a handful of guys, and their waiting list is out past retirement, anything less just isn't worth the time or money to build.

On the F-14 G limits, according to an interview with the Chief Engineer, the plane was only designed for 9G in the dogfight configuration, which only included 4 Sparrow and 4 Sidewinder missiles, as well as a reduced fuel load. It was not designed to handle 9Gs with a full fuel and any Phoenix load. Second, because it uses elevons for roll control at full sweep, the roll force twists in the same location as the pitching force. As I understand it, that plane was especially easy to get into that type of trouble with. I believe this was the interview where the designer talks about the G limits: https://youtu.be/SsUCixAeZ0A The comment about rolling while under G's overloading the spine was on an interview with one of the F-14's test pilots, but the group that interviewed him escapes my memory. Might have been Aircrew Interview #026 with Kurt Schroeder on testing the F-14? On a side note ACI #21 does have an account of Jeff Fellmeth's emergency landing in an F-15E where they blow wildly past a large number of failure thresholds on the travel pod (among other things), and it just stays on like nothing had happened.

Do you have fpsVR? You can use the "Detect Resolution" button under the Basic tab to check what resolution Steam is actually running the headset at. Over on the Il-2 forums we've discovered that it seems to be capping resolution at 3240*3240 Thing is for me now, I'm finding that my headset resolution has now been locked at 3240*3240 regardless of what resolution I set it to in Steam. I'm wondering if a recent Steam VR patch broke the Steam Super sampling.

I personally prefer to use armless reception chairs with high wear fabric and steel construction. And its best of you can find high seat weight limit ones, because if you're doing VR, you'll put a ton of force on the back of the chair are you're craining around to see. I prefer the ones without ruling wheels because I'll actually twist with the rudder pedals or when hauling on the stick. But a good solid side chair works great for me.

Very. Predictions I've seen are at at 450W, it's expected to trade blows with the 4090 in raster performance, but lose in raytracing. From what I'm hearing, AMD decided cranking the power on their reference cards to beat in raster only wasn't enough to let them claim the crown, so the reference cards are focusing on being the most sane high end option, while still keeping up with the 3090 in RT performance, and squashing the 4080 in everything else. But the chip itself has a lot more gas in the tank, and with AIBs stocked up on 450-600W heat sink designs for their nVidia cards (and now AD102 chip supply to put in them) I think they're banking on AIBs making the ridiculous cards that take a dedicated case and power chord, and having those benchmarked against 4090's and generating the hype. And I think that's also why they did not show hard numbers at the launch: they know the reference card will lose, so why lock that in now, before AIBs have had a chance to go crazy.

From what I recall if that, all of the makers had problems. It's just EVGA accounted for over half of the 3090's sold, and were the only ones that had a good RMA process going. As I recall some of the other makers took a "too bad, so sad" approach to the problem.

Ask me in January. Right now everything AM5 has a 20% markup. The BOM costs are on par with the LGA1700 motherboards, probably less, but the vendors are in full milking mode, at least until Raptor Lake finally shows up, and probably then some. But if you're talking using DDR4, you're still better off getting a 5800X3D with an X570, than even a 13700K with an LGA1700 motherboard. That's that little red bar than Intel is mostly hiding on their charts, and it does not care whether you're using DDR4-4000 or running it at 2366, unlike Alder Lake, which does care about RAM speed. That's where we're at right now: if you want to keep DDR4, then the 5800X3D is the way to go, but if you're aiming for Alder Lake, Raptor Lake or Zen 4, then go DDR5. Buying a new LGA1700 motherboard for DDR4 is just a bad deal right now.

32GB of DDR5-4800 is $140 USD. It's faster than DDR4 3600 in pretty much all conditions. Things have changed considerably since this time last year.

@WipeUout I'd be careful of Alder Lake/Raptor Lake with DDR4. The 5800X3D is memory insensitive, but the non-cache chips really want the bandwidth, especially in flight sims. Right now the top performers, excluding Zen 4, are Alder Lake +fast DDR5, 5800X3D, the Alder Lake + fast DDR4. If you want to go DDR4, you're better of going 5800X3D, otherwise the memory is going to end up being your limiting factor. On the AM5 boards, they've all got a 20% early adopter markup right now, because there is literally nothing out to compete with them. That will change once Raptor Lake starts going live. And definitely change once B650's hit shelves. We've already seen specials with AMD offering free DDR5 ram with certain CPUs. That's only going to accelerate as the market goes sideways.

@Slammin Well, that is going to have to wait until we see what AMD actually releases and how far AIBs are willing to push it first i will say, I am *very* interested to see how AMD's second generation cache tech compares to nVidia's first gen. From what I gather, AMD's first gen cache gave great results up to 1440p, but did not hit often enough for 4k+, so frame times weren't as consistent. Sounds like RDNA3 has done a lot of work on that cache, so it's supposed to be much better, with possibly twice the hit rate of the RDNA2 cache. And, if they decide to, they could stack it for 192mb of cache, but currently sounds like they don't think it's worth it. Given Lovelace is the first nVidia generation with GPU cache, it will be very interesting to see how they compare. And it will be very interesting to see how it all behaves in VR.

They're all huge. SimHanger a list of checks: From the rumors, nVidia was trying to launch a 600W version so the coolers are all sizes for that. It did not work. Not at all.

MSFS is also expected to support FSR2.0 come SU11. I'd expect it to be more likely for Il-2/DCS to end up supporting FSR2.0 than DLSS as well, since it does not require nVidia training on the game. So I'd only consider DLSS a factor is you want to play other genres. CPU single thread performance is a bit weird. As near as I can tell, CPU cache size and memory access speed/latency seems to be more important than pure single thread performance in Dx11 VR. Not as sure about Dx12 or Vulkan, but that's not today. As such, the 5800X3D seems to still be the king of VR, even against Zen 4 and what we're expecting to see from Raptor Lake, but the Zen 4 VCache chips should probably roflstomp the 5800X3D when they come out too. I sort of think the 5800X3D is a 60fps CPU, and the 7800X3D will probably be a 75 fps+ CPU.

Seeing the discussion about continuing to sell Normandy 1 after Normandy 2 releases, in order to support older campaigns. I would propose a better solution would be to include the Normandy 1 map in all purchases of Normandy 2,and focus the Normady maps on late WWII while the Channel map focuses on early war. This would deconflict which Normandy map people should get in the future, and should help promote migration to the final map.

@BitMaster @lt.shifty May check the performance with both the base speed ram and with the XMP profile. I've only run the testing in the other flight sim, but I found with the 5800X3D, ram speed had almost no meaningful impact. Everything was just as fast running with the ram at stock DDR4 2366 speeds.

I suppose the question becomes, is it worth going to that trouble to run it at all cores 5.8Ghz when DCS is really only using 2-4 cores? Do you have to do any of that to hit 4 thread 5.8 Ghz? Or will it more or less do that out of the box with a basic tower cooler? HUB basically saw 0 gaming difference between the configs, didn't they?

I mean, I do use my nose as a stylus at times, but not generally in this context...

From a practical standpoint, even fixed foveated rendering is a big performance improvement. What I've found is I'm only generally using the periphery for object tracking, not fine detail, so it does not need to be at near the same resolution as the center 30 degrees or so does. The things that really require high resolution, like visual ID, VFR navigation, and reading labels, I'm generally looking directly at it, as close to center as I can be.

So finally got it installed, and used the fpsVR logging to capture the CPU frame times of the F-14B cold start with the 5800X and 5800X3D. With the 5800X and DDR4-3600 CAS 16 memory the median CPU frametime was about 9.2ms. The 5800X3D with DDR4-2666 it was 7.8ms, and with the 5800X3D with DDR4-3600 CAS 16, it was 7.2ms. Frame rates were still bottlenecked by the GPU, but it looks to be providing a lot of additional CPU performance in VR. I also saw similar performance improvements in the CPU limited Il-2 VR benchmark. For standard 2D gaming, it does seem to be providing around a 7-12% lift over the 5800X. I think what we're seeing is the impact of the dual rendering of VR. It seems like having two almost identical render scenes benefit greatly from very large cache sizes, to a degree that other types of games do not. Overall, I think us VR users can more than double the GPU power on one of these without becoming CPU limited.

@Nahen It's been a while since I followed SATAL, but I gather it was the Radar Warning Receiver that was considered excessively omnicient. But again, that was a while ago.

I think it's mostly because the FC3 F-15C is getting dropped from things like SATAL because it's electronics package is pretty magical. Likely the interest in a A2A mode F-15E will drop once a full fidelity F-15C is in the works.

I've been seeing pretty solid stock of them. From the benchmarks it's comparable to an I9-12900K on average, and everyone is waiting on Zen4 later this year, so I'm thinking we'll have solid supply for a couple of months before they wind down production. I was able to pick one up Wednesday. Haven't had time to set everything up and run all of my benchmarks yet, but will try over the weekend. Based on the Il-2 and MSFS numbers, I'm expecting a 10-15% reduction in CPU frame times from the 5800X, myself. But, we shall see.

If you're happy with your framerates, stick with the 1080 Ti. For VR, I would not expecting any of those cards to do much better than it, so probably wait until the next generation stuff comes out later this year. Between AMD, nVidia, Intel and the consoles all being on different high yield nodes, and the mining crash, this next generation should be less bonkers than the last one.

From some of the MSFS benchmarks I've seen, the 3800X3D is slightly faster than a 12900K with DDR4, but slightly slower than a 12900K with DDR5-6400. So, it's not an absolute win, but if you've already got an AM4 with high 3800hz DDR4, it appears to be a solid last upgrade before you replace the entire platform. I'm probably going to grab one because I've got a 5800X platform and a goodly amount of CAS16 DDR4-3600, so it's just a bios and CPU swap, for a likely decent step up in VR performance. However, if I wasn't so heavily invested in the AM4 platform right now, and mostly GPU limited, I'd expect Raptor Lake and Zen 4 with DDR5-6400+ to roflstop it later this year. As it is, what I *really* need is either a 7900 XT or whatever the Lovelace *090 gets called to feed the frames. Even with the fholger's FSR, and a 3080 Ti, my GPU frame times are still nearly twice as long as what my current CPU can do.

If you haven't, go check out Moore's Law is Dead on YouTube. He has some deep breakdowns on what is coming. Basically, AMD figured out how to do GPU chiplets and vertical stacking, so they can dice up the top end GPUs into small, high yield parts, and use multiple nodes to build the core GPU. They're going to be using both the 5nm and 6nm nodes for the RDNA3 parts. Further, TSMC's 5nm node is having exceptional yields, so we're going to get a double whammy of a higher yield design being built on higher yield nodes. And, because these are chiplettes, they're able to both shift production ratios after fabrication, and build out much larger GPUs than they could with monolithic designs. nVidia is about a generation out from solving the chiplette problem, so they are responding by pricing very agressively, and by pushing their GPU performance to the absolute limit. It sounds like they're also paying extra to get space on TSMCs 4nm production line, so they won't be pulling from the same wafers as AMD. Even if our niche doesn't play nice with RDNA3, nVidia will be bringing some heavy hitting hardware in. Finally, with Intel getting into the game, they are going to be buying market share with Alchemist. Basically pricing at cost so they can get their foot in the door. The drivers are a big area of concern, but their cards should help the current low end demand. The numbers aren't huge, but it should help alleviate the demand for RX 480 replacements. Q4 this year, provided TSMC is still standing, is going to be wild in the GPU market.