Voyager

Is it just DCS, or is it other games too? When I was fighting the HAGS issue, I'd noticed that the SS% had no effect on anything. But it started working after I'd turned off HAGS.

Rule of thumb I've found is to go through Thud's VR4DCS.com checklist and see if that fixes things. On my Reverb G1, it was forcing the system to Dx11 mode. On my Vibe Pro 2, it turned out to be turning off Windows Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling. For you, it may be something completely different, but it's worth going through the checks.

@Lurker I'm glad it worked for you. I have no idea what HAGS is doing, but I suspect it's sending interrupts to the GPU and handling them in such a way that it just keeps interrupting video provision in some configurations. Like for me, it didn't cause any problem when I was using the Reverb G1, but switching to the Vive Pro 2, it was just hammering my video performance.

Huh. I had not seen that before. That is tempting, even with the hit in the other game. It's possible that once 6000 series cards become accessible, we may see more dev teams getting them in house and fixing weirdness issues with them.

For the VP2 it's probably better to specify the pixel count rather than the SS% because of its different models. For me I'm looking for 2900 by 2900, since that seems to line up best with the headset resolution.

Ah. Yeah. One of my other core games does not work right with the 6000 series. Ends up having worse performance than the 5000 cards do. No-one is sure why yet, and there isn't a timeline for fixing it, so haven't been considering it yet. If this was a pure DCS build, it would be high on the option list.

As I gather they've been running 24/7 in a humid region with poor air quality. If you've lived in a hot humid climate you'll discover dust just loves to glue itself to *everything*. Might as well open it up and make sure you have cooling fins instead of a dust bunny the size of a peach...

@RealDCSpilot @BlackSharkAce What is the ReShade tool you two are talking about? I've heard of it used to change color vividness, but had not heard of it for upscaling?

Wait. The crypto miners are dumping cards in China, with bulk sales going for less than MSRP. It will take about a month or two for them to get to Europe and the States, just because of bulk shipping times, but we will see another market crash here too. Just be ready to deep clean any used mining card you get.

Hardware Unboxed did a comparison between SATA, nVME, nVME PCIe 4.0, and HDD for gaming a while back. Basically any SSD will be better than good enough for gaming, and otherwise indistinguishable. And HDDs will all be poor. Addendum: this will not be as applicable when AAA titles start taking advantage of the things consoles are doing, but those titles don't exist yet, and the nVME drives to support them aren't available either, so not worth even attempting to future proof here. Just keep a high bandwidth nVME slot on your MB free for when they do become a thing.

Given that DCS only uses a limited number of threads, I'd agree going to a higher core count CPU isn't going to get you much. But if DCS is sensitive to ram latency the way some other flight sims are, going to. 5600X or 5800X may have a measurable benefit. Not so much if you're transferring from a Sky Lake chip, though. Those has very good memory latency. But to the OC's question, a 3080's going to give the biggest bang, if you can wait long enough for the buck to drop. Personally, given the GPU crash that seems to be happening in China right now, I'd guess we're about 1-2 months* out from discarded mining GPUs kicking the bottom out of the market. *It's about 1-2 months to bulk ship stuff to the US from China. Air mail is expensive, so thinking the ones that fly are going to keep prices higher, until the boats start hitting the shores.

Also, before you start on VR, get your eyes measured. Trying to make a headset work that doesn't fit your Inter-pupil distance (IPD) is just not fun. I did that for over a year and it put me off of VR entirely until I got a headset that actually fit my eyes.

Just wait and watch the secondhand market. Prices are dropping, and there is always a used GPU price crash when the miners let up. There will be again.

Have you gone through Thuds VR4DCS yet? Thud's VR4DCS https://vr4dcs.com/ For me it turned out to be Windows Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling was interrupting my GPU every few frames and causing draw failures. Cut something like 30% off of my frame rate in VR. And none of it showed up in the Task Manager; it wasn't actually using the GPU, just pestering it to drop what it was doing to go move a grain of sand with a pair of tweezers.

While I do question whether DLSS or FSR would be appropriate for spotting, it is hard to deny that their current incarnations are able to offer significant performance improvements for any graphics setting with marginal to indiscernable impacts to graphics. I've brought it up elsewhere, but given the various debates about simulated vision and the array of new up sampling tools such as FSR, i think it would be good to make a universal in-sim vision test it could probably even be as simple as rows of the eye exam rotated E's stationed at known distances from a view point. I should run the conversion on that. Thinking 1 meter E's with randomization and a method of reporting what direction you think it is, and tracking and consolidating the score, for a human vision equivalent. I suspect that 4k monitors already allow for greater than 20/15 vision.

Finally believe I've got a VR headset that work for me and has good resolution and clarity, with enough GPU driving it (Vive Pro 2, for me, targeting 2900x2900) My current rig is a 5800X with 32 GB DDR4-3600 and a GTX 1080 Ti. Have not gotten DCS tuned up for it yet. The 1080 Ti is a bit light to get everything out of this headset, but most of the games I've gotten to a good spot. However, DCS currently floods my VRam on the 1080 Ti. So. I'm wondering how does the 3080 handle DCS in VR, especially with the newer higher texture cockpits like the F-14? I really want to get things to a point where I can read the buttons without needing to zoom in on them. And if I go deep into a 3090, is the difference here going to be pretty large? At this point I'm torn between going for a new GPU in the near future, or holding what I have until the next gen CPU/GPU/Ram drop late next year, and doing a complete rebuild of the machine. I can't help but think by then I could get a 16-20GB card that's significantly faster than a 3090 for significantly less than the 3090 series is going for. On the other hand, If I can ever locate a 3080 at retail or near retail price, it closes the loop on all of my other VR titles, but DCS is still an open question.

Try this: Thud's VR4DCS https://vr4dcs.com/ On my Reverb G1 I needed to force WMR for Steam to Dx11 mode. On the Vive Pro 2, I needed to go into the Windows > Display > Graphics and turned off Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling to fix the absurd numbers of Display Errors (purple lines in the SteamVR monitor). Now, all this was on a 1080 Ti, so your results may be very different.

I've found Gaffer's Tape to be great for cable control, and it's intended for being removable when you don't want it. I actually replaced the back clip on my G1 with a gaffer's tape-down because the clip was digging into the cable.

So anyone else seeing a high level of display errors in DCS? Mostly beeping trying to get function frame rates in the other flight sim, but decided to check DCS as well while I was at it. Absolute wall of purple, and weird pulsating planes, just on the runway. (F-14B cold start) CPU is 5800X, GPU is 1080 Ti. Prior headset was Reverb G1. I've been bouncing back and forth between the three pixel presets, and that doesn't seem to make a difference. The GPU is also only running a less than 50% load, which seems weird too. I'm this close to returning it and just walking away from VR entirely for the next few years. Addendum: found the issue. The Windows Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling was causing my GPU to unload and generating a large number of display errors. Turning it off fixed my problems.

Even if the miners are immediately selling their coins, other people are buying them to the tune of (checks market...) 47,551 USD per coin. That's actually down from its peak earlier. It was up to $57k last week, but we will see if it declines further.

Crypto is booming is because people are concerned the dollar is going to crash hard. That is what happened when the bolivar went into freefall: people built mining rigs to convert their bolivars and subsidized electricity into a currency that wasn't going through hyper-inflation. And unlike, say, jewelry, no-one is going to shoot you to steal your Bitcoin cache. You want to fix the GPU shortage, fix the dollar.

Hardware Unboxed did a bunch of drive tests, HDD vs SSD, SARA vs nVME, vs nVME PCIe 3.0 not that long ago: The TLDR is, for gaming, the only big difference is HDD vs SSD. Everything else is past the point of diminishing returns.

How on earth did Transcontinental and Western end up with the B-17 type certificate? I would have thought Boeing would have held onto it like grim death. And given T&W's demise, wouldn't that have migrated it to American Airlines? The P-40's even weirder. Are we talking about Prevost the coach company? With the way the assets divested, I would have thought it ended up with Boeing. This sounds like a subject for an aviation book.

As I recall Fantasy of Flight has a flightworthy P-35, until it got damaged in a hurricane. It did fly in the US, so it would be reasonable to assume it flew with some type of certification from the FAA. I'll see what I can find. Given when the FAA was founded, I suspect you are correct that the pre-P-35 aircraft would not have had type certificates, but I'm wondering if the type certificate might give an indication of any corporations are currently claiming ownership of the P-35 or its lineage. Would probably be worth comparing it with similar certificates for the DC-3 and B-17, and the B-26, if I can track one down. I known there were at least a couple of those flying into the 90's. It would be interesting to see how the record keeping differs between the types.

Well, the contractor itself doesn't exist anymore, and as near as I can tell, no-one else using its likeness or likeness of other aircraft in the series have any attributations to existing contractors at all, so I'm thinking it may have lapsed entirely. Now if you want a shaggy dog story, try and figure out who would likely own the rights to the likeness of the P-40 Warhawk. Would it be A) Curtiss-Wright? B) Boeing Aerospace? C) United Technologies? D) Some other company entirely? Could actually be any of them, or none of them depending on what changed hands when, or to whom. Mergers and bankruptcies are fun...