doveman

Thanks. Anyone know if there's a way to use SweetFX with SoftTH, as they both have their own d3d9.dll which goes in /bin?

Thanks. I did download your package and checked the SFX readme which says: "Version 1.4 SweetFX is a universal image improvement and tweaking mod, that works with almost any 32bit (and hopefully soon 64bit) DirectX 9, 10 or 11 game or application." but so does the download theGozr linked to, so it seems it just hasn't been updated to reflect the 64bit release.

Ah thanks, I'd missed that.

I understood that Sweet FX only works with 32-bit games (although if used via Radeon Pro that can make it work with 64-bit games) so how have you got it working with DCS World?

It's definitely 2.08b alpha x64 as I downloaded it again and checked it against the dll I've already got installed, so I guess there's just some redundant lines left over in the config. Thanks for the suggestion re. the resolution, I'll try that and see if it works. Certainly DCS didn't offer 1920x2380 but hopefully if I edit options.lua to that manually it will stick. I actually calculated the 1920x2300 using your method of 1200+100+1000 (sorry, didn't explain that properly in my last post), and then stretching the lower monitor from 1776x1000 to 1920x1080, so I'm not sure 1920x2380 will work unless I edit [head_1] to make the SourceRect 0,1300,1920,1080, which obviously won't then use your clever calculations to compensate for the different monitor sizes (my upper monitor is 24" 1920x1200 16:10 and the lower 22" 1920x1080 16:9)

I'm just trying to use two monitors in a vertical arrangement at the moment, with the lower one showing the cockpit interior but when I try and use SoftTH, it just hangs at the splash screen after launching a mission and I don't even see the loading screen and have to Ctrl+Alt+Del to get to Taskmanager and kill DCS. If I rename the SoftTH d3d9.dll in /bin it works fine again. I'm using this config file for SoftTH as the upper monitor is 1920x1200, then allowing 100 for the bezels and the lower monitor is 1920x1080, so 1920x2300 in total. This is the graphics section of my options.lua. Windows doesn't make allowances for the bezel, so it only shows the combined resolution of the two monitors, 1920x2280. So can anyone please tell me what I've done wrong?

OK, so we've established that we can't put mods in Saved Games yet. What about files in Config/? Can we put our edited versions of these (graphics.lua for example) in Saved Games/DCS/Config/ and have DCSW see them and use them rather than the ones in the install folder? Does this apply to any files in subfolders as well, such as Config/MonitorSetup? I see Saved Games/DCS/Config already has subfolders for View and Input but it might be hardcoded to only use those, so I can't assume that all files and subfolders will work the same.

I've used the Xbox360 controller with the KA-50 and I actually find it rather better for controlling the cyclic (pitch/bank) than my Thrustmaster Hotas X stick, as that's just not precise/sensitive enough and has too large a deadzone to be able to make the fine adjustments necessary to balance the helo. I don't really find it practical for overall control of the helo though and really need a proper throttle/stick so I'm looking at alternative HOTAS at the moment. The Thrustmaster 16000M http://www.thrustmaster.com/products/t16000m has hall sensors and I've been told is great for controlling the KA-50 but I really need a proper throttle and the extra buttons under my left hand, so I might have to save up for the Saitek X55 http://www.saitek.com/x55/ or similar, which will also be good for the A-10C. For planes it's probably fine though, although a bit short on hats/buttons for something like the A10C but here the Xbox360 controller comes in very useful again, as I can use the two sticks and D-Pad for the DMS/CMS/TMS and the four buttons for the Coolie Switch or Mic Switch. Then I can use three buttons on the stick for the Boat Switch and (with modifier buttons) the Pinky Switch and China Hat. I use Xpadder just to map the controller buttons outside of DCSW to the default keyboard commands as I find it makes it easier having a visual display of the mappings both as I do them and for later tweaking and reference but I'm sure you could do just fine mapping everything within DCSW controller settings.

Thanks for the tip, that does seem to have reduced the object count and accompanying fps drops on the mission I'm testing with. It still drops to as low as 15fps at times though, so it's not really playable but that seems to happen a lot less (only when I get nearer to the action I think) and it manages to stay above 20fps most of the time. Guess I'll just have to wait for EDGE.

How did you find the X52 compared to the 1600M? I understand the hall sensors in the latter make it very precise and thus ideal for making the small adjustments necessary to balance helos, so I wonder if the X52 is worse in this respect?

That does look pretty unusable and I've not even used a throttle with it on the inboard before, so I don't think it's a muscle memory thing but basic ergonomics. Sadly it seems Saitek have made some really poor design choices with this stick, so I guess I'll have to wait for a decent hall-effect sensor stick and throttle that I can use to fly the KA-50 which also has the correct controls for the A10-C. I'm not in a great rush as DCSW can't maintain playable fps on my system at the moment, so until EDGE is released I can't fly anyway :(

I've now tried disabling all addons and disabling API Monitoring/D3D tweaks in Radeon Pro, so the only settings that applies are the ones on the Visual and Advanced tabs, which are basically those available in CCC, which I gave my settings for a couple of posts back. Whilst that seems to have given me a few extra fps at the start, it still drops to 17fps or below as the object count increases. I then tried setting Textures, Scenes and Visibility to low and disabled HDR. This seems to have reduced the maximum object count in that mission to around 22-25, so the fps didn't go below about 22fps but that's still too low. I then tried setting Textures and Scenes back to High, with just Visibility left on low and then I did get some instances of high (35-45) object count and low (16-19) fps but they were less often and shorter duration than with Visibility on High. A lot of the time it was still in the 22-28fps range though. I imagine Visibility is quite important for the sim to be playable though, so I don't think setting it to low is going to be a practical way to play it.

Not silly at all but I am only using a single monitor at the moment, sorry if there's anything in my post that suggest otherwise. I've currently got the pagefile on one of the HDDs to reduce writes to the SSD but I normally have it disabled completely as with 16GB RAM, DCS doesn't need it at all. I only enabled it again the other day as another game (Dawn of War II) refuses to run with no pagefile. As for permissions, I'm running as Admin and that is already set to Full Control. I'll try disabling the head tracker dll though (I'm not currently using it anyway as I need to rebuild my homemade tracker). I have experimented with trying different versions of the ATI 64-bit dx9 driver (atiumd64.dll) in the bin folder and with 13.12 (13.10 installed on the system) I think I saw a couple of extra fps at the start (40 vs 38) but it didn't help with the drops once I was approaching the target.

Well I got a SSD recently and I still can't play DCSW as when the objects increase, the fps drops massively, so I might start at a FARP with 10 objects and 40fps, then as I fly and the objects increase, it drops to 17-19fps, as shown here http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=107551&page=6

So here's some screenshots in the campaign mission I've been testing with (KA-50 Georgian Oil War campaign, Mission title is ATO A.02.1) showing how bad it is. As the objects increase, the fps drops so that at the start with 10 objects I'm getting around 40fps (not shown here), at 22 objects it's down to 22fps, at 47 objects 15fps and 65 objects 10fps. I tried flying the same area in the Mission Editor and then the objects stays around 9, so it must be units in the mission that create the objects but I didn't buy DCS World to fly around by myself on an empty map. Clearly the fps I'm getting are unplayable, so I assume others aren't having this problem as people are playing this sim, so what do I need to do to fix it? I've tried dropping vis and shadows from High to Medium, MSAA from 4x to 2x and dropping tree vis from 6000m to 1500m

Well out of curiosity I tried affinity=12 for cores 3 & 4 and I could see from Task Manager that it was indeed now running on those two cores but it was still a stuttery mess, which doesn't happen when I don't set affinity, so it's obviously not a good idea for my Phenom II X4 955.

OK, true I don't know what speed the HDD was reading when DCS was loading from it but I did have a separate partition for games that was defragged. Regardin the RAMDisk, I've disabled the pagefile as I have 16GB, so that wasn't being used at all but you might be right that the OS would have been accessing files in the background, although I'm not sure that should've made much difference to DCS when all it's files were on the RAMDisk.

Yeah, when I'm not gaming the PC is in "Balanced" power mode and PhenomMSRTweaker is set so that idles at 800Mhz @0.9v :)

You're probably right. I use PhenomMSRTweaker and have Cool'n'Quiet disabled I think, so it stays at 3.5Ghz when I switch to the High Performance profile.

OK thanks, I'll forget about that trying that then.

I don't know why but my results are much lower, around 54fps as you can see from these screenshots (I took an external one just to show it's not using vsync or limited to 120fps). I copied most of the settings from the OP, other than the resolution to 1920x1200, Heatblur off, HDR to Normal and Trees Visibility to 6000m. When I play actual missions, the fps drops drastically, to an unplayable 17-19fps, as the number of Scene Objects increase. So I might start with 40fps and 12-13 objects, which drops to 17fps as I fly over a town (no enemies nearby) and the objects increase to 30-40. I'm using a number of mods, mostly cockpit and sound tweaks but none that should negatively affect the fps and a few that should improve it: [Less Smoke for more FPS] (might not be doing much as I also delete smokecloud.pfx from Bazar/Effects/PFX/High anyway) [Reduced Distance for more FPS] (also set "structures = {20, 10000};" in graphics.lua for High) and this is needed to stop flickering white dots appearing when HDR is enabled: [HDR with a 'D' like Dynamic for DCS WORLD] These are the rest, none of which should be having much, if any, effect on the fps: [Ricardos Blue HD cockpit] [Trimmer Mod] [A10-C Bigger HUD Font] [A10C Horse of War] [Airfields v3b] [Center HMS] [Clickable Radio Menu for 1.2.6 V3.1] [Custom Snapviews] [Headtracker for 1.2.6] [Labels Mod] [nrgized NVG mod] [Real Sound 1.2] [isegrims Sounds for DCS World zzzspace RealSound Version] [Reduce Avionics Volume] [Diveplanes DCS A10C AUDIO MOD Pack] [Diversified Switch & Key Sounds] I'm also using Radeon Pro and using the following for DCS.exe which I understand are the recommended settings for it: Tesselation Control: Force Off Ansiotropic optimization: Enabled Trilinear optimization: Enabled Surface Format Optimisation: Disabled Texture Filtering Quality and Mipmap Quality: High Quality Texture LOD: 0 Flip Queue Size: 1 So is there anything else I can do to at least get my fps up to near what others with similar hardware are getting?

OK, I tried putting affinity_mask = 24 in autoexec.cfg, which if I've calculated correctly should set it to cores 3 & 4 on my Phenom II X4 955. I also only ticked cores 3 & 4 in Radeon Pro for DCS.exe. Neither seemed to work, as Task Manager still showed 99% on Core 1 and very little on the other three. It also made DCS much more stuttery. Something's not right anyway as I'm only getting about 30fps and this drops to 22fps when taking off and flying along (on the KA-50 Georgian Oil War campaign, Mission title is ATO A.02.1), so I'll have to ask for some assistance tweaking in another thread but certainly those affinity tweaks caused stuttering which I don't see without them (running from SSD).

Windows already has a profile called "High performance" that sets the CPU to 100%, so I've been using a batch file to switch to this before launching DCS and back to "Balanced" afterwards. I'm not sure if the GUID for the profiles varies on each system but you can find them by going to a command line and typing powercfg -list For myself, I use the following to switch to High Performance: powercfg -s 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c I haven't tried messing with Affinity yet though to see if that adds any benefit. EDIT: Another tip is that Radeon Pro can set Affinity for particular games when launching (for DCS World using DCS.exe rather than Launcher.exe), so that's a possible free alternative to Process Lasso for AMD GPU users.

I think it's ideal if you have a second screen, so that you can watch videos on one and have DCS running on the other and actually do what you're being taught in the video. I find if I just watch a video it's too much to remember when I try and do it later but doing it alongside the video seems to help it go in a bit better. Same as if I just read the manual, I wouldn't be able to remember most of it when I went to fly hours later or the next day.

Oh and I bought the Samson SR-850 headphones, which are amazingly clear and sharp and only cost about £30 :) These are semi-open backed but this is meant to make them sound more roomy and spacious, which helps surround sound by creating a wider soundstage and giving more feeling of sounds coming from outside the headphones, as compared to closed-backed which can give a bit of a constricted, boxed-in sound. All the reviews I read for budget hifi headphones recommended the SR-850 and all the reviews of 5.1 (i.e. multi-speaker) vs stereo headphones recommended to get a good pair of stereo headphones and then use software like Razer on soundcard virtual surround, like CMSS-3D or Dolby headpone.