Fishbreath

I have a non-FFB stick, and I get the same problem. I suspect it's something along these lines: 1) I fly the helicopter onto a new attitude, 'fighting' the autopilot to get there. 2) I blip the trimmer. 3) The game logic, rather than holding the new yaw/pitch/bank attitude, holds my new yaw/pitch/bank control inputs. 4) My control inputs are ~20% greater than necessary, because I had to override the autopilot's old attitude hold inputs to get there. 5) The new inputs push the helicopter further in the direction I was maneuvering, because they're stronger than they should be, thanks to #4. Holding the trimmer down disables the attitude hold functionality and gives you something like flight director mode, so you don't get the 'bump' when you fly onto a new attitude and hold it there—the controls are nearly where they should be for the new attitude, so the autopilot's authority is sufficient to hold it. There's another, unrelated jolt I get when I release the trimmer in the middle of dynamic maneuver. That one, I think, is something like this: 1) I'm pushing the nose forward, using more control input than necessary to hold the nose at my desired attitude. 2) I release the trimmer. 3) The helicopter jolts to the nose-down attitude where my control input would be stable, rather than attempting to hold the pitch angle attained when the trimmer was released. In short, it seems to me like the trimmer is functioning exactly as a helicopter trimmer should, sans the autopilot (which is to say, I expect it to function like it seems to in Flight Director mode). The problem is, it seems to be functioning in the same way when the attitude hold autopilot is on (when Flight Director mode is disabled)—as a naive system to hold control inputs at their current positions, rather than as a true attitude hold system. I'm not sure if this is how it's supposed to work or not. If it is, I'll just have to stick with the decidedly non-Russian method of holding the trimmer down through maneuvers.

Give us Crossfire support and better performance.

To be clear, when the procedure says to press the auto-turn and ground-moving-target buttons, it means to turn those off, right?

It could be a couple of things. Potentially the A-10 cockpit is better optimized than the Black Shark 2 cockpit; I notice a framerate hit of a good 10-15fps when looking at a given scene through the cockpit compared to looking at it from an external view. In the Ka-50, you're also usually messing around at levels that the A-10 rarely visits. If you can, maybe benchmark both sitting on the ramp at an airfield?

My final update: turning mirrors off bought me an easy 10-15% improvement in framerates. I cracked 40 fps in my artificial benchmark, stayed in the 27-30 range flying over Sukhumi, and never went lower than 25fps with the Shkval on and pointed at a column of smoke.

I can't recommend those training missions highly enough. The interactivity is simply fantastic.

Or about 125 stone. :P

For price/performance for Black Shark 2, at least, I don't think you can do much better than an overclocked i5 2500k, 8Gb of whichever RAM you prefer, and a Geforce 560 Ti 448 (similar benchmarks to my 6970, cheaper, runs BS2 better if performance threads are to be believed). Honestly, if I were building my PC again, I would have gone with Nvidia cards, not least because SLI seems to actually improve framerates for people.

Well, that's is the best I can do without sacrificing visual quality. Water and civvy traffic to low and HDR off, 4x MSAA, no TSSAA, and everything else to High/On. Tesselation in the Catalyst Control Center is off, and most other things are set to the performance end of the slider. My benchmark is Sukhumi free flight, quickly diving diving down at the factories dead ahead, then flying at 50m over the city and turning on the Shkval. I get 30fps at the top of the dive, 34 in the dive, 25 over the city, and about 23 with the Shkval on. Here's hoping DCS: Nevada brings some of the Crossfire improvements it might.

Obviously you'd know better than me, but from my games-consumer perspective, Nvidia's better dev support and AMD/ATI's usual performance well below what the hardware ought to be capable of is kind of a common factor. The comparative performance thread suggests that if I had an Nvidia card which benchmarked about the same in other games as my 6970, I'd get an easy 10 extra FPS over my current setup. Unfortunately, since I'm not about to go buy an Nvidia card to prove myself right, I'll just have to deal with it. I'm not exactly swimming in helo sim choices here. :P

I've got a pair of 6970s, and right now I'm trying to squeeze more performance out. So far as I can tell, I'm not CPU-limited, Crossfire is indeed worse than a single card, and 30-35fps is what I can expect out of an ATI card of that generation, with less around trees and buildings. The Black Shark 2 relative performance thread seems to suggest the same thing. I suspect that the DCS engine has a ton of Nvidia-specific optimizations that aren't getting ATI equivalents, which is unfair but unsurprising. Most games are that way.

I can get a solid 30ish fps in the cockpit (and 60fps in external views) if it's not a complicated scene (e.g. one of the fast missions in the northeast plains). Trees seem to cause problems, and come to think of it, I bet civilian traffic is a big driver of my framerate problems (set to Low for me). That's a lot of extra traffic to worry about. When I get home I'll turn that off and fiddle with things some more, and if I get something satisfactory I'll report back here. Thanks for the input.

I know BS2 is a pretty demanding sim, but at the same time, I'm not sure I'm wringing as much performance out of it as I can. My system: i5 2500k (4GHz) 2xRadeon HD 6970 16gb RAM BS2 is installed on a 7200rpm drive. I've verified that the processor is running at full tilt during gameplay with CPU-Z, so I'm not being limited by that. Everything in the Catalyst Control Center profile for DCS.exe is set to performance, using the 12.8 driver. In the free flight instant action mission, I see 30 fps paused at the start--that's at about 300 meters, with no AI or physics calculations going on. Changing graphics settings has bought me about 10 fps (I get five *fewer* FPS with Crossfire enabled than I do with it disabled, and my graphics settings are roughly midrange; tree view distance is 4000m and clutter is off). That said, 30 fps in free flight means about 20 fps in a mission with a moderate number of units, which is on the very low end of the framerates at which I can control a helicopter. Is anyone else using HD6xxx cards, or Radeon cards at all? Is it a problem with the 12.8 drivers? Are there any other tweaks I can try? I saw the post in the A-10C performance forum about graphics driver tweaks, which I've made, and I saw the tweak thread in the BS problems forum, which mostly focused on multi-monitor setups. Looking at the performance other people report, though, I feel like I'm seriously underperforming compared to how I should be.