danilop

Gaming rig = Haswell. You are going to have sizable power draw from graphics card(s) and you probably want to OC CPU. The less power drawn by CPU, the better. Haswell is the most power efficient design yet. And it's faster than AMD in gaming. Non debatable really.

And one more thing ... It would be great to have additional Z axiss button on CMS switch (like in real thing and TMWH). This is not as important as dual trigger, but it's shame that these annoying details spoil otherwise great experience with new Saitek HOTAS. It's understandable that old CH stick doesn't have these features - but designing and making serious new HOTAS without considering DCS A10c & BMS F16 is, well, not too bright ... :D

I've programmed it on the throttle lower rotary button. You need perfect coordination between left and right hand and timing has to be just right to have a decent gun run. It is doable with practice, but Saitek has to come to it's senses ASAP. With dual trigger is dead easy and realistic to boot.

Me too on X65F. And it sucks big time in A10C.

The X55 stick is basically x65f stick without Force sensor, swapped Weapon Realease Button and TMS HAT (as it should be, thank you) and added springs. So I assume that they are using the same parts as in X65f which means no dual stage trigger. I really wonder who is doing market research at Saitek? He/she should be fired immediately. The same mistake again. We have only two combat flight simulators (BMS and DCS) and you put seemingly serious HOTAS on the market which doesn't fully support either of them!? Sorry Saitek, you cannot do the proper A10C gunnery without PAC, programming it on the other button is not going to cut it. And dual vs single trigger price difference is what? $0.20? Certainly infinitely cheaper than childish screen printing gimmicks or useless buttons on the throttle. :music_whistling: Unbelievable :no_sad: P.S. I would like to be wrong on my assumptions, but that is very unlikely.

Hey, there is Old New Year as well on 14th of january which is wildly observed in countries with Orthodox heritage. :drunk::D

Partially true! Israel is not overwhelmed and outnumbered by any means if you take in the account who the major ally is! More, economies and production capabilities of Israel opponents could not sustain prolonged losses inflicted by superior technology. And in the end, ongoing Middle East Crisis is very, very specific and sad one at that. I didn't want to say that technology and training doesn't matter - it would be extremely silly thing to say, however, it is foolish to say that technology is the answer to all the questions as well. War is chaotic by its very nature, so structured and mathematically precise thinking based solely on technological advantage doesn't work often.

Well, when you fight goat herders or third class military / economy, technology really does look impressive. But ... History teaches us that those countries which could quickly mass produce more war machines and have strong will to fight, win the major wars against evenly matched or even technologically superior opponent. In grand scheme of things technology is overrated, spamming opponent with huge numbers of cheap, simple and disposable units is not. And there are always nukes which makes all this mega (air) war scenarios between major forces very unlikely indeed. :music_whistling:

It seems that lot of people don't understand the study combat flight sim market and make assumptions based on the mainstream gaming market where we have sequels every two years or so. For a start, your average gamer would be scared to death and probably would suffer an instant panic attack after being left for 5 minutes in the cockpit of A-10c. So he/she will never, ever come back. Flight sim enthusiasts are considered geeks (you should read discussions about say radars :)), are very hard to please, are counted in thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands and millions, so this market is avoided like plague by big software companies. All the mighty ones (with huge budgets and resources) were very quick to pull out. The stubborn ones, who didn't want to compromise, are no more. So that leaves us with the only survivor: Eagle Dynamics. I think that they know thing or two about surviving in this market, and who the *ell are we to question their strategy regarding timing of new content release? Instead, we should question the quality of the already released (and payed for) content and politely demand improved stability with better overall gaming experience.

Well, it's New Year and then Christmas in Russia (and here in Serbia, too). It's actually New Year proper, then Christmas and then the Old New Year (Julian calendar) which falls on the 14th of January (Старый Новый год, Српска Нова Година). So we have two New Year days - one more occasion and reason to pass out from drinking :D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_New_Year

Well, there is no chance that nVidia would even consider supporting Mantle - it is true that Mantle is an open API (very smart strategic and PR move from the AMD), however it's obvious that beeing AMD made, their cards will have an edge in the Mantle powered games. NVIDIA will not play AMD game. It would mean admitting to AMD superiority. So, new Windows based API from nVidia is almost certain. I wouldn't be surprised if they are quietly working on it as of now. Regarding consoles - it seems that most of them are slowly dying anyway, only the Sony is still going strong. There is a new "console" in the making and this can be potentially huge. Steam BOX. It runs on repackaged Linux and nVidia is exclusive Valve partner. If it all goes well, linux gaming may be the next big thing. We had API war before, and the result was truce with standardization in form of the Microsoft DX API. Now, DX is loosing pace on the modern GPU hardware. The two remaining GPU giants are loosing patience over Microsoft DX. It seems that we need new all out API war to finally move Microsoft into action. If nothing happens, we could see major shift towards Linux as a PC OS of choice for gaming, which I personally have been waiting for ages.

And Nvidia will put out competing API if Mantle start to grab too much attention ... Great, we will have API war and God knows what Microsoft will do in that situation ... not good :cry:

I think that Lomonosov can provide enough World class parallel computing PhDs. So it should be doable for DCS to become multithreaded if they decide to do it. The biggest hurdle I see is MONEY (small market) and monopoly position which ED holds - we can't just go out and buy competing full blown multi-threaded study flight simulator which runs on 12 threads, can we? ;)

It is not realistic to expect many DCS quality modules. Simply, there is not enough return of investment. Our community of die-hard simulator enthusiasts is not big enough. That's the reason why Flaming Cliffs franchise is the best seller and biggest money provider for ED. FC quality planes are much easier to learn (and cheaper to develop) and they appeal to much broader audience. We would never see A10c if there was not the previous order for full military simulator (they've got access to original Fairchild blue prints, manuals and all). And we were lucky because customer agreed to the commercial version. So, to cut the long story short - until something out of ordinary happens (like someone grants rights for blueprints, declassify manuals or order full military simulator) we will hardly see new modern DCS quality fixed wing airplane. And there are always 3rd party developers who have their channels through which they acquire material and human resources needed for high quality mod.

I'm not usually into super bands (booooring), but these guys have some great creative chemistry going on. Portnoy, Sheehan, Kotzen ... The Winery Dogs :thumbup:

Except when things go south :crash: My day one recently went reasonably well (knock on wood), without major hiccups, apart from usual tweaking to force new hardware / drivers / software / technology to cooperate in the new build. It was great to fire up DCS for the first time on the brand new rig. :pilotfly: Moment to remember.

I've run the benchmark track from the OP in standard 1920x1080p resolution. Here are the FRAPS results (GTX 770 @ 1.25GHZ, i5-4670K @ stock): Avg: 51.781 - Min: 34 - Max: 80 My settings in DCS (with following tweaking in line 150 of graphics.lua: structures = {20, 10000};):

GTX 770 is great value. And if OC-ed it's not that far from reference 780. Mine is pushed to 1.25 GHZ GPU, 8GHZ memory - stable as a rock @ 74 degrees for one hour of Furmark and 65 degrees in everything else.

Haswell i5 is all what's needed for games really. i7 is the next step (beyond gaming) and hyperthreading is great for media editing, so your choice is sound. Regarding RAM - although 8GB is plenty for gaming (and DCS), if you do a lot in Photoshop or 3DS Max 32GB RAM is not overkill. 16GB would be minimum to consider for serious photo editing / CAD PC. Get at least extra two HDDs (beside system SSD) for scratch disk and output render. The most important information in PSU specification is basically who made it. If the maker is reputable, say Seasonic, Enermax or similar, wattage and specs actually do mean something, could be relied upon and accurately represent what you are going to get. If you work with apps that support GPU acceleration (and both PS and 3Ds Max do), get the GPU with most CUDA cores you can afford.

Well, if the market was there (it's not unfortunately) I have no doubt that ED would come up with half a dozen new DCS fighter modules already. It is easy. Do the ROI calculation, if the market warrants it, hire hundred or so programmers, dozen PHDs and SMEs, pay for blueprints / rights and do it in a year or so. But ... This is niche market, so we have to wait for just right circumstances to get full DCS modules (like some government agency ordering new simulator and agreeing upon commercial release as well). :)

TrackIR is necessity if you want to fly DCS NOW. Untill it gets obsolete, you'll probably change 2-3 PC configurations. TrackIR simply works (well free trackers kinda work too, but are sometimes pain in the butt to set up properly if you're not DIY inclined). On the negative side it's sort of expensive and PRO clip is flimsy. Oculus may be the next big thing, but it will need to mature to be completely acceptable for flight sims like the TrackIR is now. It's still vaporware (in consumer sense), keyboard integration in VR is questionable, and development kit has low resolution display which is useless for serious instrument flying / combat (it is "promised" that retail version will have "high" resolution display).

And that's the "problem". Wait for the EDGE. It should give you some boost in FPS. AMD is handicapped by current DCS engine beeing DX9 only. Having said that, something along R9 280x or GTX 770 is really needed for full enjoyment (60FPS+) in maxed out 1080p display.

IMHO, they could have done it when original DCS was in development. They've missed the opportunity and now that code is an obvious dead weight. You were lucky. I had 512 mb of RAM back then, IIRC (socket A Athlon as well) :D

Yeah, I'm aware of that. This game is NOT CPU limited (when you overcome certain level of CPU performance) although there is common assumption that it is. But, it's really shame that they haven't made DCS with multi threading in mind back then - within next 2-3 years majority of games will probably start to utilize all possible CPU power. And DCS in current state is stuck. Sooner or later, ED will have to face it.

The easy way to check for PSU overloading is to pull out one of GTX780s and do the stability test for several hours on single GPU. It looks, like your PSU was upto SLI power requirement while new and with aging lost some of it's power (quite common - that's the reason why you want some overhead in power). Quality 850W PSU would be sweet spot. Good luck!