AlphaInfinity

I seriously doubt the person who started the thread is going to see a large FPS increase with a 4 ghz I7 920 guys by going with a PCI-E sound card. Seriously, the processor with affinity set to all 8 "logical" CPU's on my box is about 13% when I am playing this game. On an older machine where the processor is running at 80% I can see how a sound card might make a big difference but when your CPU is not working very hard, I doubt it. I could be wrong, but if I am, I would really like to see some benchmarks showing the differences between onboard sound and a dedicated PCI-E card on the X58 platform. I believe that the sound quality is probably better on a dedicated card. I have a harder time believing that a guy with an overlocked i7 920@ 4ghz is going to see a big performance increase from a sound card.

I agree, the e8500 is probably the BEST bang for the buck out there right now, especially for this game. If you are on a budget, go with that processor.

Whatever you end up with, make sure that water is not on "high". This drops my FPS by at least 50%. I can run with everything else on high.

This turned out not to be true from a performance standpoint. The CoreI7 performs very nicely with BS and most of the core I7 reviews (Th, anandtech, sharkeyextreme)place the 920 application performance above the Core2 Extreme series processors in most scenerios. Now, in terms of the bang for the buck argument, I agree somewhat with the post above. My main issue here was that I didn't want to spend money on the last generation board and processor and the 920 ran 300 which is the same price as the fastes Q series dual dual core processor. I wanted to have a few years of upgradeability and swapping out motherboards is something I hate doing. I see around 40FPS at a very busy FARP online. I average 50-60(60 is my refresh rate with vsync on) on Battle.miz in the game. I play at 1920X1080 on my new Viewsonic and I have noticed 0 performance decreases when increasing the res from 1680X1050. I have everything on high except water and vis.

Hi All, I purchased a 26 inch viewsonic display(25.5 viewable) and the game plays very nicely at 1920X1080 with no drops in framerate! :)

Well, you might still have a problem. I am interested to know if uploads from the server are throttled to clients. For example your upload is fairly good for gameplay but what happens when a new client connects that doesn't have the map? Will the server eat your upstream sending the data to the client(map)? If so, the gameplay experience for clients can get pretty poor while the upload occurs. If it is throttled, is it throttled by client or is there a total limit on what the server will use. The reason I am a little worried about this is because you don't have any options to set a throttle limit so does it auto detect your connection speed and set a limit that way? I doubt it. Hopefully the dedicated server release will answer all those questions. I think the community will have much better long term growth potential when the MP issues are worked out. Your internet connection won't react well to having the upstream saturated.

Forgot to mention improved multi monitor support where you can configure individual displays in the GUI. Hopefully some kind of Vista multi monitor support without having to experiment and edit config files.

The suttering issue for me in windows XP seemed to be related to the page file configuration. I changed the page file from system managed to a set min/max size and actually moved it to a partition other than the gaming partition. This fixed the stuttering issue in Winxp for me.

I ran the Russian version of Black Shark on my laptop on both Vista and Xp Sp2. I did notice a performance increase in Vista. Keep in mind though that the DCS process itself IS a 32bit process. In taskmgr it will be listed as: DCS.exe*32 Vista does like RAM. I will be upgrading my new gaming box pretty soon to at least 6 gigs of RAM when prices come down a little bit.

I don't know about a linux dedicated server, but they did mention they were going to release a dedicated server at some point in time. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

I run the game with everything on high except water and I never see below 31 fps at 1680X1050. Before deciding on the core I7, I was going to buy the E8500. I think you can get more clock speed out of that processor than you can with a Q series processor. Vista however really does like the quad core and it will eat lots of ram too, but the game performs really well, even with only 3 gigs of ram.

I hope they include a dedicated server with a CLI in the next patch. The serverlist bounces around from 5 hosts to 20 every day and the gameplay can be interesting on all the home connections.

THG doesn't work for me on windows vista 64

I wouldn't count on windows 7 this year. You can bet that Microsoft will be more cautious with the OS release this time. If they screw things up again, they will have to extend the support date for XP for another year or two...again.

When I had my core duo laptop I had to do the following: Turn water off in the options lua. Turn effects off in the optioins lua. Shadows to lowest settings Cockpit refresh to 512 There are instructions in the main DCS forum FAQ on how to edit the options files. Once I turned water off and effects off, I was able to get OK framerates most of the time.

Hi All, My new corei7 box is built and I am very impressed with this processor! I can run the game at 1680X1050 with everything on high except water(normal) with 8x AA and 8x AF and the game has been smooth as butter in multiplayer. I am waiting on the 159nth to run the weapons range map. That map with a lot of players would kill my laptop. Anyways, I do have some pictures and I will post them later this evening when I get a moment.

I ran BS on my Dell e1705 with the core duo and a 7900GS card on XP and Vista. Vista does seem to run the game smoother for me but only after I turned off Aero and went back to the windows classic desktop. I also upgraded the laptop to 4 Gigs of ram. The OS only sees 3 because it is a 32 bit, but overall, vista seemed to run the game better. I am putting together my new Corei7 machine this weekend and I will be installing vista ultimate 64bit. In terms of the dual core vs quad core argument, I am not sure that the question is right. I believe that Black Shark really will perform better on a faster processor, not neccesarily a processor that has dual cores vs a true quad core processor like the i7 or a dual dual core like the Q6 series.

Ark, I will be building my new machine this weekend. What types of temperatures were you seeing on the Corei7 with the stock CPU fan...non overclocked?

Merry Christmas ED and everyone else!

Ok I am a little confused. The cockpit resolution setting is suppose to set the resolution and refresh for the SHVAL camera right? It doesn't have anything to do with cockpit texture resolution?

I have played with guys from the 159nth and the 67th. Both are a great bunch to play with and they have been pretty helpful.

Are you setting that in-game or in the video card control panel?

Let me know how SLI works out. From what I understand, this game is pretty CPU dependent if your video card is pretty new. And update: All my stuff is sitting in Salt Lake City now. Half is suppose to arrive on the 23rd, the rest next monday.

Thanks for the response! In that case, you may want to take a look at this article if you are in the market for a decent mid-level card: http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=3479&p=4 Take a look at what the suggest for a good mid-range card if you are a corei7 owner. :) By the way, sharkeyextreme has a review on the NZXT Temptest case that I ordered. It is a pretty interesting read: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/article.php/3790956

Hiya Arklight, What types of frames are you seeing with your corei7? Can you let us know what detail settings you have and also...are you using a trackIR4? An update for everyone else: Half of my parts are in Las Vegas and the other half are in Salt Lake city according to UPS.com.