nervousenergy

Full WH setup is over $500 on Amazon, so I'd think a stick in decent shape would sell well on eBay. My WH setup went 12 years (bought in November 2010) and several thousand hours of use. Replaced with VKB Gunfighter III (20cm extension) and Orion 2 throttle. The throttle works well, but isn't enormously better than the WH, especially since I mostly fly WWII craft - I'm overkill on input buttons. The VKB GF3 is a work of art compared to the WH stick gimbal, though. Just an absolute pleasure to use.

They work just peachy as fixed-wing pedals - even better if you like the arc motion and have less width in your pit to mount them. Good review: ArsTechnica Slaw Rotor Pedals Review

Third option: the best pedals in the world right now (IMHO, of course) are Slaw Device. Not sure about availability these days, but my 109's are still a mechanical work of art after 5 years of use.

Sorry, I should have been more specific: at 90 FPS in multiplayer. I only play MP (WWII), and constant drops below 90 I find very annoying. Fixing it at 45 helps to some degree, but there are times the engine struggles to even keep that when it gets busy. I've switched to 95% IL2 these days, either Combat Box or the WWI campaign server I can't remember how to spell. I like the effort and detail that's gone into some of the WWII commercial campaigns for DCS, but flying warbirds against the AI is supremely frustrating with the current state of AI and damage model. DCS rules all in visuals, and I'm always struck by how beautiful and realistic the world looks from a P-51 pit in VR, but actually playing it in MP is too frustrating at today's state of the art. IL2 keeps 90 FPS at virtually all times (a 10 person furball low over a city can drop into the 70's), and it's hard to go back to DCS after the visual wow factor wears off.

I liked the FOV, comfort, and vastly better software (no klutzing about with WMR), but I agree it's pretty overrated, at least at that price. If it was $600 it'd be a contender, but my original $300 Odyssey is 90% of the experience (and in black levels, 110% of the experience) for 1/3 the price. Definitely looking at the G2 Reverb, especially if Nvidia releases the 3000 series cards around that same time. Even a 2080 Ti isn't quite enough to drive a Reverb.

I want that P-38 throttle. Badly. I don't even fly the P-38 (in IL2), but I need the sliders. Currently using a Warthog throttle plus CH quadrant for sliders.

I'm sure the tanker crews greatly appreciate your investment in VKB hardware. ;) I've had mine for nearly a week, replacing an aging but still pretty trusty Warthog stick. Still using the WH throttle (still a pretty nice piece of kit), but the Gunfighter MK3 / MCG Pro is so far ahead of the WH stick in terms of precision it's just not funny. I had no idea what I was missing. Mostly fly WWII aircraft in DCS and IL2, and the ability to make fine adjustments when firing on a target almost feels like cheating. It's crazy.

Received my Mk III & grip. What an incredible piece of engineering, and just a joy to use. Thanks for getting it out so quickly, and in what had to be a very challenging environment with everything shut down. Hope y'all are staying safe, and looking forward to more goodies from VKB. Please make some high-quality button boxes... :-)

Yeah, if you used it for a throttle that does look somewhat awkward. For my application, though, the levers aren't often all firewalled, as I'm using them for everything but throttle (the WH throttle handles that job.)

Late to the discussion, but I thought that, historically, the A8 also served in the anti-bomber role. Am I mis-remembering that?

I laughed hard at that. :lol: 'HP Warranty Services not responsible for physical injury due to surgical IPD modification.' Definitely RMA on the physical break at least. Consider whether the bump in center-view resolution is worth all the compromises (framerate hit, no IPD adjustment, poor sound, poor build quality, poor FOV) and perhaps check out an Index. Well, once they get them back in stock at least...

Excellent - that's the one then. The TQ6+ is metal and beautiful, but over 650 euros. As long as the ABS plastic and lever presentation looks good in black (and it looks great in the pics) then I'm happy. The CH Quadrant is a great piece of kit, especially for the money - long lasting and very functional. But the presentation (color, surface texture, etc) makes one thing it should have 'Fisher Price' on it somewhere. Just out of place compared to the Warthog, VKB, and Slaw equipment.

I'd only add this that improvements not only can be done, but MUST be done, or the sim will start to collapse under it's own weight. IPC and clock speed improvements have nearly ground to a halt as engineering meets physics head on. The writing has been on the wall for some time - improvements in compute performance are coming wider with more cores, not taller with more IPC and clock per core. Even if the core physics simulation has to remain on one thread (and I think even some of that can be made parallel), there's a TON of compute that can be spun off. AI should be low-hanging fruit... people have been writing self-contained client bots since the Quake days. Avionics systems, weather, damage, etc. are all candidates. As long as the sim is adding more performance draw from a single core each year than cores are going up in IPC/clock (and I think that's now 10% or less per year), then things will keep getting worse. Got to go wider. It's much harder to code this way and takes a lot more resources/talent, and I hope DCS can commit that. Battlefield 5 gets great scaling across 6 logical threads, but they've probably got more engine programmers than DCS has total employees.

GVL224's custom option might be cheaper, but that Honeycomb unit looks amazing. Also found the TQ6 Plus. If the Honeycomb isn't 4 figures I'll wait to see reviews of it before committing. Thanks!!

Looking through all the manufacturer sub-forums, I only see modern jet re-creation efforts. Does anyone know if anyone is looking to put out a modern version of something like the CH Throttle Quadrant? I have one mounted next to the Warthog throttle, and the sliders are essential for WWII aircraft. 2 levers for trim, 2 for engine control (RPM and prop pitch), and 2 for rads (water and oil.) Works well, but after nearly a decade one of the lever pots is getting flaky. Easy enough to grab another one, but I'd really like something in metal that's a bit more aesthetic.

The upcoming Steam Half-Life: Alyx game will probably do more to push VR hardware to gamers than all other previous VR games combined. It will be interesting to see the Steam Hardware Survey a few months after Alyx drops. This can only be a good thing. I play DCS/IL2 and iRacing in VR exclusively, and they'll always be niche entertainment. The more the mainstream buys into VR, the better for us.

Slightly off-topic, but has anyone done any benchmarking in DCS around newer AMD and Intel procs to see what the benefit is? I've got a nearly 3 year old 7700K OC'd to 4.7, and from what I can tell any upgrade (3900X or 9700K) would be more of a sidegrade for gaming, but DCS is different from most gaming titles in how compute intense it is.

Microsoft will take your money if you shell out the full $140 for a retail license, and you do get the benefit of a license that's not tied to hardware, but it's a total waste. The 'suspicious' licenses are grey market - they're supposed to be sold with hardware, but MS gives out huge banks of them without any verification from the reseller that they're only going out with qualifying hardware. 100% legit licenses. The reseller could 'theoretically' get in trouble for selling them in violation of the tying agreement, but never the end user. 'Theoretically' because MS would never do this. They'd give Windows away to consumers if they could get away with it from an anti-trust perspective. Once you're invested in Windows, you're assimilated. Not a dig on MS - I've used their products and been in their ecosystem since DOS 3.1.

Yep, ordered a MKIII with Pro grip as well today. Surprised when the store was up! Thought it wouldn't be till Monday. 10 cm straight extension - I don't think my Obutto would easily allow a 20 cm extension with the way I've got it set up right now. Time to put the DD wheel back in the closet for a while.

Curious how the Mk III feels in comparison to the Warthog stick with a 10cm extension. Are the gimbals noticeably smoother? I don't really have much complaint with the WH, but I would like a smoother axis transition.

Multiplayer missions with a stream of AI B-17s could be fun. ME262's / A-8s with an objective of knocking down X number of bombers, and P-51s running high cover trying to keep that from happening. Use air starts for both to keep the mission lively. Hmm...

The offline content really needs the new DM for AI planes.

+++++ Or should we just plan on shipping from EU?

It's only a niche till it's not. I think it's obvious GPUs have hit a wall, just like CPUs have. It's getting exponentially harder and costlier to push ever faster clock speeds and IPC. The current top card (2080ti) costs well over a grand to get a fairly marginal improvement over the previous top card (1080ti). This isn't sustainable. Nobody is going to pay $2K for a 3080ti that's 25% faster than a 2080ti. Hardware vendors are going to have to start going wider instead of faster, likely delivering multi-GPU single cards and forcing code writers to deal with multi-GPU rendering. It'll be painful, just like multi-threading has been painful for coding on the CPU. It's inevitable, though. Moore's law is just too much of a #$%& to keep up with. Latency is only an issue with alternate frame rendering. Committing a GPU to each screen largely solves that issue.

Yeah, I run 1080 SLI, and I'll likely need to seriously look at selling both and just buying a 2080ti. It would be amazing if DCS could use SLI, with a card dedicated to each screen, but I don't see that happening anytime soon, if ever. Eventually pushing ever faster clocks and IPC on the GPU will hit the same plateaus that CPUs have, and developers of both hardware and software will start pushing multi-GPU (probably on the same card, with internal SLI), but it's a chicken and egg thing right now. With GPUs only giving us fairly small incremental improvements each generation, something's got to change significantly or VR hardware available now or very soon won't be driveable for years.