Cyn0sure

Looking at your system specs compared to mine, I'm guessing it's mostly your i5 4.2 GHz CPU (a dual-core, right?) that affords you that framerate. Hrm. I guess that makes sense, because the free Su-25T module in DCS World is actually from FC3, right? That's disappointing, since I get about the same framerates with Su-25T as I get with KA-50. Well, FC3 is presently on flash sale for a mere $12, so I'll go ahead and purchase it, even though my system's performance with it will be less than ideal. (Which is a shame, being that my system runs most other games at blazing speed.) For sure, I wouldn't pay full price for FC3, and I probably won't be buying any more of the "high-fidelity" DCS modules.

I'm thinking about getting Flaming Cliffs 3, but I hesitate because of the poor framerates that I've been getting with Black Shark 2. My CPU is an AMD Phenom II 2.8 GHz, with six cores. I have 8 GB of RAM. My graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti, with 2 GB of VRAM. I'm running Win 7 (64 bit). With Black Shark 2, I get a speedy framerate of 50-70 fps (frames per second) when I'm just flying around, be it over mountains, plains, or cities. But when I get into combat, my framerate takes a huge hit. Most of the time, in combat, my framerate drops to 20-30 fps, but sometimes, it drops to as low as 10-15 fps. This is especially the case when I'm using the Shark's laser/video targetting system in the heat of battle. This makes the sim almost unplayable, for me. I've tried lowering my video settings in DCS from high to medium, and even to low, but that doesn't help much. I figure the bottleneck with my system is being caused by my CPU, not by my graphics card. I realize that DCS is not optimized for use on a multi-core CPU, and that a "high-fidelity" sim like BS2 requires an awful lot of CPU computations. What I'm wondering is, will I experience the same problem with Flaming Cliffs 3? I don't expect FC3 to be any more optimized for a multi-core CPU than BS2 is, but I'm wondering if FC3 is less CPU intensive because it's less "realistic" and thus requres less computations than BS2?