Hi everyone.
First, I'll say that this is my first post here, though I've been a big fan of this line of games since the old LOMAC days. I will mention as a disclaimer that I'm not terribly advanced as far as "under the hood" computer workings, so consider this in your replies please. However, I have read through many of the posts here, so I will do my best to answer any potential questions with this first post.
When playing DCS, I usually start out flying with reasonable, acceptable FPS readings (in the 20-30 fps range, which I guess for my rig is alright, at least the game is playable) but after playing for a few minutes, I basically always have episodes (usually 30 seconds or so) where the FPS drops to below 10, and usually it gets worse than this, with the game basically freezing, reading less than 1 FPS, and this is accompanied by intense audio stutter, which doesn't happen until these REALLY bad lag episodes. If I can manage to not crash the plane when this happens, the FPS usually recovers for a time to playable levels again, before the cycle repeats.
I'm playing on an Acer laptop running Windows 8.1
Intel Core i7-3632QM 2.2GHz with turbo boost up to 3.2 GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M
8GB DDR3 memory.
I initially assumed this was a graphics issue, but after adjusting every option in the game, including turning everything to the lowest setting, I was only able to squeeze a marginal FPS increase. I have also turned civilian traffic off. I've made sure all my drivers are up to date. I recently tried disabling my Norton AV and Firewall and that seems to make no difference. I also tried flying the plane outside the "rendered world" in DCS, hoping to eliminate any trees, objects, or buildings, seeing if I could isolate the issue. While initial FPS was higher, the stutters continued. I'm also using GameBooster to hopefully shut down unnecessary processes that might slow things down, and, after reading another thread about this somewhere (I don't remember where) I had been using TimerResolution to set the timer resolution to maximum (not sure how this works, but it seems to help marginally initially).
I had also read somewhere that this could be a latency issue? To be honest, I don't understand latency, but after downloading LatencyMon, I did notice latency spikes that are being attributed to ndis.sys. I don't know exactly what this means, or how to fix it, or if that is even the cause of my problem.
I know I don't have a fancy gaming rig or anything, but I did pour more money into this laptop purchase in order to be able to game on it, and unfortunately the only one I really want to play is more like Digital Kamikaze Simulator than Digital Combat Simulator. I would just like to figure out the problem causing this stutter so the game can be playable.
Thanks very much for any and all help anyone can provide. If you need me to track down more specs or details about my system, I'm happy to try and track it down.
