Aluminum Donkey

If you're buying a new GPU don't bother with the 3070. DCS needs all the silicon balls it can get, the 3070 is too wimpy for the price. It's not that it's a bad card--it's just that the price of any new GPU is gonna suck no matter what, so I'd get one that will have great performance and suit your flight simming needs for years to come instead of being a bit of a disappointment and always leave you wanting for more and wishing you could upgrade. Keep using what you have for now, save your bread, and get the 3080 instead. AD

Dustbag, Hang on to your 9600K. I'm using an i5-6600K that I dug up along with some dinosaur bones. Works just fine, runs at 4.5 GHz without too much trouble. The 9900K with eat a bunch of bread that deserves to be sat on until maybe the 12th gen i5 comes out--or even quite a while after that. Your system looks really well-balanced and I'd just leave it alone, a 9900K is far too much cash to burn just for another 2-3 FPS! DCS 2.7 performs really well and you'll gain just about nothing anyway because all of those extra cores will just be sitting on their thumbs. DCS World is clock-speed dependent and little else. Overclock your i5 and enjoy. AD

Don't care much, but it's getting to the point where equipment just to play video games costs as much as a good amount of flying lessons in a real aircraft. Imma stick with my archaic rig. The "good" new stuff is great until you realize it isn't--for the price, it's downright lousy. It's still just another consumer product, not a mansion with a late-model Learjet included in the price The 3090 looks like a neat toy, but this stuff is for people with money to burn. It's for Hollywood plastic surgeons and not machinists or welders. I'm old, I remember when CD players were $5000 and they were apparently pretty bad when they were new AD Bingo bango. I'm glad somebody gets it. If you're an electrician or a plumber you're probably not going to marry a supermodel. Private jets aren't for people who pump gas for a living. It's how the world works. Find something better to do than gaming AD

Flashing, cloud shadow glitching, stuttering is all gone! Mission loading times are better too! It's been a LONG time coming, nice job ED!

Can confirm 2.7 kicks ass No more yellow/black graphics flicker. Propellers look awesome now! Stutter-free. Great performance even with Ultra cloud settings and runs smoothly now even at lower framerates, so you can turn up your graphics settings if you like and it'll still fly great! VERY fine work ED! AD

Woooow! Mine was only 15 GB. I have NTTR, Normandy and Gulf. Many modules. No idea why yours is so huge. AD

What I meant to say (sorry for being a bit of a smartass) is that it's still DCS and you're probably not going to have any problems at all. I have a nagging suspicion that 2.7 isn't going to be much different aside from the way the clouds look, some wind/weather effects, and hopefully graphics glitch/flickering fixes. It's still the exact same game so all your missions should work exactly the same way. I wouldn't be concerned. Frankly, after the noise of the hype train has died down a bit, I wonder if they'll actually release 2.7 any time in the next few months. AD

I wouldn't worry about that, how bad could it possibly be? The worst you'll have to do is re-create your custom missions from scratch It's still DCS World, and if 2.7 can't cope with existing missions, then how will it deal with the massive amount of work that ED (and others!) have put into existing modules? AD

It isn't a bug. When you speed up time, more stuff has to happen in the sim for each frame. So, you get fewer frames per second of real time. Makes sense? AD

Sounds great, I wouldn't mind being able to fly WW2 dogfights without my screen turning into a rectangular disco ball. Peace AD

You'll need a much heftier graphics card, and probably a new motherboard and CPU with an unlocked multiplier that can run at well over 4.0 GHz on all cores. AD

I know people like new stuff, and I'm looking forward to the Typhoon myself. But, I think it would be in ED's favor to not bother with new content and improve the simulation engine instead. Fix all the graphics bugs! Flashing clouds, flickering WW2 propellers, the infamous yellow/orange/black flashing, and generally improve performance (Vulkan API!!) and just polish the sim engine overall. There are enough bugs that people are irritated by it, and that's just no good for a video game that people have spent over a thousand bucks on over the years! AD

You could put the pagefile on your 120GB 840 EVO, and use it for nothing but that. Put the Windows Environment Variables on that drive as well. That way when it wears out, a replacement is cheap AD

Connect your two boxes with an Ethernet cable and rip DCS from the old drive to the new one. Then copy your Saved Games\DCS folder to the new machine. Should work just fine--DCS isn't tied into Windows in any way and its copy protection doesn't have anything to do with your old machine or old Windows install, so you should be able to just copy it over and you're ready to rock 'n' roll. Peace & happy warfare AD

Hmmerhead, In my own experience installing DCS on both SATA3 and NVMe drives, it makes very little difference. NVMe is best for tranferring very large files, but makes little difference in gaming. Load times for missions are about the same. If you don't have much room left on your NVMe boot drive, get a SATA3 SSD for DCS. It works just as well. A great improvement can be had in DCS with more and faster memory (system RAM), though. By the way, "performance" (framerates, FPS) are NOT affected by the storage device you use. Just loading times and texture streaming in-sim as you fly around the map. I run mostly high settings and find a SATA drive fine for this. AD

Taz1004, Thanks so much man, much better than the bleach-blonde default trees in the sim AD

That's true. It's just that I've never had much luck with cluster weapons in DCS anyway. The explosion effect looks cool, but doesn't do much of anything to the targets that you hit. AD

Yeeaaaahhhh... Noticed that myself. Just use the C version (single warhead) and hit each aircraft (or tank, or other ground targets) individually with one bomb each. That seems to work. AD

Klabo, Did you try down-clocking your GPU? The "DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED" message means your GPU is crashing. That's why your system is crashing to desktop instead of giving you a Blue Screen. Messing around with reinstalling/repairing DCS isn't gonna help with that and neither will re-installing Windows and/or changing graphics drivers most of the time. If it's always, always doing it, and muffing about with graphics drivers, Windows settings, repairs/reinstalling, different brand of beer, different swear words etc. aren't helping, it's probably an excessive GPU clock--even if you haven't overclocked your GPU. It's very common for GPUs to be factory overclocked excessively right out of the box. Great benchmark scores, but lousy stability. Reduce GPU clock speed and fly a while, see what happens! AD

The Kurfurst was a tough bitch to smack in real life too, especially a later version with 2,000 HP on tap at 2.0 ata supercharger pressure (not modelled in DCS.) It had other-worldly flight performance for its day and could out-fly just about anything the Allies could throw at it. It probably also enjoyed certain "benefits" such as a short engine life at full power, and short range due to other-worldly fuel consumption AD

+1 I've got a bunch of empty beer cans kicking around here, I wonder if they'd let me trade 'em in for the Syria map

Klabo, Down-clock your GPU. Crashes to desktop are often, if not usually, causes by excessively high GPU clock speeds. Graphics cards are often heavily overclocked right from the factory, so even if you have not overclocked yours, it might be running much too fast already and it isn't quite stable. The GPU crashes and the sim dumps you to the Windows desktop--that's why you're getting the DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED error. Down-clock your GPU by maybe 200 MHz or thereabouts and try again. Once it's stable, bump the GPU clock up again in small increments until you find a nice, fast speed where it's still completely stable. Worked for me. AD

I bit the bullet (and ate the cash) for a 32" 1440p screen a while back. Now I wish I'd gotten a 40" 4K one. But, then I'd want a 60-80" 8K one and a GPU that can drive it at acceptable framerates. Then I'd want... You always want a bigger screen with higher resolution, and then you always want higher framerates. You know how it goes AD

I remember buying my first SATA SSD just for DCS and nothing else. It's DCS so it has to be fast, so an SSD is good--but, it's still DCS, so I better get a HUGE one. That way, I'll never run out of room, plus I'll have some extra space for Windows and some other things. 240 GB. I'll NEVER fill all that space up AD

For VR... Well, the answer you expect Wait it out for that RTX 3090. It'll be a pain in your arse to wait for, and a pain in the wallet to pay for, but that'll be it. Then you can just run the dang sim with a minimum of BS. I'd consider that 1080 you have to be marginal for DCS, and woefully inadequate for VR. AD