Aluminum Donkey

In all fairness, you could probably do that in real life no problem at all. The manifold pressure (supercharger boost) was pretty low, only 1.4 ata, so it wouldn't really have been a big deal to fly an entire flight on WEP. It would have shortened the engine lifespan, and of course it burns fuel more quickly than lower throttle settings, but WW2 engines running at almost 1.4 ata continuously weren't uncommon. They just didn't like it because it wore the engine out faster, but I don't see why there would be any catastrophic failure at 1.4 ata continuous. AD

I'm using the BU0836A 12-Bit controller. 8 analog axes, 32 buttons. I'm pretty sure that's the maximum number of each type of input you can have on one USB port with DirectX, so if you want more than that, you need to use two of these boards. They have *really* high analog input resolution, great if you want to fly helicopters, but great for everything else too. I'm not sure what you mean by "emulation mode". The BU0836A just plugs into a USB port, and Windows detects it right away--no driver or anything. AD

Hey, I use one of those too! The factory-built TM Cougar is an absolute pile of crap. The stick gimbal is total crap, the buttons are cheap crap, the electronics are crap. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention, the stick gimbal is pure unadulterated crap. Did I mention that the stick gimbal is crap? That's a lot of crappy junk for $600 if you bought it new. I bought mine used for about 200 bucks, acutely aware of the fact that it was mostly a pile of junk, and ripped out the stock electronics and replaced them with Leo Bodnar's excellent USB interface board. The stock gimbal is still crap, but I replaced the cheap potentiometers with Hall effect sensors, and re-worked the gimbal and pivots bearings to eliminate as much of the slop as possible. It was an awful lot of work to put into a pile of junk, but it's now, actually, a pretty decent flight stick & throttle. The total cost of all mods was about $60 including the Leo Bodnar control circuit--plus a hell of a lot of work. $260 for a decent HOTAS isn't bad. The all-original TM Cougar is atrocious, and I spent more time overhauling it than any sane person should. But, it's decent now, and the cash cost was half-decent. Terrible, TERRIBLE product, though, and Thrustmaster charged an outrageous price for this pile of garbage with its low-quality components and atrociously shitty design and workmanship--it was ready for the garbage pile when it left the factory. Terrible, low-quality product that even 1980s China would have been ashamed of. It only becomes decently usable after a lot of work. If you don't have a lathe and a milling machine, you're sh!t outta luck--don't waste your time on the Cougar. But... That's what I use Peace and happy warfare AD

Obviously they did it that way to avoid getting sued. Why else would they do it? It's blatantly obvious...

Go into Options, Special, for the Hornet. Set your Afterburner Detents to Always Off. That way, the burners light up when you push the throttle forward far enough. Otherwise you'll have to bind a key or a button to "Cycle Afterburner Detent" to toggle the detents every time you want to use the burners. AD

Ok, I've had this happen too and it only happens in DCS, rarely in anything else except Metro. For me, and a lot of other people, it's caused by default GPU clocks being much too high. You graphics card and motherboard have a feature called GPU Boost, and it ramps up the GPU clock speed to much higher than the original manufacturer's recommendation under heavy load, which can cause graphical glitches/artifacts and crashing to desktop. In your crash log it says "ERROR DX11BACKEND: DX device removed" which mine did too, meaning a GPU crash. Obviously you didn't actually remove your graphics card while it was running! It just quit working and DirectX couldn't detect it anymore, and crashed to desktop. The solution for me was to slightly down-clock my GPU. It took about 60-65 MHz downclocking for me, not very much, but if your GPU is running at close to 2000 MHz then it can be a problem, because these chips are actually designed to run at closer to 1700. I can attest that the 460.89 driver is very good, that's not the problem. Try using MSI Afterburner (or something similar) to downclock your GPU and possibly VRAM, by about 200 MHz or so. Try DCS, and see if it runs properly. Slowly increase your GPU clock until it crashes again, and bump it back down. Have fun AD

Because Nvidia drivers sometimes tend to be somewhat less... Functionally Graceful, shall we say, than their hardware, I've stuck with the Studio Driver for now, which is version 460.89. I've had good luck with it, it seems to perform well and be fairly crash-free. AD

Thanks for the input everyone! Just for laughs I wiped both drives clean and put Windows 10 Home on the NVMe drive, along with the paging file. DCS is now on my SATA3 drive. For the life of me, I can't really tell the difference! Windows seems to boot a little faster. DCS loading times are pretty much the same as they always were. The biggest difference is that when re-loading a mission I've already flown, the loading time is reduced to dang near zilch! Other than that, it doesn't seem to matter that much, so I guess I'll leave Windows, the pagefile.sys, my various boot-time stuff and a couple games on the NVMe drive, and use SATA for DCS. It doesn't matter much, but Windows seems happier (slightly faster) on the NVMe. I don't do heavy media production on my rig, so I guess the NVMe drive just isn't that big of a deal. When I need a new SSD I'll probably just get a big, dumb, cheap SATA3 one. Thanks all, AD

I started reading your post and thought, "I wonder if he got the Hornet?" Glad you like it, the Hornet is one of the best modules in DCS simply because it's good for both roles and it's very well-rounded (although it's still incomplete, but they're working on it.) Anyway, since you're digging the F/A-18C, if you're wondering what module to get next, I can heartily recommend the A-10C II. Don't get the original A-10C module, make sure it's the II version. It's pretty kickass as well Peace and happy warfare AD

LucShep, thanks so much man, I'm starting to think I should just leave it alone and get a bigger SATA3 SSD for games and whatnot. Maybe getting the NVMe drive only for DCS was a good idea after all. AD

Thanks Qiou87, I'm still considering it because it seems to me that having Windows 10 (and the paging file) on the fastest drive is a great idea. My loading times in DCS (on the NVMe drive) are very good, my only concern is if the slower SATA3 drive will give noticeable stutter when actually flying the missions. I'm always hearing that SATA vs. NVMe makes little difference for gaming, and that the best use of the fast NVMe drive is for a quick boot, snappy response and ultra-fast paging file access in the OS, but not for games. Also, I'm running out of space for more DCS stuff on the 250 GB NVMe drive, and a new SATA drive is cheaper anyway. Gonna hafta think about this a bit

Greetings everyone, I have two SSDs, one is an NVMe (Samsung 960 EVO 250 GB) and the other is a SATA3 drive (Kingston V300 240GB.) I currently have Windows 10 on the SATA drive, and DCS on the NVMe drive (only thing on that drive.) Question is, would I be better off using the uber-fast NVMe drive for Windows and the SATA one for DCS, especially with the Windows paging file on the NVMe drive? Would I notice any improvement in how things run, or am I better off having DCS on the fast NVMe drive? Reason I'm wondering is that people say there's no improvement in gaming with an NVMe drive. I bought it for DCS to get around texture loading stutters, but everyone says it makes no difference. So, I'm considering putting Windows on it instead. What do you all think, is it worth the time and effort? Thanks so much! AD

Nvidia antialiasing settings, all of them, don't do jack in DCS World. It doesn't matter what you set them to in NVCP. Something to do with DCS World's method of deferred shading. The AA settings in DCS itself are all you have to go with, and that's it. The only exception is Nvidia DSR, which after flying for a while, causes crashing. AD

Never been a problem for me, I have a 2-stage trigger. Pulling to the first click fires the slug guns only, pulling all the way fires the guns and cannon together. AD

It's called DSR, or Dynamic Super Resolution. It looks really good, gives great framerates compared to other AA methods, uses an enormous amount of VRAM, and causes crashing. I find the built-in MSAA has gotten better in DCS, I can run 4x MSAA on my old 1080 Ti and FPS hardly drops down to the low 40s. AD

It's only a soul, you get it for free when you're born. It isn't useful for much so why not?

You should try flying in a real aircraft! AD

Try it and see! Pretty much what AnimalMother711 said. It's mostly for taking cool screenshots and serves little to no purpose in the actual game. AD

Speedy4GT, Looking good man! I bet that new 5600X processor kicks ass. Make sure you use FAST memory with it to get the very best performance out of it. The newest AMD processors need fast memory to run at their best performance--more than 3000 MHz memory is needed, I think 3200 to 3600+ is recommended. If your RAM has an XMP profile (high speed) make sure you enable it in BIOS so that CPU will really rip! The limiting factor here is your graphics card, which is woefully inadequate for DCS. I'd recommend keeping an eye out for a used GTX 1080 Ti (not the regular 1080, but the Ti version, 11 GB) which is an older card, but is still a beast, and DCS works well with it. Alternatively, hang in there and get either an RTX 3080, or an AMD 6800 XT when they become available. They won't be cheap, but at the same time, you won't be disappointed. Stay away from intermediate cards like RTX 20x0 series. They cost too much and don't deliver the performance for the buck. Save your cash and hang in there for the *really* good stuff to become available. AD

Your computer specs look pretty good! You forgot to tell us about your monitor, though. Does it have Freesync? It allows your monitor's refresh rate (screen update rate) to exactly match your graphics card's render rate (FPS). That way, the monitor refreshes its image on-screen with every frame produced by the GPU, instead of the two being independent. It eliminates a huge amount of stuttering and give much more fluid motion. Make sure it's enabled! Don't confuse Freesync with VSync. They're two entirely different features, and both should be enabled together for best results. VSync just prevents your GPU from producing more FPS than your monitor can display--Freesync (adaptive refresh) makes sure that your monitor updates the image exactly when your GPU tells it to--with each new frame produced. We also need to know the resolution of your monitor to recommend any settings. You'll do well to add a "signature" to your profile that describes every detail of your system, so that way we can always help you out without having to bog you down with questions Oh yeah--16 GB RAM is pretty good for most stuff. Since you have an 8 GB graphics card, you might want to go up to 32 GB of RAM in the future. Make sure it's fast memory, because the AMD Ryzen processors perform better with it. So, well over 3000 MHz memory is good. Finally, I find I get more consistent performance when disabling the Shader Cache in the graphics driver (control panel.) It takes longer to load missions, but once they're running, there's less stuttering when flying around. Peace and happy warfare! AD

That sounds like something the Russians would do deliberately, rather than a quality control issue. Westerners can say what they want about the Russkis--but they aren't stupid! AD

Actually I've great luck with the latest Studio Driver, 460.89. It's more stable and allows me to run my 1080 Ti full-tilt instead of downclocking, and it doesn't seem to crash anymore. Of course, only time will tell, but it seems pretty stable and has really good performance. Guess I'll find out eventually. AD

You'd probably like the Hornet. It's a very good A2A platform and very good for A2G as well. It's not the very best at either--but very good at both, which is why they built it The F-16 module is still very unfinished. The Hornet has more 'goodies' functioning. AD

Update--I'm back to getting yellow flashes with WW2 fighters. AD