Headwarp

So, not trying to sound snooty here but can we or can we not disregard the fact that you have an sli setup and focus on the fact that one Titan XP is powering three 1440P monitors? Man that's a lot of pixels and DCS is demanding at much lower resolutions. Roughly 3 million more pixels than 4k. Have you tried running on a single monitor and does the GPU usage still randomly drop @2560x1440 resolution? Nevermind that, Try a single monitor, disable MSAA if enabled and enable SSAA x1.5, as this should help the GPU take more of the workload as well as provide 4K resolution which is the target pascal has been borderline able to reach. Then adjust your other graphics settings from there. The 2080 Ti is being touted as "The first true 4k60 gpu" by the people buying them. With one monitor at native resoultion with msaa off and ssaa 1.5x (4k resolution on a 2560x1440 screen), if your problems disappear you're choking out one of your Titan XP's VRAM with 3 high resolution displays. If DCS runs acceptably @4k, I'd recommend selling the 1440p displays and using 3 1080P displays, or holding on to one 1440P display and maybe picking up a samsung Odyssey if you aren't prone to motion sickness. Unless you spend more time playing games that utilize sli than not. If it were me? I'd probably sell two monitors, sell one Titan XP and invest that into a Vive Pro, or a Samsung Odyssey and a faster cpu/mobo/ram combo. If you are still freezing up even at lower resolutions it's something else, hopefully not the easily overlooked power management setting in your DCS profile in NV control panel, but perhaps a CPU bottleneck or something else causing CPU spikes. I hope I don't sound condescending. I don't mean to be. Linus Techtip's videos on 8k gaming shows some of the complications with too high of a resolution in modern games. We aren't there yet.

Yeah I'm completely surprised by the fact that the i7 9th gen comes without hyperthreading. That used to be what made the i7 the i7. Pretty weird shift in marketing design. 9700k from what I gather should outperform the 8700K in multi-threaded apps afaik though. Reviews may prove me wrong. I might play around with disabling HT after my 2080 Ti gets here and see if I notice any difference in performance between that and using process lasso. Just help me pull my foot out of my mouth if it turns out I'm just wrong k? Sorry again for being so wordy. Very few topics I can find so much to say about. Start talking pc hardware or talk to me like a musician and it's hard to shutup sometimes.

Download and install MSI afterburner or some other monitoring tool with an on-screen display while gaming and configure it to show CPU usage per core and GPU usage. If one core is maxing out on your CPU and your GPU is hardly working you're CPU bottlenecked and the 6700k would allow you to OC to higher frequencies provided you have suffcient cooling and provide performance increases (in the same regard so would a 6500k vs a 6500). Remember we're looking for any given one of the cores on your CPU being maxed out, not the total of all cores being maxed out. 99% of one core on is 25% of total cpu usage for a quad core without hyperthreading. If none of the cores on your CPU are maxed out but the GPU is at 99%, the 1070 should offer you the 15% you're looking for if not more, but it might be the tipping point that causes the CPU bottleneck and then you'd want a faster CPU to get the most out of the card, although you can always do that at a later date. DCS likes lots of VRAM. IMHO I'd upgrade all 3 over time. The GPU/CPU taking priority depending on which one is maxed out while you're flying currently. Memory being the last step. https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/H170M%20Pro4/ Is this your motherboard? Seems the latest BIOS supports Kabylake aka 7th gen even. So yeah a 6700K would work... but so would a 7700K if you update your BIOS. You might even consider the i5 7600k as it's cheaper than both the 6700k and 7700k minus the hyperthreading that DCS doesn't benefit from right now anyway, although who knows with vulkan. I'd imagine the 7600k overclocks decently. On the other hand the 7700k turbos to 4.5ghz out of the box. But as far as single core performance - the i5 7600K turbos to 4.2 ghz out of the box just like the 6700k does. My guess is GPU will be the biggest upgrade for now. But you need to determine that through monitoring cpu/gpu usage rather than let us guess blindly. ;) GPU's are something I personally will never skimp on as I make use of them for a period of years before upgrading and got myself into high resolutions and VR. But for 1080P - today's high end gpu's surpass the basic needs of 1080P resolution gaming. 1070/1080 should do ya if you don't plan on any supersampling. Advice for future upgrades and builds - it's always worth it for the K series when shopping intel processor. It's faster stock out of the box if you're afraid of OC'ing, and then when it is finally out of warranty and you're wondering "do I really need to upgrade?" down the road you can play around and get decent results with overclocking with plenty of guides out there to tell you how to do so safely. Can end up feeling like you brought a brand new computer for the cost of navigating the bios and changing some settings, and perhaps the expense of a respectable AIO cooler rather than air. By the time I overclocked a CPU for the first time, it wouldn't have sold for much at all and it was that or build a new rig at the time. So there really wasn't any downside. That being said - for me and my technical ability it was easy enough to get a stable OC that I'm no longer scared of the idea, and didn't hestitate with my brand new 8700k as soon as I had everything installed last year. ;) *Edit* My apologies for my interest in the PC-hardware forum as of late. It's tiding me over while I'm waiting for my new GPU to arrive. >.<

I thought 9th gen was confirmed soldered TIM for all K series? I'll have to re-read up on that. *edit* Snipped this screen capture from newegg. So yeah..apparently all 9th gen K series processors have soldered TIM. Read under "Push your limits" Still going to be a few years before I feel the need with my 8700k though I imagine. 4.9ghz holding strong in stress tests including at least 4.7 on the cache ring ratio wihtout a delid. Then again, my PC is mostly a glorified entertainment system with some very limited production use, so that's just me. If I had waited a year to upgrade from my 2500K tho or was just building a new rig? Whoo boy that sounds lovely. Might be worth hoping for a price drop over the next couple years, especially given that I could probably make some money back on my 8700K and offset the cost even more. I feel like despite it being a kneejerk to ryzen, 8th gen intels must have had high odds in the silicon lottery. Far more posts of people achieving near 5.0ghz or higher than complaints, at least once people figured out to disable the automatic OC features on their motherboards >.<. I personally haven't even tried to push mine to it's limits and don't feel a need to delid. Kudos to Intel if 9th gens hold up to that trend despite the recent 2700x vs 9900k sanctioned review debacle and the extra money you'd have to pay for a 9700k or 9900k. It will be interesting to see what 9th gen can do.

The reduced cable management is awful appealing, darn you evga/nvidia for taking all of my money while so much hardware is on sale.

I find that strange but I'll have to take your word for it. There are certainly some games I've run into that run better with the CPU affinity set to only cores 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 on my 8700k but that improvement was seen using process lasso. The questions I'd ask are - are you certain you set DCS.exe to always>single threaded performance mode vs current>single threaded performance mode? Is there a background task, maybe like anti-virus/windows defender or anything really that might not perform as well on logical cores as it would on physical? Windows power management settings set to "High Performance?" Were you running an overclock that may have caused additional voltage requirements with hyperthreading on? Which is more likely on a less current i7 than something within the last 2-3 generations. Sometimes a lack of voltage isn't immediately obvious. In most cases too low a voltage will cause your entire system to crash, but I've also witnessed "passing" stress tests that would cause a few seconds of system hangup constantly through the process, and a .25 voltage increase would smooth that out. Or even disabling hyper-threading might allow for lower voltage requirements. Chipset drivers are current? BIOS version is current? CPU running at desired speed in task manager I.E. no throttling? What generation of i7? Back when I first built my i7 8700k rig coming from my i5 2500k@4.5ghz using the same 980Ti and SSD's in both, there was no real noticeable performance difference between the two rigs. I use the comparison because the i5 2500k doesn't feature hyperthreading. Then again I was already GPU limited at the time, and I may have run into bottlenecks if I had simply upgraded just my GPU. (pretty sure 3440x1440 and VR would still pin a 1080Ti if I had bought that instead of a new computer, but it was time if nothing else for ease of configuration) If it works better for you by all means do what you gotta do. But afaik there shouldn't be a difference between running an executable with cpu affinity set to only physical cores and running that same executable on a system with hyper-threading disabled given the specs are otherwise identical. I don't mean to insult anyone's intelligence..so forgive me if you've already assured yourself of these suggestions. These are just things that would go through my mind if I experienced something similar. Personally if I pay for hyperthreading, I want my hyperthreading hehe. The difference between hyperthreading and no hyperthreading on a CPU is sometimes more than $100, (9th gen it's more like $200) and i5's overclock pretty darn well. 8600k reportedly getting to 5ghz as easily as it's i7 counterpart. I use my rig for way more than DCS. And it very well could be I'm not noticing a difference because of the resolutions I play at, causing the GPU to have a higher workload than my CPU. Just me personally your scenario would cause me to investigate potential issues with my rig. I'm not saying you have any system issues.. just that if it were my system behaving that way I'd suspect and start going through my troubleshooting routines. Flight sims are resource hogs, and at times have helped me identify system errors that just don't occur (or at least dont affect gameplay) in older or less resource intensive games. *Edit* - Just also want to throw out there that recent generations of intel chips with hyperthreading are a different thing than older generations of intel chips with hyperthreading, at the very least when it comes to overclocking. When I built the 2500k rig I had prior to this one, i7 users were struggling to get to 4.5ghz and above, 1080P was pretty much a standard resolution and disabling hyperthreading allowed for higher cpu clocks with less voltage As gpu's got better at handling 1080P higher clockspeeds began to matter more in the gaming world. That may still be the case, but people are breaking 5ghz at like 1.3-1.35v on 8th gen intels at least with hyperthreading enabled and I don't generally see disabling it suggested for OC purposes on newer chipsets. I don't know at what point in recent history allowed for better efficiency, but I'd say at least up to 3rd gen it was common practice to disable HT for overclocking purposes. My apologies for my wordiness I dont know why I can talk about this stuff for days. In the long run, it's your money and your PC, so do what works best for you. What I've said can be taken with a grain of salt, as there are too many specifics about any given individual's system that I just can't know without a comprehensive inquiry. Fortunately, disabling/endabling HT isn't a difficult task.

By simming drive i just mean a drive you only install your sims on. DCS takes up about 130GB with all the maps and as your modules pile up. So by itself I wouldn't give it smaller than a 250GB drive. For Xplane + DCS i'd have at least a 500GB drive and you might have room for a game or two other than your sims depending on the size of them while leaving more than enough free space for performance. And no you don't need to install DCS on your C:\ drive. Every program you install on your PC should have an option to install programs to a drive and file directory of your choosing. I recommend installing system and device drivers to your boot drive, and your games/sims on a seperate drive/drives. During the windows install process you will choose the smaller drive to install windows and that drive will be your C:\ aka boot drive. You might have to google how to add a second drive in Windows 10 or your preferred OS. Once done by default the second drive will be "D:" IF you know your way around windows you can choose any drive letter of your choosing, but by default windows goes alphabetically from C:\ I keep my gaming drives separate from my boot (C:\) drive.. and i keep my hardware drivers on my C: drive as well. My games are on my D: and E: drives, and my storage is on F: , you can create folders within those drives. the format is Drive:\foldername\nextfoldername\filename.extension, or my dcs install dir and executable D:\games\DCS World Openbeta\bin\dcs_updater.exe - D: is the drive, the string of \folder\s\ is referred to as the path. You can have as many drives as you have sata ports in your system (at least when talking internal drives, you wouldn't want to run DCS on an external drive afaik), some of which may or may not be disabled with the installation of multiple NVME's, but still allowing for the same amount of drives total. The easiest way to navigate these is through file explorer in windows, with icons to click for drives, folders and files, but you can also navigate them using MS-DOS language in CMD Prompt, which if you ever run into a reason to use it, google will likely steer you down the right path. When you run the DCS installer it asks you if you want to install to the default location (likely C:\program files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\) or you can type in or browse for your own drive and path, which is my recommended method as it helps with organization as well as not fill up your boot drive. Those samsungs are among some of the best sata III ssd's on the market and are a great deal atm (if you're in the USA at least). I'd just decide if you want a 1TB so you have space for other stuff should you decide to or a 500GB. It's nothing to sweat though as you can always change or just add or replace your drives at a later date. At any point for years on end. And yes - for the purposes of gaming/simming I'm confident you'll be more than happy with the sata III SSDs. The NVME drives are overkill and bragging rights pretty much, also it's generally less stressful on your chipset's pci-e lanes to have less drives with more space. I.e 250GB + 1TB > 250GB+500GB+500GB. (Not even getting into raid setups. You won't need it on SSD's :) Grain of salt there as I have 4 drives connected and don't have issues. I don't think there's ever been a point that all 4 had disk usage at once. *edit* Mule summarized my wordiness pretty well, so thank you. Hope I've helped, Bazmack, sorry for diving so deeply into the basics on this topic, I don't mean any offense by it if I'm telling you things that you already know outside of what drive sizes and types you'd want.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147676 I'd pick that up 250gb on sale for like $55 USD for a boot/os/drivers drive That leaves you with the option of a 1TB version of the drive above for $166, or a 500GB version for $90 for a dedicated simming drive. or a 500gb NVME (970 Evo is $147+tax) You don't want to game on an HDD. My 4TB HDD only gets used for storing large video projects and maybe really old games. NVME won't be a huge upgrade from a 2.5" ssd when it comes to a boot drive and gaming, at most it might allow for faster swap file access if your system needs it but I really can't say there's a benefit to it at all vs sata III SSDs even in that regard when it comes to gaming. . If money is a concern go for the 2.5" sata III drives. You should be happy with them. 970 Evo's aren't terribly priced though at the moment imo up to 500GB, so don't feel bad about whatever you do. If i didn't just splurge on a GPU I'd be thinking about replacing my two 2.5" ssd's with a 1TB 2.5" and maybe adding a 500gb NVME drive. I have DCS, another sim that takes less space, and maybe 1/2 other games on one of my 480GB drives, it's about half full. SSD's have better performance the more free space you have, although, for large file transfers and perhaps some production work NVME will leave sata III in the dust. Summary - If it's just for DCS and Xplane, 2.5" sata III ssd's will do you just fine and they're pretty inexpensive at the moment. You technically don't need more than 500gb to have plenty of free space as a dedicated drive for your simming purposes for awhile to come. If you want other games and stuff, I'd go for a 1TB at least. And my personal preference is to have at least one additional drive that is separate from anything to do with my OS or drivers. system boot/loading speeds benefit largely jumping from HDD to SSD, as well as most games (which I include flight sims as games), where the jump from a sata III to NVME for gaming purposes doesn't offer much at all... but they take up less space and don't require addiontal wiring. And if you had to transfer data between them it'd be stupid fast. I can't remember what review I watched, but boot times from HDD To SSD went from 40s-1m to like 11 seconds, and NVME booted in 6-8. The drives are like 6x faster but when it comes to loading a bunch of small files like OS drivers or game engine files it's just not the case. Either will make you scoff at your measely old HDD's though in any regard. If I had the money to throw down on storage right now I'd personally try to refine it to no more than 3 drives, 250GB boot drive, 1TB gaming/simming drive, 4-8TB storage HDD. And sales happen frequently.. so I'd be waiting for sale prices. Which it seems there are quite a few right now. Don't forget you can always plan ahead and add more storage later. The benefit of the desktop is ease of adding drives and other hardware LATER if you want it. $150 for a 500gb NVME drve is honestly tempting though. I paid close to that for a 240GB 2.5"sata III Kingston SSD when they were starting to drop in price >.<. That was like 3-4 years ago, and it still works perfectly despite no longer being in my system. same with the two 480gb sata III ssd's i got for even cheaper not much longer after that which I'm still using. I personally wouldn't go back to a traditional HDD for general purpose. Outside of my house my PC is one of the most valuable things I personally own so it's not like I'm rich. I use my computer daily for a lot of things and simming's honestly a cheaper hobby than some so it's all about how much you value your time spent vs your $$$. And just to knock more dollars off, while i personally prefer separate drives for OS and my sims, you'd probably be fine with just the 1TB Sata III SSD with your OS and sims on it too if you really have no use other than xplane/dcs with a bit of room to spare. I just think two heads are better than one. Background tasks will generally be using the boot drive at least a bit.

Google "Process Lasso", you can set DCS.exe up for single threaded performance which does the same thing as disabling hyperthreading except it's only for the .exe files you specify rather than turning off the feature all together. Hyperthreading is the selling point of 8th gen and lower i7's or i9 with 9th gen. On early gen i7's you could reach higher overclocks by disabling it, but the 8700k overclocks with it on just fine. There MAY be some truth to DCS running better on physical cores rather than logical cores, but you don't need to disable the feature entirely to achieve that with specific programs with a program like Process Lasso. That way you have hyperthreading for the extra horsepower if you use any applications that benefit from multi-threaded performance. I.E. better overall system performance. If DCS is the ONLY thing you use your computer for disabling hyper-threading isn't a big deal, but you might as well have bought a CPU that doesn't feature hyperthreading to begin with and saved a buck imo. But if you use it for more than that, and alt tab to browse the internet inbetween sorties, or run discord in the background or various other programs keep the hyperthreading on and check out Process Lasso, you only have to pay for it if you want to support the developer. (This advice isn't specifically for the poster I'm responding to) Also - just as general PC advice because we never know how much people know about personal computers - if your rig aint running how it should it's always good to check motherboard manufacturer website for driver updates at least once a month on hardware released within the last year or three, as well as drivers for any other peripherals or hardware in your system. Windows updates tend to break old drivers from time to time, also having a z370 asus board myself, Asus has been updating the BIOS for them regularly if you haven't checked on that in awhile, some of which in response to some of the latest windows updates. Take pics of your bios settings with a cell phone before flashing, as you will have to reconfigure your OC as long as you're certain it's stable, and never cut the power to your PC during the flashing process. Let it finish and it will reboot a couple times before you can get back into bios to configure your setup. Not trying to offend anyone who may already understand basic PC maintenance, but it's good to keep in mind for anybody who's still learning what comes with PC gaming.

did you at least set the ram to run at the factory xmp profile in bios after resetting defaults?

Turning it off lets you turn up the pixel density further tho. *shrug* its all trade offs.

Check flight controls for aileron and elevator trim commands.

Hyperthreading has never caused me any issues in DCS, but for those of you who say you saw an improvement without it, instead of disabling the feature entirely Bitmaster is on point with Process Lasso. Pretty easy to set up any .exe file to utilize only the phsyical cores rather than logical ones and you get you keep your logical cores to help with managing anything running in the background/multi-tasking or if you for some reason start using applications that do make more use of multi-threaded processors. Without hyperthreading your older i7's might as well be i5's. For the latest iteration, a 9900k without hyperthreading is pretty much a 9700k. Gaming may not benefit from it yet, but overall system performance should be better with HT enabled. I have been using Process Lasso due to seeing Bitmaster mention it many times in these forums and gives you the benefits of both worlds. I recommend trying that before disabling the feature that made your processor more expensive than its i5 sibling. Should I find myself not gpu limited @45fps in DCS VR with a GPU upgrade I'd just increase my pixel density, but for the VR user not getting 100% gpu utilization, i'd be looking into system drivers or perhaps even a DRAM bottleneck. Via supersampling or DSR for pancake mode, or Pixel Density increases in VR, you should one way or the other be able to pin that GPU til it slows to a crawl, your CPU hardly breaking a sweat and thus find the performance limitations of said gpu.

I would hold off personally.. getting my 8700k when they first came out was a pretty tedious task and retail prices went from $389 to $419 (USD) and you had to watch retailers like a hawk to snag one before hardware scalpers tried to list them for $500-600. I've got all 6 cores running @ 4.9ghz currently without delid on like 1.25 volts using an AIO cooler and barely breach 75C while stress testing (I keep my house pretty chilly admittedly). I'm glad I CAN upgrade to a 9th gen processor later without gutting my entire system if I want to but there really is no need for it right this moment. Wait til the newness wears off and maybe we'll be lucky and see some price drops next year. If the 9th gen CPU's weren't compatible with my z370 board personally I wouldn't be thinking about one in the future at all. It took me 6 generations to buy a new intel CPU and frankly I was GPU limited @3440x1440 as well as in VR which I'm trying snag a 2080Ti at retail price. With soldered TIM the 9th gen K processors may be cooler and as a result easier to OC, but still, 8th gen intels should easily get us through the next 5 years if we want them too. I'll grab one if the prices ever drop. If one were building an entirely new build I'd say the choice lies between the 2700x or a 9th gen intel chip, but for people already rocking a system that games well I'd say don't rush if gaming performance is all you want, especially if interested in VR or high resolutions which tend to limit you at the GPU anyway. We don't even know what differences we'll see with the vulkan api, or when ED will implement it. To comment on the OP - if you got deep pockets build dat intel rig. I've been an intel fan since my first i7 kicked the crap out of the performance of any amd rig I ever built, but I have to say I'm impressed with what the 2700x offers and wouldn't scoff at someone's selection of it for a gaming rig.

Seems to be the general consensus when you start asking google about nvme vs sata III for gaming that you won't see much benefit from NVME drives over an SSD. But either will likely keep you from running newer games on an HDD not aided by intel optane ever again. Likely very different for production/rendering/editing workloads. But for the gamer my old kingston 240gb SSD I was using as a boot drive benched slow as crap, no where near the 500MB/s reads that even my cheap PNY 480GB ssd's are capable of. Yet, that kingston already booted to windows within seconds of the logo/bios screen, sometimes hitting reboot, looking away and being back to windows before I thought to reach for f2 or del to enter bios. File explorer and other apps from that kingston were noticably more responsive than the HDD I was using prior to that. In my head MAYBE my system is a smidgeon more responsive witihin windows but if so it's an increment so small I can't be certain its not just placebo after making the 970 evo my boot drive. The 250gb 970 evo I got when they first came out for like $120 total after tax so I'm not particularly unhappy about it. I'd say it takes up less space in my case, but, my 2.5" mounts are very well hidden out of the way of airflow and stay pretty cool on the other side of my motherboard. 970 evos up to 500GB pricetags aren't that horrible tho imo as low as $150usd atm, hence why I'm still planning to buy another, and may even decide to use it for audio/video production, but if you shop around over time you'll likely find decent 2.5" ssd's for half the price if you aren't concerned about the space they take up. Some of the newer boards (z390 i think) I've browsed on websites seem to have 3 m2 slots, altho the 3rd looks like a smaller form factor maybe for optane I'm unsure, but at least on my z370 board, with one NVME drive you can have 7 total drives in your system, 1 NVMEand 6 sata III ports, or with two NVME drives you can have 6 total drives, 4 sata III and 2 NVME, disabling 2 sata III ports to allow for the bandwidth of the second nvme at pci-e x4. Factoring in that 4-8TB HDD's are more and more affordable, as well as 2.5" SSD's, you can end up with a plethora of storage configurations to suit your needs with that amount of connectivity imo.

Just another take on multiple NVME drives - Yes, CPU only has 16+4 PCI-E lanes but the z370 and z390 chipset have 24 pci-e lanes via the PCH that share the +4 to the CPU. *editing in some demystification about NVME drives and GPU pci-e lane bandwidth* Only if you're using one of your PCI-E slots on your mobo for NVME drives do you have to worry about GPU bandwidth.. The 16 pci-e lanes on the CPU are for your pci express slots, which is why 2 pci-e cards = x8+8x and 3 = x8+x4+x4. All of your sata and m2 form factor drives will use the motherboard's PCH that compete for the other 4 pci-e lanes on your cpu. Unlikely to hamper your gaming in any way shape or form. The only time you'd really run into a bottleneck with two m2 nvme drives is if you're transfering large amounts of data to or from both drives at once i.e. - it's probably a non issue. That being said - changing from a 2.5" kingston to a 970 evo for a boot drive wasn't much of an improvement for me personally. Using a sata III ssd for boot and a larger nvme drive for gaming/data transfer is a completely viable setup that still offers fast boot times and snappy response from the OS. Not that nvme will do much for gaming over a sata III ssd. Eventually I plan to throw a 500gb 970 evo in my other M2 slot for a dedicated simming drive, but I'm not thinking there's going to be that big a difference in loading times compared to my current 480GB sata III sim drive.

You should check Steam VR settings as it likes to default to supersampling that it thinks your rig should be able to handle (way more than you want generally) and set that to 1.0, disable MSAA in game and raise your pixel density in game for your supersampling needs. On my odyssey I'm able to hit a P.D of 1.5 on my 980Ti and maintain 45 fps over Cacausus. Persian Gulf not so fps friendly, but I'm waiting for gpu availability to take care of that.

I'm not saying to stop using this or anything but I feel like maybe using TARGET software in DCS is overcomplicating things in most cases unless you just really want 2 and 3 position switches in aircraft that don't have native bindings for such, which many do including the hornet. The hornet in particular has MOST of the 2 and 3 position switches we'd want ED has provided "abstractions" for. and if ever you need multi functions out of any of your buttons you can add any button as a modifier within the DCS controls menu. That being said - TARGET is pretty much 100% necessary in older sims that don't recognize more than one or two input devices, but DCS World actually allows for a lot of configurations with the option of adding as many modifiers as you want to get multiple functions out of keys/buttons from within the game client. I tend to use the diagrams from the manuals to map things to the stick and throttle grip. Some people have even managed to learn how to program positional switches in the games existing .lua files where they didn't exist previously. Just a suggestion.

if you did a clean install it will default to "Optimal" under power management in 3d settings in NV Control panel. If you did an express install and are experience this I'd run DDU in safe mode and reinstall... also can try just enabling nvidia share via geforce experience.. I've run into an issue in DCS where for some reason it would cap my fps to 64 if I didn't enable nvidia share or have geforce experience installed. I know of at least other in these forums who experienced the same issue and said he was able to fix it by deleting the "max fps" line in the graphics lua.

Have to toss my two cents in here that DLSS sounds like everything I've been dreaming for in DCS since the implementation of deferred shading. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad ED has been working to make 2.5 and the Hornet after all these years. And it's been exciting and can't wait to see future improvements. Hoping DLSS is included in that. Pretty sure nVidia claims they'll do the work of implementing it for you, and they're saying for free. (i'd love to find out if they mean it) Of course, I completely understand waiting until we get definitive performance results for DLSS vs other anti-aliasing methods, however - even at a resolution of 3440x1440 MSAA 2x is pretty much necessary to not see shimmers everywhere while causing a massive loss of performance. The same is true for VR, which I'm using a Samsung Odyssey which is 1600x1440 per eye. WIthout AA, or even with FXAA enabled buildings and tree lines shimmer like nuts, sections of ww2 gunsight crosshairs can vanish, and I've even seen surfaces of aircraft dissapear as they get further away, where msaa you can see every surface facing your direction until they're far enough to be just a dot. At these resolutions SSAA is more costly resource wise than MSAA. DLSS running off the tensor cores sounds amazing. DLSS sounds like the solution, and deferred rendering was mentioned as something that DLSS should pair well with. If DLSS offers the performance increase we're expecting while providing anti-aliasing comparable to at least msaa x2, I'd love to see it, as I'm upgrading to a 20 series nvidia card regardless. Looking at the hardware in the sigs from a lot of folks in these forums, I think if this feature were implemented many DCS pilots would be looking into a GPU upgrade. Also sounds like the closest we're going to get for some time to 90FPS VR in DCS without compromising image quality. I don't care if Eagle Dynamics NEVER messes with ray-tracing. DLSS is the feature I'm excited about with next gen cards. Although, realistic shadow and lighting physics maybe in 5 years sounds cool too.

that's pretty awesome @4k with msaa on. Dear Santa, I mean, Dear Eagle Dynamics, please implement DLSS lol.. he'd be getting like 90fps @4k touching the trees. It is the solution to all of our complaints about AA.

Nothing wrong with buying a 2080Ti if your budget allows for it, especially for a new build. Nothing ill advised about not upgrading if already in possession of a 1080Ti as well. My chain of thought behind GPU's is buy the best single gpu that you can as long as you're not currently CPU limited and it will last you longer than any other option, even let you skip generations. And you never know, ED might actually listen to folks if enough of us beg very kindly for DLSS implementation. Wouldn't hold your breath on that though, but more likely the more of us sporting RTX cards in our sigs. Things to note - in reviews using DX11 titles we've seen CPU limitations up to 2560x1440 on an 8700k @5.0ghz with 1080Ti (easily solved with supersampling). 3440x1440 might be a different story, at roughly 1.25 million more pixels. 2080Ti probably the highest performing option for VR right now, which you might find yourself interested in down the road. After switching to my Samsung Odyssey personally I couldn't go back to flight sims on a monitor. I still use my 3440x1440 monitor for other games though and still love it. And have been thinking about my next GPU upgrade ever since I got it. Never bought two GPU generations in a row and I wasn't about to start with pascal. It's hard to describe the immersion of VR to someone who hasn't experienced it, other than saying everyhting's lifesized, and in 3d with depth perception, and from the perspective of actually sitting in your aircraft. Although it helps if you know you aren't overly prone to motion sickness. I could spend all day on a boat. I'm a little salty that Asus hasn't given a release date for the Strix 2080Ti, as I'm in love with the RGB provided by my mobo/ram and case fans, and I'm having a debate on whether I'm going to wait for that or order an FE model and be done with it, but, if I get my card before you build your new rig I'll take a couple flights pancake style and let you know what kind of gpu usage I'm seeing.

Good to hear.

Delete/reinstall usb drivers, also maybe just unplug and plug everything back in. Flight simming has caused me to have powered USB hubs, one with 4 inputs and another with 7 and sometimes they get a little confused if I bump one and all devices try to connect at once.

With all of the terrains + quite a few of the modules my DCS directory is about 130GB. 250gb 2.5" ssd's go on sale for cheap regularly. I'd just let DCS have it's own if I didn't already have 480GB drives, one of which contains both of my prefered air combat sims.