BeastyBaiter

Performance should be fine for 1440p 60hz but it feels a bit overpriced. I do assemble my own though, so the markup on that might be reasonable. The bottleneck will be the GPU assuming the system doesn't overheat (common problem with prebuilts, especially Dell/AlienWare).

Agreed on waiting. In a month or two you will get a vastly more powerful card for the same money, or be able to buy that card on ebay for half off.

I have an "AKRacing" chair, it was about $300 at the time and was highly recommended. I would not recommend it or any other "gaming" chair. What I liked about it was it is cloth instead of PU leather. PU leather disintegrates after about 6 months of use regardless of brand or how much you pay, so I cannot advise strongly enough to stay away from it. It's probably the worst of the common materials chairs are made of. Go with simple cloth or real leather only. Moving on from that, a good quality cloth office chair is probably the best option overall or a good quality leather office chair if you are concerned with spilling stuff on it. The racing style gaming chairs aren't terribly comfortable and the high headrest gets in the way of VR headsets.

It's very easy to add enough PD to kill any GPU, throw in some AA on top of that and you can have all kinds of GPU bottlenecks. However, backing it off slightly, you will find that DCS is capped at 40-45 FPS in VR at low altitude even if you bottom out the graphics in most missions whether single player or multiplayer. I've hopped in a few MP missions where the framerate ran at about 20 fps due to the CPU bottleneck and our CPU's are basically identical in terms of performance.

I don't think graphics quality is really the issue for VR, the problem is the CPU bottleneck. I have an RX 6950 and it rarely goes above 50% usage in VR, the problem is the CPU maxing out a single thread and being unable to feed the GPU graphics calls fast enough. My hope is that Vulcan + multi-threading corrects this problem. I do think that change needs to be made the #1 priority. It will incur a short term cost, but the reality is that even in 2d, continuing with DX11 and single threading (+half of one for sound) will kill DCS as a viable product. DX11 is truly ancient at this point and single threading is something that belongs in a history book. My guess is, within a year or less, GPU makers will drop support for DX11. That doesn't mean it won't work, but they will put about as much effort in as they do for DX9 on Windows XP, which is to say none.

Lack of reliable IFF does change rules of engagement pretty substantially. I've toyed around on one of the cold war servers a bit with the Mirage F1 and basically you have to be in guns range before you can shoot anyone. That's kind of a problem for a high speed brick. On a related note, I've never been shot down by an enemy while flying the F1 in MP... I've been shot down many times in it though.

I would expect them to be well past the planning phase at this point. Typically in software development, when the thing gets released, the devs are already working on the next thing and just doing bug fixes/testing/documentation. Bug fixes and testing are an awful lot of hurry up and wait, not a whole lot of active development. So whatever is next is likely 2.5 years into development already or at least some of the ground work for it (such as generic tools or blocks of code to make things easier).

Ideally we would have gotten the EQ5 rather than a Spanish version but that's a moot point. If a weapon was capable of being used without modification to the aircraft, then I think it should be included. Just because a particular air force didn't use said weapon due to doctrine or budget isn't relevant in the context of a game. Additionally, if all the changes required to make a weapon work were under the hood and invisible as far the pilot was concerned, then that too is a good enough reason to include the additional weapon. Once we get into cockpit or substantial airframe modifications where there are physical differences in the cockpit or flight performance of the plane, then I think that's where it makes sense to draw the line and say no unless an additional version is made. Logic behind this is simple, I doubt more than a handful of people got the F1CE due to it's long history of collecting dust in the Spanish Air Force. We bought it as the closest example we could get of a Mirage F1 that actually saw combat (mostly Iraq, but others too). That's true for many aircraft in DCS. If memory serves, the F-18 in DCS is also the Spanish model but basically everyone got it for its USN service.

+1

My guess is missing function, I noticed it too. Radar controls have the same problem, you can do max range or min range but neither of the two middle options.

Good news is GPU prices have collapsed along with the crypto market, shouldn't be hard to get something good for cheap off of ebay.

Hopefully the Flogger gets some love. I expect it will be one of the more fun fighters in DCS between it being a little speed demon and having some slightly sketchy but still usable missiles. But yeah, the F-15 is going to be more popular and sell better, so will likely get more attention.

Q2: Agreed on biggest GPU you can possibly get. That said, my experience shifting from an RTX 2080 Super to an RX 6950 XT is that the AMD cards have a bigger CPU bottleneck in VR than the NVidia ones do in DCS (and IL2). A few others have noticed this as well. So while the RX 6950XT is theoretically significantly better than an RTX 3080 Ti, in DCS it has a lower peak fps in VR if you try to sacrifice quality to get average fps up. That doesn't mean the card is less powerful though, as within that capped fps you can really crank the settings up. Can't say if they can go higher than an RTX 3080 Ti as I don't have one, but you can't drop settings way down in an attempt to actually get 90 fps. At least that's the case with my i5-10600k.

I suspect you'd be disappointed if you learned how little mock dogfighting modern fighter pilots do. It's also not a very practical thing to do in real life anyways. It was a bad idea in WW1 and WW2 and hasn't gotten any better with age. While it certainly happened in real life on many occasions, that doesn't mean it was smart. It is fun to do in video games though. In any case, I'm sure basic performance charts like max sustained turn rate exist. I think and hope our flight models adhere to them closely. That likely isn't the kind of thing they can just post on a forum due to copyright, though.

Main thing I've noticed is it appears a hell of a lot safer to be in a Ka-52 than an Mi-28. Seen videos of both taking hits, yet to see a Ka-52 go down in such a way that the crew would have been in real danger, looks like every Mi-28 that went down killed the crew in the process. And yeah, they seem to favor rockets and guns a lot, but that makes sense. A hovering attack in forested or populated area is suicidal. I've seen a few choppers attempt that and they keep getting whacked with ATGM's. I've also noticed the countermeasures seem pretty effective. More than a few videos out there of Ka-52's spoofing many manpads before one finally scores a hit. It is worth mentioning the propaganda war is pretty fierce. In the US it's next to impossible to see any thing except the Ukrainian videos and they are all heavily edited. Most are completely useless for figuring out what's actually going in a particular fight.