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.

Looks like a solid build to me. I think 32 GB is enough, if you're looking at increasing the budget then I think you'd get more out of a higher tier GPU than increasing RAM to 64 GB.

Software development is very complicated. I'm not in the game industry (I do automation) but things are always far more complicated than they seem at first glance. Either way, this is my most anticipated module now. Hopefully it's still moving along and not dead. I really like these 70's and 80's aircraft. Pretty easy to learn to operate but have most of the features of the modern stuff. But those features are also still sufficiently crude and unreliable that it doesn't make things too easy.

That is assuming we can get the cards. I'm sitting on my 2080S for now and plan to upgrade to the big card from the next generation, probably AMD from the looks of it. But it might be a struggle. For a laugh, I checked ebay to see what the ancient RX 480 is going for, it's basically MSRP despite being a card from 6 years ago. But as said, things are getting better. Some cards are starting to get listed around MSRP but most are still well above. If things continue as they are, it should be fine in 6 months but my concern is there are a lot of people like me who would have upgraded but didn't. That backlog of gamer upgrades may hit the next gen cards pretty hard. Hopefully AMD and Nvidia have accounted for that with production. I don't think Intel is going to be a major player. They are releasing a mid level card for this generation, and this generation is on the edge of going away. The only way they will sell is if they sell for well below cost in the hope of gaining market share. The new intel cards are looking an awful lot like the old AMD FX series of CPU's. It didn't have to be that way, but they've had so many delays in getting them out that they will be obsolete before the first one hits the shelf.

I hopped onto the VR train with the Rift CV1 and have used the Rift S, Samsung Odyssey and currently use the Reverb G2. The resolution with the G2 is fine, it's the first one where I feel it's comparable to a modern screen. Resolution is still a little lower compared to 1440p but not by much. Overall I find spotting to be about the same or slightly easier but identification requires use of the VR zoom function. Situational awareness in VR is superb, TIR can't compare and that was the case for me within minutes of trying VR after years with TIR. It has other benefits too, like depth perception. Formation flying, gunnery, low level flying and hovering with a chopper are all vastly easier in VR. Overall I consider VR to be a competitive advantage if you're going for that. The downside is you need a monster system to use it. My system isn't really adequate for the G2 but is ok with the Rift S. Now would be a bad time to do a complete system replacement. GPU's are well above MSRP still despite a new generation coming later this year from both team red and green. The rumor mill suggests it will be a major technological leap so that even entry level cards this winter will be faster than anything on the market currently. No way of telling what pricing will be, though I expect prices will continue to fall.

I haven't noticed any performance improvements with the hind. With the Ka-50, I get about 60 fps in VR while Mi-24 gives 45-ish and AH-64 gives 30. This is in the same mission in the same sitting.

Nice setup, how to you have the collective attached? From that angle it looks like you drilled the bottom of the throttle.

Zoom isn't really what he's talking about, it's the distance from the aircraft the camera is at. I haven't noticed anything special about it but you can move the camera closer or further out. Think it's right mouse and drag or something like that. Been a while since I messed with that function.

Radar doesn't see everything. It's great against moving vehicles but completely useless against the MG emplacement in the 2nd floor window of a mud brick house. Within the context of a typical DCS mission, my guess is laser hellfires will serve no purpose once we get the FCR as it's pretty rare to see a mission here that isn't just a giant convoy of armor out in the open. Lately I've been toying with more realistic setups but the inevitable result of that is missiles are generally useless. Just end up using tons of rockets and guns to spray and pray into the edge of a forest I see fire coming from.

I feel like that was just a mistake. Got on talking about AI being applied to other choppers and started talking about the only chopper in DCS where it isn't relevant.

If we're talking about effectiveness, then it's not even remotely close. The Ka-50 is an overwhelmingly superior machine to the AH-64 as it currently exists in game. There is no situation in which the AH-64 would be preferable save for 1, I've been flying the Ka-50 since 2008 and need a change. As the AH-64 gets more complete, my opinion may change. With that said, I don't fly the Ka-50 much these days. It's just a little too easy to dominate ground forces and other choppers with it. At the moment I'm mostly playing with the Hind.