Icefalcon

Happy is a relative state of being depending on which game one runs, and the acceptable level of shadow effects on textures :) For DCS 1.5, I was running a GTX 950 2GB with shadows turned off and TBH, I was actually completely happy with that. I think DCS 1.5 was using around 1GB of VRAM, and around 6-8GB of RAM. I upgraded because of another flight sim that could render cities, when you hit something like Chicago or NYC, it's a whole other ball game for rendering requirements. DCS cities are by comparison tiny, and designed to be extremely efficient for rendering. So for DCS, I'll be turning on a whole bunch of shadows and up the graphics to max or near the max and I'm very happy with the GTX 1060. Some people with crazy cards like 980Ti and so forth were just running shadows and other effects like crazy, there is big diminishing returns to rendering that type of visual effects. Something like the 1060 should do DCS 2.0 just fine. I also do expect in about 2-3 years to upgrade to a GTX 1170. If you're holding your card for 2 generations and also play other games that are visually intensive, might want to try and go for the 1070, I believe it does have a significant difference in CUDA cores.

DCS work fine on Windows 10. The problem are other older games since Windows 10 disable some fairly popular DRM protection that were used, ironically some on Microsoft games... Just make sure to keep a spare SSD and roll Windows 7 on it, or run Virtual Box with Windows 7 for older games and you'll be fine. Aside from the spyware, I've been running Windows 10 since March, it's actually is the most stable Windows I have ever seen.

Big +1 for the 32GB of RAM. I used to run DCS 1.5 on 16GB which was fine, DCS was running around 6-8GB, but the Nevada map is going to push that to the edge for 16GB. You also want some breathing room for your OS and other background software so they don't get pushed out. If you play other games (space sims & flight) I've been able to get the main process to run up to 14.5GB of RAM usage on a certain other very resource intensive flight sim that uses 64 bit memory (it start with a letter of the alphabet :). Went out and got another 16GB after seeing that. That was in many ways a limit of my graphics card a GTX 1060 6GB, if you consider in maybe 2 years we'll all have graphic cards with like 10GB of VRAM, it's very easy to see a lot of games easily breach the 16GB usage level. I think DCS 2.x will breach that easily.

When you say "and thingys", you mean buttons too? Is the profile you edited loaded? Click the clutch "I" button, and use the 8 ways HAT on the joystick to cycle through and select profile. The active profile stored in the joystick is displayed on the LCD throttle screen. You can alternatively find the tray icon for Saitek and set that the active profile is the one you were editing. And good luck with the rotaries, I had an X52 Pro a few weeks ago, returned it for CH. The rotary were just difficult to use in DCS effectively, at least for me. I tried setting them as TRIM controls, but you had to set a range and bind it to keyboard, which causes all sort of input havoc. At the end I just gave up and didn't find a good use for the rotaries in DCS.

25" Acer G257HU 25-Inch WQHD (2560 x 1440) Widescreen Monitor. 2K monitor, not as fancey as the 4K ones, but good enough resolution, got it earlier 2016 for $250. Couldn't afford a 4K, they were still in the $600+ range. Big noticeable difference between the 2K and the 1920x1080 I was using.

I'm gonna be real geeky here, but I LIKES CH Control manager. Once you've figured out how to use it, it's actually really fun to try and set it up the correct way. And out of the various joystick management systems, I actually do like CH CM the most thus far. The biggest reason to go with CH CM is it's easy to switch profiles and you can save them. Once you've done the profile and the CMC file, it's done forever and ever. Once challenge I'm running into while doing HOTAS is some of the planes have control setup that are just so drastically different from each other that you can't use the same keybind for multiple aircraft (at least not easily). So what I've done as a strategy is to have same control on my hands for ease of muscle memory, but that mean multiple CH CM map for each of the unique planes with different key maps, all with 1 master CMC file. You can do all the same thing within any game, but it's just faster to make a CMC file and program stuffs in CH CM once you've gotten it figured out. And as a disclaimer, I got my CH HOTAS Trinity last Friday and learned how to use CH CM on Saturday. I'm not one of those old dudes who've been using CH CM since the mid 90s or anything. TARGET and SST just crash on me more and need more clicky to get what I want it to do than CH CM.

I went with HDMI monitors after comparing the two type for a long time. A key thing to remember with USB is they need drivers, and the refresh rate and quality just isn't the same because USB just isn't designed for this as part of it native spec. The way I have mine set up is with 2 8" mini monitors that are VESA mounted using a small articulating arms that clamp on to my desk https://amzn.com/B00EQ7HTG6 . The Cougars are velcroed on the monitors, and I can use the VESA arm to position it to the perfect spot for reaching.

It's actually not hard. Amazon or eBay something called the Zero Delay USB Encoder. It's a board with 12 buttons, come with the plug wiring and terminators for it. I did mine without any soldering at all. As long as you can use a drill and have some step bits to drill holes in a plastic box, you can get pretty much any decent size project box from the electronic store and it'll work. Check out some youtube videos on how people make buttons box, once you get started, it's super easy. The hard part is buying a ton of different buttons and figuring out what you want on your box. But honestly, if you have the space, I think it's a good beginning toward doing a cockpit. You know you're going to need multiple panel with buttons and toggle switches later on. Or just make different boxes for different games.

The one advantage to building your own is toggle switches gallore, you can have so many SPDT switches and LED switches it's just like a real aircraft panel.

Pretty much all standalone button boxes use some sort of USB encoder board that translate the input into a generic USB joystick readable by default drivers. It'll show up in your control panel with some number of axis things, and a number of buttons. You can then program them either directly in DCS by just clicking on the button, or through something like AutoHotKey AHK for more advanced functionalities and macro like sequence behaviors like those typically found in joystick programming utilities. I just finished building my own buttons box this weekend and I'm going through the AHK programming portion myself. Doing the macro programming is pretty fun, take some a few hours though.

Hello, First time poster. I've been out of the Flight sim game since the late 90s, just got back into it right now with DCS. In the past week I've purchased an X52 Pro, TrackIR 5, TM MFDs (and hooked them up to a pair of 8" LCD). All working, going through and reading the manuals now for various planes. My next project is to build a Buttons Box for common flight controls, usually the ones that are used but yet have weird combo in different games. This is in addition to functional combat controls that the X-52 can handle in it various modes. I'm using the Zero Delay USB encoder kit (LED version), which comes with board & wires, no soldering necessary and emulate 12 joystick buttons and 1 joystick (not used in this case). Got AutoHotKey scripts and tested it out that my Single Pole Single Throw (SPST) heavy duty toggle switches can work emulating 2 keyboard actions (ie: Landing gear down/up). Here are the controls I have so far: 1. Eject! => Big Red Round Button 2. Master Arms => Red LED Toggle Switch with cover 3 & 4. Jettison Fuel & Ord => SPDT Toggle Switch taking up 2 buttons and 1 neutral position. 5. Landing Gear => SPST Toggle Switch 6 & 7. HUD Only View / Forward Cockpit View => SPDT Toggle Switch (I might map this to the joystick though) 8. Gun Sight Mode => SPST Toggle Switch My question for feed back is, what common controls do you use that you would suggest being mapped to such a buttons box?