Sideslip

I think there are two reasons for difficulty spotting ground targets. First is the fact that most vehicles in the game are camouflaged. Green on green is not supposed to be easy to see. If they were bright red or yellow tanks, it would be a piece of cake. You might have a better chance by coming 90 degrees to the sun so that the shadow is visible. I've noticed using illumination flares at night casts some huge shadows that makes targets super easy to spot. Second is the poor terrain quality. I fly down low IRL and you can spot vehicles from 3 or 4 miles easily even if they are near bushes or similar color to the terrain. But there is far far far more detail in the real world than can ever realistically be expected to be in any video game. So instead of having a sharp contrast of a squareish vehicle in front of a raggy bushline, you have a squareish vehicle on top of a blob of green shades that doesn't have any logical pattern to be interrupted. Basically you can spot things by noticing something is out of place, but if everything is random there is nothing to pick up on. Even if they replaced the ground textures with accurate satellite imagery, the resolution would be too low. Maybe in 15 or 20 years. Unless they hand draw high rez textures and have a 50GB texture file. Also keep in mind that in the game you have tanks driving on top of flat forests. The textures are supposed to look somewhat real, and IRL there are often lots of forests. They can't draw trees everywhere so you have them included in the texture. The complex nature of the colors makes it hard to spot a green speck among many green blobs. If the game were nothing but flat green ground, you'd spot everything no problem. Just look at vehicles on roads. They are very easy to spot because they are on top of a flat sharp texture.

Yup I was right http://www.apem.com/int/ag-series-73.html Hall effect sensors from CH for farm tractors, but not computer joysticks.

I owned the CH pedals for 8 years and finally replaced them 6 months ago (they only lasted that long because they spend half their life in the closet). CH pedals are complete crap. I hated them after about a year of use, as I did my CH Combatstick. They are clunky, loud, inaccurate, the toe axis only uses about 50% of physical travel making them basically on/off only, look like piss, and the software like the pedals themselves is from 1995. I dremeled them last year to remove the awful centering, but the springs are still too weak and I didn't want to go through the hassle of finding stronger ones just to have slightly less crappy pedals. I can't imagine how the Saitek ones could be worse unless they just plain don't work. It's easy to think CH makes good products when you've never experienced an actual good product. I actually think they are a despicable company for charging what they do with no desire to improve the products. Heck they could have replaced pots with hall effect 10 years ago for almost nothing so that customers would never have to worry about lost accuracy, but they don't give a crap about customers. They are an industrial company that makes this 20 year old equipment on the side. I'm sure farm tractors have better equipment than their joystick. Never tried the Satek pedals but I was considering them (hoping they would be better) before I decided it was stupid to replace crap with slightly better crap wasting my money, and instead bought a crosswind that I will likely never need to replace. You have to ask yourself, "do I want to spend hundreds of dollars on something that just sort of works ok, and then replace it a few years later when it breaks or I want something better? Or should I just spend that money now and have something that I actually enjoy and works properly that I'll likely never need to replace, or at least not for the next 15 years?"

Seeing your settings, turn off Civ Traffic. It's a waste of CPU performance (which is in short supply) for nothing. Also reduce water to medium. All high does IIRC is add better terrain reflections which you will rarely see and that costs a little bit of GPU power. And I would reduce the Rez of cockpit displays. That can be a big performance hog when using a weapons targeting system as the game has to render a second view, applying AA and AF twice. The rest of your settings are similar to mine. I'm using ultra for my view distance, but in areas with lots of units and buildings you may get an fps boost (via cpu load) by dropping to medium. I wouldn't use low though. If you want to have a better idea whats going on, I'd suggest getting Afterburner and using the on-screen display to see your fps, total cpu usage, gpu usage, ram usage, vram usage, and cpu/gpu temps. It really makes it easier to tune your game settings when you know what is limiting your performance. When setting up a new game I change 1 setting at a time and note cpu/gpu performance change and fps, and then decide where I can obtain the best quality to fps balance. A 3 fps difference 10 times stacks up to 30fps, but changing a setting to remove shadows for 1 fps, or reducing gpu load from 80% to 70% are not worth it.

Actually I don't think it is the SSD but rather the game being on the C drive. Sounds stupid I know, but I had a problem I won't get into explaining right now that was solved by moving the game to my slower C drive.

The game won't use very much more than 1 CPU core. In my case with 4 cores and 8 threads that means about 12-20% is what I usually see. If a lot of stuff is going on that % doesn't increase but the FPS do decrease. Usually (but not always) you will see CPU stay constant and GPU usage decrease indicating a CPU bottleneck. The only thing you can do is to increase clock speed. If you are comfortable overclocking, a 10% overclock results in 10% more fps when CPU bottle necked. Or from 40 to 44 fps. Not huge, but I have a 25% overclock which is a much better increase. If you haven't already, turn off traffic. Little cars driving around is really useless and actually uses a lot of CPU power. View distance is another big CPU consumer. In some games lowering shadow quality actually hurts fps as it unloads the complex stuff from the GPU and instead has the CPU calculate simple shadows. Unfortunately I can't help too much without actually being there to turn stuff on/off for you. And no, CPU affinity doesn't do anything. Maybe on really old CPUs or windows vista, but that was from a long ago era. You'll get a bigger fps boost from making sure "calculator" isn't running in the background.

It's a little hard to make that statement without knowing what resolution he is playing at. I have a 3440X1440 screen and I get 60-100fps depending on the situation with a 1080. If he's running 4K that's very possible performance. Also, if this is around a lot of AI then 40-60 fps could be due to CPU bottleneck and there is absolutely nothing that he can do about that. I really doubt his "Nvidia" is disabled. There is no way he would get 40fps with integrated graphics. The GTX 1080 is 1381% faster than the 630 and there is no way I'm ever going to get 552 fps at medium settings.

For the love of god turn on anisotropic filtering :doh: You might be running the game on an old system but AF costs almost nothing in performance even back in 2006 (especially 2X or 4X) and would make that runway not look like an oil painting.

Try disabling hyper-threading or (I can't remember the actual name) clock speed reduction in bios. I had pretty bad micro-stutters (a slight hiccup every half second) and disabling hyper-threading made it go away. I then tried turning off that variable frequency thing with hyper-threading left on and it had the same effect. I had both of them off for a while but there was no real benefit to have them both off so I turned hyper-threading back on. DCS only really uses 1 core and so my guess is the way it was being managed leads to stutters when the work load switched from 1 active core to another idle core, which is running at a lower clock speed until it gets the new load. Maybe half the available cores means they don't have a chance to go into the lower power/clockspeed mode. If you are talking about larger stutters I'm not sure it will help as I get that every once in a while in multiplayer severs, but that might be a netcode thing. Edit: I'm not talking about turbo when I say disable the "variable frequency thing". I mean a feature that drops the idle clock speed to like 1Ghz from 3 or 4 or whatever.