Vertigo72

But you can and I do. Its not about comparing the sims, its about comparing overhead of graphics and terrain engines. I get vastly better frame rates in condor while rendering a large chunk of the Alps, with terrain, shadows, 100K trees and half decent clouds than I get in DCS rendering nothing but flat water and blue sky. If it takes DCS almost 5ms to render an "empty" frame, how do you expect it to ever manage to render a "full" frame in VR above a city in 11ms? Now that is harder to compare. First of all I dont have it, but what Ive seen it renders so many more buildings, far more detailed trees, crisper ground textures and it has volumetric fog and clouds. And best I can tell, it can still manage playable framerates in VR.

It may be a great trainer, but I dont see the mass market appeal for a sim. The only people who know it, are in to military flying anyhow. A cessna is something everyone recognizes, and anyone who may have any aspiration to ever fly IRL is likely to fly. If it where up to me, Id also offer all combat planes and helicopters for free. Just demilitarized. No weapons, no radar. Maybe no online play. I dont think it would meaningfully hurt sales, I cant imagine anyone who is in to DCS now would settle for that. But it might make it worth for others to actually try DCS, spend the time needed to learning to fly a plane. And then want more.

IRL, people dont learn to fly on F18s. They learn it in gliders or cessna's or similar. If you are really new to flight sims, it makes complete sense to pick xplane or MS flight over DCS for a lot of reasons, but the plane models is also one of them. But what if had a Cessna 172? Seriously. Maybe that should be the free module, not the TF51. And maybe some light twin engine civilian plane as paying module, something small/slow enough that map size isnt too much of an issue. It could even be fun in missions. Fly a covert mission transporting a VIP or fleeing a country in your stolen cessna, and dont get killed. Or be in a green team, killing greens counts as teamkills for both red and blue. Just like in most conflicts civilians are not intentionally shot at. And thats one thrill MS flight wont give you, the chance of getting shot down.

It does? They sure do a good job hiding it then. Never even heard of it. So i doubt any prospective buyers know about it. yep, that is a challenge. I dont think its the game mode though, whatever it does, its gonna be the lack of choice in planes for that money. Its really simple, if you get 1 plane for 70 dollar or 8 for 50, what do you think most will do? Nah. ace combat has nothing to do with flight sims, it just vaguely looks like one, its an arcade game. I think the obvious target is that other more popular WW2 sim as well as even microsoft simmers. You need something that appeals to them, realistic enough to make you believe you are actually in a sim, but not requiring reading thick books just to get airborne or get any sense of achievement. I see no reason why WW2 simmers would not want to try their hand at more modern jets, or even why a non trivial amount of civilian simmers wouldnt want to fly fast jets. Even "demilitarized " ones. And once they do that, hey, I bet some will like to pull that trigger too.

My disappointment was large enough that I feel I need to wait for a bigger leap. I bought the rift-s fully aware of its limitation and with the goal of passing it on, I just wanted to try it to see if I wanted to spend the big bucks on a pimax 5k or 8k and computer upgrades needed to actually run that. I didnt :). So now Ill wait for eye tracking to enable foveated rendering and dynamic focus, hopefully in combination with higher resolutions and wider fields of view. I have little doubt it will come, as it already mostly exists in the professional market, just need a consumer price tag and proper software support. I can wait a few years. /OT

I think the "less hardcore" could be handled with settings within DCS. No one wants lower fidelity cockpits or 3d models, hardly anyone wants lower fidelity flight models (especially for jets). What many dont want is spending 4 hours reading manuals and watching youtube tutorials in order to start a jet, find a target and blow something up. I think this could be solved in DCS; simplified/faster startup procedure (we already have one button start cheat, add to that instant INS alignment, easier weapon selection menu, maybe even semi automatic catapult hookup) and make it so newbies actually can enable those things easily. Just click "im a noob, tell me what to do, but KISS". I had played DCS on and off for 2 years before I even discovered the auto start keybind. Then have some sort of jester AI doing the radar, setting up of targets and weapons for you. You just select a maverick or amraam and have "jester" configure your plane accordingly, cycle through the targets, or even tell you where they are, something like that makes it "easy" and yet not entirely unrealistic, the newbie wont achieve anything an experienced simmer couldnt also do. That means, you dont even have to split up the community. But I think the biggest barrier for more casual simmers is the fact you have to pay for every plane. That makes it appear very expensive compared to other sims, and means you instantly need to commit to one plane, whereas most will want to experience several. That is what made FC3 interesting to non hardcore simmers, a decent collection of planes for an affordable price. The non clickable cockpits dont really help them, if anything I find keybinds are harder to set up and memorize.

Ive tried both sims in VR with a Rift-S. It just doesnt work for me. After the initial 5 minute cool factor, Id rather put it aside. Not sure if the "tunnel vision" or the obvious fake infinite focus 3d effect, or screendoor/resolution or the fresnel or a combination, but something prevents my mind from ever remotely believing I sit in a cockpit. I feel like Im where I actually am, just wearing silly heavy goggles looking at small and rather poor quality screens. I genuinely feel more immersed with a 2D screen and headtracking. And strangely, I did find some non flight sim games more immersive in VR, and could see the appeal there. But hey, Im a minority, clearly most people seem to love it, so if it works for you, and your PC can handle it, go for it.

Sure. No radar, no sams, no AI etc. But even when you eliminate almost all of that in DCS, by flying all alone with no weapons, no radar, and no other units and even over sea, performance still pretty much sucks and there is not much to blame other than a poorly optimized graphics engine. Also, in fairness to condor, which again is a 2 dev project, its not FS2020, most of the compute resources are spent on the atmospheric modelling, ie thermals and slope wind etc. Something DCS doesnt even really do. LOL. wouldnt that be fun in DCS. Ive thought about a SR71 but maps may be a bit small :) If you want to give condor it a try, its not a study sim, you wil be up and flying in no time, but mastering soaring takes decades. There is no trial, but there are worse ways to spend your money: https://www.condorsoaring.com/ Maps are almost all free and made by the community spanning a good portion of the globe by now: https://www.condor-club.eu/sceneriesmap/241/ Online community is very seasonal though, most are real world glider pilots who do it virtually in winter. This year was an exception with the pandemic and even national competitions have been done with condor.

Just about any other flight sim ever? I only fly one other, which is a soaring simulator. To give you an idea: another one with sea and trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb2m5BGwOt0 No, its not the greatest looking sim ever, its developed by one full time and one part time dev, and their focus is on flight modelling and atmospheric/thermal/slope wind/wave modelling more than eye candy, but it look ok, viewing distance is in the same ballpark as DCS and you can play it in VR at >90 FPS with a laptop with a gpu like a 1050.. Without VR you can play it on literally anything you could possibly buy the past 5 if not 10 years, including laptops with integrated graphics. I get like 300 FPS in VR on my system. And btw, you can also play it online with 64 players on a server without crazy lag or warping.

Not a big fan of the idea to invent a non existent "fly by wire " system. However, I would like to see a better way to gauge G loads in the sim. IRL, its kinda hard not too notice the difference between 4, 8 or 12G. That gorilla sitting on your chest is something you notice. In the sim, you have very few indications until its too late. I also imagine in a real tomcat it would take more force on the stick to actually pull 12G than our joysticks can withstand without breaking. There is no way real pilots would do it "by accident" nor would they need to look at a small gauge somewhere in the midst of a dogfight. Now the tomcat in dcs has more audible cues than some other planes, so good job there heatblur, but it isnt enough. Maybe we should get a loss of peripheral vision that begins much sooner and is more gradual, like a visual G meter to let us "see" the Gs we cant feel. This isnt even that unrealistic FWIW, Im not a super fit highly trained military pilot, but at 4-5G I do begin to lose peripheral vision.

Interesting. Kinda makes sense whatever is being buffered could reduce stuttering if you buffer more of it. But how repeatable is that benchmark? if you run it a second time, what kind of variation are you seeing? Ive found playing back tracks can give me very significant variations between runs, even changing nothing.

Makes more sense to replicate or at least mimic the behavior you want on your throttle. I planned on something elaborate but when I test glued 2 magnets in my TWCS throttle it worked completely perfectly first time. For the virpil, look at this:

Alternatively, its possible ED changed that parameter for a good reason that we can only guess at unless they tell us. Admittedly, if it really does make a 10% difference, that had better be one good reason, but I dont notice any performance impact.

Slightly related because Jester loves TWS-A so much; the little cross thats supposed to guide the pilot the best course to fly to track targets, seems to not make a difference between friendlies and hostiles? So if there are 4 friendlies at you 2 oclock and 2 enemies at your 10 oclock, jester will happily keep pointing the radar at your 2 oclock, which is also where the cross may be. Noticed this behavior a few patches ago, not sure if it has been changed recently.

The simple fact is DCS graphics engine is currently poorly optimized. Throwing money at hardware doesnt really solve the software issue. You can spend fortunes to buy yourself maybe 20% more performance, but its hard to imagine a rewritten game core couldnt boost framerates by many 100s of percent. Those who say you shouldnt compare performance with more popular games because of AI or physics or ballistics; ignoring the fact those should be able to run those on our 6+ idle cores, I might buy that argument if I got a bazillion FPS flying around solo on an empty map with no other units, so no AI, no ballistics. But I dont. Just flying over a desert with zero other units, you may struggle to get 120 FPS. And less if any buildings or trees show up. Even flying over water with nothing else in sight, even when disabling the cockpit so even that doesnt need to be rendered, just plain water and a cloudless blue sky, not another polygon or texture to be seen, I got 150FPS. I get more than that in some AAA titles rendering hugely complex scenes. Lets hope a Vulkan implementation provides a fix.

Im in the same boat with DDR4-3200. FPS scales 100% linearly with ram speed, something very few synthetic benchmarks even do. All these people buying the fastest CPUs out there and overclocking them thinking every MHz counts, I wonder if the more important reason they are getting performance boost is that they are also overclocking their memory controllers and cache.

Just run task manager and find out if you need it. I find that 16GB is cutting it close online, but I still keep a little margin if I care to close any background apps I dont need. Offline 16GB should be enough. But there are other effects which can be harder to predict and measure. Another 16GB gives you more ram for disk caching which may or may not make a difference in loading times or to avoid stutters. Then there is the impact on memory performance, which I have found to be extraordinarily important in DCS, more so than in any gaming benchmark Ive ever seen. if your ram is single rank (so 2 rank for 2 dimms), adding more dimms will mean 4 ranks which can give a surprising performance boost just by itself: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-3000-best-memory-timings,6310-2.html Thats for Ryzen, but I think at least the same principle will apply to intel chips. OTOH, when I look at my motherboard manual and list of approved memory modules, on 2 dimms I get officially supported 3200 speed and a little more with some modules, while with 4 dims about the fastest that is supported is 2400. Maybe it will work at higher speeds, maybe it wont. Long post to say "I dont know". Im also considering it, but fear the reduced ram speed/bandwidth may cost too many FPS to warrant the possible improvements, and paying more to get less is not something I like doing.

Make sure you have "trueview" enabled in trackir.

DCS doesnt support physx, so I cant see how it matters. I fear this is a common thread, DCS performance is difficult to measure in a way that is controlled and reproducible, and even when you try hard to control the variables, it just seems varies. Which leads people to believe / promote all kinds of snake oil performance boosting tricks.

Just so I understand. You want DCS to simulate a pilot for you with almost superhuman physique to endure 9G, even though you can not. You want that pilot to simulate someone who has passed all kinds of evaluations and practical and physical and psychological and theoretical tests, because, you (probably) can not. You want DCS to simulate that he has received all the required training and proven his abilities to even be allowed to fly, even though you, did not. But simulating a pilot who actually knows how to use his radar (which all of them do), or is able to do AAR, because some other player can not and doesnt care to, thats a red line to you?

Which is exactly the point. You want to end realism before you would need to prove your theoretical knowledge of Fluid dynamics in a written test. You dont want that part of being a military pilot realistically simulated. Others may want the simulation to end before the point where they need to study a 400 page manual to operate a radar, they prefer not having that part fully realistically simulated. Same with doing AAR. Whats wrong with giving people the options they want?

Yup. Definitely. Need more realism. Get rid of one button auto-start procedures, easy radio, unlimited ammo, take off assistants, hot starts and simplified G effects No one gets to fly anything before passing realistic built-in theoretical and practical exams, just like real pilots. If you cant solve an integral, you have no business flying an F16. Impose a 5G blackout limit, unless you pass a medical that includes a G tolerance test in a centrifuge.Then your actual result is applied in to the game. Lets make it more real, because ED needs to raise the barrier to entry to limit the untenable influx of new players before they further ruin the game by doing stuff like paying for it.

True. They all do something similar, but subtly different with pro's and cons. But there is no obvious "ideal" way, so its up to the users to decide if they care more about being a little more blurry (FXAA) or incur a lot more performance hit (SSAA) or just want less jaggies (MSAA). And apparently it may also have an effect on shimmering with headtracking. I think its good we have the options, if you are not bothered then just click the presets. But they can absolutely be combined, and you do combine the effects, both the good and bad ie performance hit cumulates too and so you may get diminishing results if you combine them. Dont think FXAA works on DCS though. Maybe if you force it through the drivers. I should try as it is a "cheap" way to do antialiasing that relies on shaders and doesnt eat vram like MSAA. Has anyone tried? edit: nVidia driver turn on FXAA by default for DCS. Either that, or I enabled it and forgot about it

Not running graphics does not really make it a "dedicated server". Its still like 98% of the game. Or more like 100% just with a null render device.It actually has frames per second. For perspective, I fly another niche flightsim, condor, a soaring simulator. As different as it is, it actually has much in common with DCS, like niche market, small dev team like laser focus on realism, flight model , physics.. But one very important difference is that it has a dedicated server app. It uses 6Mb ram. Mega, not giga. I checked, it literally uses less ram than windows calculator. And has no problem supporting 64 players lag free with literally unmeasurable cpu load. THe only restriction is bandwidth, if you have that, running 2 dozen servers on any old obsolete 10 year old pc is totally no problem. Of course, its much simpler to achieve than in a combat sim. There are no bullets to keep track off. No rockets, no radar, no sams, no AI (well none to speak off, the tow planes are AI I guess). The 'damage model' is a little less elaborate and not much more than counting the number of wings and control surfaces that are attached to the fuselage. But it also totally doesnt care about anything other than syncing the players world, it doesnt care about your flight model or damage model or the atmospheric model or anything of that. It doesnt calculate collisions, physics, it doesnt do the atmospheric modelling of thermals or slope winds, it doesnt know where those clouds are or how strong the thermal underneath it, let alone that it would do any sort of rendering, only the clients do. But they all get the same result, because the physics model is deterministic. For instance each client gets a seed value for the weather and all clients wil calculate the exact same weather based on that seed (and map and weather settings and time of day etc etc), there is no need for the server to even care, let alone do those same calculations. What good would it do even if it came up with a different result ? I dont know how that works in DCS. Like, who gets to decide if a bullet hit or not. Presumably its the plane shooting who "owns the bullets" and determines their flight path and tells everyone else about those bullets, and probably any plane that gets hit by those bullets that where said to follow that fly path determines if they got hit and what damage it causes, and then tell everyone else. Im guessing, but it seems logical. What the role of the server in this? It should be none. Just making sure both planes are aware of those bullets and their effect. but calculating the ballistics and collision detection, why redo that? Each client already does those calculations and it works in single player or "peer to peer", duplicating all that work on a "dedicated" server seems extremely wasteful to me. You need to check the client isnt running some mods that shoot magic bullets or have invulnerable planes (both sims do) but then if one clients says "my bullets went there" and another "I just got hit by those bullets, took me left engine out", just take them on their word, and tell everyone else. Why check his math by redoing it, using the same data and the same algorithms? Maybe its needed for AI though. I suppose someone has to decide what that sam battery or AI plane does. Although even that may not be needed when their behavior is completely deterministic. Im actually not sure how that works in condor, "who flies" the AI tow planes. Maybe its just the client that is being towed, and then tells the server the position/attitude etc of the tow plane, and the server than broadcasts that to everyone else. That would make it doable for condor to ignore the AI in the dedicated server, but that wouldnt really work in DCS. Which clients gets to control the behavior of that sam battery or mig 29? But Ai is about the only thing I can think off that a DCS server may need to calculate. AFAICT it should be able to ignore everything else and leave it up to the clients, and just ensure their worlds are in sync. Given the amount of "stuff" that needs to be synced, I can see DCS being much more bandwidth hungry that something like Condor, but it shouldnt take 32GB and a monster PC to keep client worlds in sync and perhaps do the AI.

I disagree.Those boxes would be visible even when most of the tanker and all of the probe are not. They also give a MUCH better indication if you are drifting in any particular direction and how quickly rather than judging that based on a (barely visible) tanker you are looking at from a somewhat arbitrary angle Of course, you still need the skill to fly the plane where you want, but knowing where exactly that is would be a massive help. To make it more concrete, for me the biggest problem doing AAR in the tomcat is lateral position. Judging height is relatively easy as long as you see the basked and speed is doable. But I tend to miss it horizontally because that offset throws me off.