Bob_Bushman

Rig building has only gotten easier last few years too. It's now on par with a Lego kit imo and far easier than self assemble furniture from ikea etc. The secret sauce is to actually read the manuals ;) Even a basic DCS module require far more effort to learn decently than building a gaming rig, that's the nitty gritty truth of it. So there is no doubt in my mind you would be able to. That said there are many hardware retailers that offer significantly more suited kit machines and doesn't charge much of an extra to build them for you. And unlike HP these use standardised modules. With HP you need to go to HP to get an upgrade and they will easily charge 300% for the fun of it, often making it a lot more reasonable for a customer to buy a whole new unit instead. I'm on the other side of the planet so can't recommend any such services/retailers local to Michigan but I'm certain they are there.

What is your use case for them ? These are office drone desktop computers, and not meant for much gaming whatsoever. for DCS: I wouldn't really touch either of them. HP uses non-ATX standard components, so it's not like you could walk into any hardware peddler and get a replacement PSU, or mother board, this also means they have virtually no upgrade capability down the line, apart from maybe increasing the RAM size or maybe find a small form factor gpu. But the HP ENVY Desktop - TE01-0165t seems slightly less hamstrung than the other. It has the power supply to support a slightly more power ful GPU, but not too powerful, 1070 at upmost The other with a 180watt supply would run into major issues with anything bigger than a 1050 or equivalent.

It depends how much of a rush you are in, but Nvidia, according to the semi-reliable rumor mill is launching next gen spring 2020.

Some modules have started to have binds for these types of switches out of the gate, but this depends on the module designer. If memory serves, these can often be marked with "function x ELSE OFF" etc.

If you have problems on stable. Try the beta. If you have problems on the Beta, revert back to stable. If it's working just fine, well no need to fix what's not broken. Through the summer and such there was a few very annoying bugs still in the Rift S stable that was released early in the Beta but for the last couple of months there has been only minor differences in the two.

On the contrary my experience with ch is not the same as yours. I got my ch hotas new in 2015 or so, from day one the pots where spiking and needed fairly large deadzones to not wobble all over the place, And three hats combining the throttle and stick often needed multiple presses to engage. I don't know what happened to CH but they aren't what they where and quite frankly I know consider their lineup as utterly abandoned and cannot recommend them to anyone. From what I gather the old CH kit is rock solid, but anything newer than 10 years or so are almost in line with pre Logitech saitek's.

Took me about two weeks of near daily session to get dialed in with pedals and that was coming from just using one of the hatd on my stick for yaw, no twist, but there is absolutely no going back now. I find when adding a fully new interface you get an immediate "oh no this is wrong" impulse. You would have to decide if it is wrong on a personal level. I chose myself to give it a chance for a week or so and then make a decicions.

Depends as you point out, on the design of the stick itself. As for most budget sticks the single spring design is prevalent, and from what I gather the only stick in the $150 ish bracket that has independent axis movement would be the CH fighterstick. Even the Warthog has the "single spring in a cup" design and would suffer similar issue. And the fighterstick is missing quite a bit in terms of resolution and has noise and spiking issues, needed quite a lot of deadzone while I was using mine, as well as a noticeable "clunk" noise and feel as you pass zero. This problem really isn't solved fully I believe unless you go for higher end sticks like the Virpil or VKB sticks, these have fully independent axes, and could even do differing force profiles on each axis if so desired. The virpil stick for instance has no noticeable noise whatsoever, and I use no curves or deadzones in game at all, be it I'm flying jets or the Huey, even the gazelle is quite controllable with this stick.

I have a virpil hotas myself, but I don't think there is a single thing that I can do that anyone of my friends with a 5+ year old Saitek, or a t16000k wouldn't be able to do right along side me.

It's been awhile since I tried but I tested the dogfighting scenario in the Mustang against other AI mustangs, and it was as if they never bled energy what so ever, and even managed to fly 100 knots faster than I could with missing wing bits. Simply put the AI just don't play by the same rules as we do.

Labels should reflect what button the OS actually identify the axis and or button as. Would speed up binding quite a bit, and as for playing I'm in VR and labels don't really matter much at all.

I would advice to completely skip FC 3 entirely, and rather get a couple of the study sim modules. Might want to pass on the F16 for the time being, it needs a bit more work.

Windows in general needs a page file to work right in terms of memory management, just that it doesn't necessarily start to catch fire when you delete it doesn't mean it's good. Unless you have very very particular needs for a page file, often those are found in server environments and special use cases in all other situations, just leave it at default and auto managed, it won't be utilised until you are completely out of memory space anyways or something is being sent off for long term storage, inow, something program you haven't used in a long while. And in those cases the modification is more likely to be to increase it so it never goes below a certain threshold. No gaming or simulation has ever truly benefited from removing the page file further than what can be considered a statistical anomaly, and more often than not it's causing other problems. I would expect more performance benefit from shutting down MSI afterburner than messing with the page file. The one positive mod I have done to my own computer in the past in regards to the page file, has only been to move it to a faster drive, or a RAID system setup mainly for speedy access, in a pc consisting of m.2's or SSD's this too is no longer necessary.

No tricks, Just make sure they don't move to much on you so you can build some muscle memory. I'm really loving that fourth MFD :D

Windows will cycle a threads load across cores to manage load, temp, and power consumption etc hyperthreading or not. So no single core will stay under full load for enough time to show up on the graph. This simply makes utilisation a next to worthless metric to look at. It's simply how the game is made, it needs fire changes of the game engine to allow higher fps to handle VR natively. With that hardware you can probably dial the GPU based settings up a fair bit, things like smoke and shadows can be left on lower setting to ease the cpu. There really isn't anyway o buy yourself out of this, only solution is that ED will have to sort their code out if it's even possible to begin with.

You can get 80 with your system, I'm sure, but it depends a lot on situations, and settings. Don't go bonkers witht he PD for instance, personally my best result the rift-s is PD of 1.3 and a smidge of AA. A lot depends if you are loading up a busy missions, cold starting on tarmac next to 15 other AI, or are you firing up an empty free flight mission engines running at 10 angels ? I have a mission for target practice that I start cold on a carrier, I get 80fps on the carrer deck np, but starting off at the blue airfield, forgetaboutit, 40 is the best I could even try to aim for, at least with any major stability. Those who claim getting 80fps usually don't elaborate since they either know they are skewing game load to their claims favor, or simply are ignorant about the whole matter and never had the inclination to start off on a busy MP server, where they would be lucky to get 30. Getting an SSD is a major boost, I get significantly less stuttering while flying on an SSD, it also more than halved my load times when loading a mission or connecting to a server. RAM depends a bit, didn't notice too much moving from 16 to 32, but with 32GB you can max out the preload radius and that is a huge boost to image quality at least over distance. I'm also hanging on to my 1080ti, It's just too much money for not enough major difference, for $1200+ I would want something to keep me in 80fps in all situations, and when the problem isn't even our GPU's for this matter why spend the money when we will see new cards come out in about 6-10 months.

The HDMI specs do not apply to cables only the devices they connect. The cables themselves only get a bandwidth certificate. Grab any recent cable labeled, hi-speed. Would work up to hdmi 2.0 connections. That said hardly any manufacturer doesn't plaster the latest compatible spec on the cable as well. Doesn't matter there hasn't been any major changes in a decade.

Enabling the quest to tether is not "abandoning pc-vr". That's just maniacal hyperbole taken to an extreme, another round of "VR IS DEAD!!" In fact it's the very opposite, and I wouldn't be dissatisfied at all if the next hmd from Oculus could connect through a DP cable or virtual link through a USB-c thunderbolt connection, running full resolution, framerateste etc. And be fully standalone sounds good to me. I was honestly surprised the Rift-s didn't use it with an adapter/splitter for those without a 20 series GPU. An hmd that can handle all the tracking internally and just pushing position data back to a PC only sound like a good idea to me. This tether will be 72hz at 36fps, yes there will be no option to run without SpaceWarp active It took the nerds less than two weeks to get streaming steamvr content to the quest over WiFi , and a lot seem to think that was ok even if it meant something like a 50-200ms latency. Personally I found about 10ms latency in my pimax unacceptable. To the point where I went back to my cv1. I have no clue how those peoples brains work to think that's ok though. Seriously some peoples perception is slow. That's them, I am me. If you don't notice it, count your blessings. I could have saved a lot of money if my tolerances where anywhere near that permissive. Oculus here has pretty much been faced with a choice. Start making hurdles and block people from streaming PC content to quest, we could guess how popular that would have been. Instead they gauged their hardware, figured they could do this pretty easily and gain massive amount of support in the meanwhile. Also you must have missed the 15-20 minutes of Carmacks talk, where he explains how he envisions VR to do anything you would do on a PC or any screen media. They aren't there yet, hence why they are a game company now. That will change in a few years. According to his vision you would be replacing normal screens with VR/MR sets for anything from photoshop to Excel. That's doesn't sound like abandoning simmers to me.

I definitely see it as a good idea, people are already streaming pcvr titles off steam for the quest over WiFi. But this could give as much as 250ms lag from render to display, in VR I found a 10ms slop in pimax unacceptable. It really is only acceptable if you don't know better. Tethering with a USB solves pretty much that and Oculus bypasses a myriad of issues. Yes it's heavy, and the S has far better weight distribution, the quest has practically none, it's all on the front. Its got one camera less but still twice the cameras of the o+. Personally I'm not disappointed they allow the quest to connect, I'm more upset by the hacks used to that already does this and presents a bad pcvr experience. But for normal boring peoole, and not us simmers, getting a quest is the better option, but without sims I probably wouldn't even use my computer daily let alone vr. Headsets I may have 3-4k hours in VR since 2016 but titles that wasn't either elite, pcars2 or DCS account for no more than 2-300 hours. At most.

I have both, well the nephew bought my Quest from me, but still got access. I'd still prefer the S for DCS and PCvr, the Quest is still a pentile display and 72hz is getting pretty low, 80hz is actually quite a bit better. So even at best, no compression, etc red and blue for the Quest is 1400x800. So that will be a major stepdown in clarity, and the S is barely ok for that comparing to the reverb etc. As well as the OLED panel has significantly more motion blur compared to the S, not a huge deal for DCS perhaps, but enough for me to get instant reaction in the Quest.

Same, GFX first would yield the most benefit. I also wouldn't bother buying any more RAM for a ddr3 plattform, especially for VR. This was of course before I started playing DCS, but I moved from an i7 4790, z971 plattform to an z370 and i7 8700k while keeping my 1080ti, and the boost in performance, and especially smoothness was suprisingly more than I expected.

The 5k+ and it's performance is simply just atrocious, and that's not just for DCS, doesn't really matter but the best I got out of it was setting it to 72hz and, hoping I could get smoothing going at 36 fps. That's not good enough. And considering it's vertical panel resoluition is no higher than the rift S, but the lenses warp significantly it honestly looks worse, even though it runs three times the pixel counts, and that's just comparing the vertical resolution, not the horisontal one. No the 5k was a massive waste of time. and I regret backing it. Switching back to the S the only drawback is the loss of the honestly too distorted FOV, and I find the S to be far better resolved and functional than any. I'd sell the 5k, but honestly it's so bad imo that doing so would poison VR for the next person. As a streamer and youtuber, I can fully understand you need a few things that for now is still far away from being nearly practical in VR.

Nope, in fact I find turning ASW off, utterly bonkers. it is going to cause blurry, double vision, stuttery mess, vs with ASW on, you might see some wavy lines between your cockpit and the world when flying really close to things. In a jet that pretty much means during taxi time and that's about it. Now it will look absolutely horrible if your system cannot maintain the target 50% fps, but then you really have bigger issues.

Try whatever it suggest for the rift, it uses the same software as the S . Next I would do is try running a repair on the Dcs install. I would also consider deleting settings in the saved games folder, just backup bindings and missions before hand.

The settings I have landed on is max textures, max preload radius shadows to flat etc I set a pixel density of 1.3 in Oculus tray tool, and SSAA of 1.5 This looks better than running PD of 1.5 or higher, and for some reason runs and looks better than msaa of 2x. Which honestly doesn't make a lot of sense.