DeltaMike

well i mean it meets minimums easily. i've hosted four people on 3 2.4ghz haswell cores and 6Gb of RAM, and managed to cram win7 and dcs onto a 120Gb SSD, if that helps... only question in my mind is how much RAM would it take to run a really massive enterprise like GAW. which, don't be surprised, you have web presence and great ideas note buying used/off-lease equipment on ebay is a gamble. i think it's a good gamble but don't count on buyer protection, a certain percent of these units are destined for the dumpster. "Carefully analyzed by highly trained technicians wearing white coats" means they threw it in a box and mailed it to ya usually and if it doesn't work it's cuz you installed "software programs" of some sort which is not covered by warranty

You don't need a GPU to run dedicated server but it makes installing software easier. Servers can be tricky to work with. If you have your eye on those cheap CPU's and RAM, might be worth looking at a workstation. The Dell T-xxxx series is rack mountable, modular, sometimes really cheap on ebay and they are enough like a "normal" computer that they will PROBABLY not give you a ton of trouble. Get one with Windows pre-installed cuz finding and installing drivers for those old dinosaurs can be really tricky Here's a good example https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Precision-T5600-1x-E5-2643-3-33GHz-QC-16GB-Q2000-H310-600GB-10K-W10Pro/163362063559?hash=item26092344c7%3Ag%3AmO8AAOSwL9tbfyLB&LH_BIN=1 You can get one a little cheaper, most of the cheap ones have like 2.2 - 2.4 GHz CPU's but that could be enough, if not it's easy to swap out. WIndows 7 seems to work as well as 10 for the server It is possible to put an SSD in there, you'll need an adapter or a caddy for it but it'll go. Alternatively it might be interesting to get one with two HDD's and see if Raid0 will give you the speed you're looking for. You can also put a beast of a GPU in there, or dual GPU's. Really nice PSU. Not a bad mining platform actually. Not great for gaming though. Question of whether it's worth $500, I mean, you don't have any old computers lying around? We haven't found a box yet that WON"T run the dedicated server Sticking something in a data center makes no economic sense at all, a $40 VPS is plenty

It's still a little buggy, sometimes you have to restart the mission to get it working right Assuming it's working, there are two major issues and one minor to consider 1. Beam geometry 2. Refresh rate 3. Pulse repetition frequency If you're scanning say 80 miles out you have to make sure nobody slips in under your beam. You may be scanning from sea level to angels 45 at 80nm, but may only be covering 20-21 10 miles out. Very easy for someone to slip in under your beam. Put the TDC cursor where you think the target might be (bogey dopes are useful here) and make sure you have it bracketed altitutude-wise using your radar elevation control. If you're in LTWS with a multi-bar scan, it takes forever to refresh the image. Twice as long if you have PRF in interleave mode, looking for a guy who is 60 miles out. Narrowing the azimuth and/or bars will help you pick up bandits that are moving and changing aspect frequently. 4-bar 80 degrees works pretty well in LTWS; for a higher volume search consider flipping into RWS. Finally, picking either PRF hi or PRF med can help. PRF hi is useful for hot aspect targets a long way away. PRF med gives you a little better ranging information and is helpful if the target is changing aspect, flanking, or running away at something close to your speed. But only useful for somewhat closer ranges, like 20 or 30nm. Either way you'll pick em up faster than if you leave it in interleave mode Even then it can be literally impossible to see somebody who is either notching you, or doesn't have closure

Runs weirdly well. My CPU render times are in the low 9's on an empty map, but in the mid 20's with stutters at busy airfields. So I have enough wiggle room to dogfight and blow things up. That's with medium shadows, medium vis range. No grass or citv traffic. GPU render times pegged at 22 with no msaa and 1.2 PD. Seems to be in the same ballpark as my buddies' 1080's and 1070ti's. And the price was right -- free (it was my old mining card, paid for itself and then some) That's with a Rift, expect Rift S would be about the same. Few more pixels but render times get pushed out to 25ms so it should wind up being close. Wouldn't want to drive more pixels than that. The 2600 wasn't much of an upgrade over my old 1700, which I was able to overclock. Shoulda just kept the 1700 in there while I was waiting for Gen3. Which probably won't make a ton of difference for me right this minute as I'm GPU limited. May buy it anyway, cuz I haven't bought anything in like two weeks. If I do, it'll be an X cuz I have no faith it'll overclock in any meaningful fashion (meaning, higher than the single core burst speed). Guess I wouldn't mind getting rid of those last few stutters. Could turn shadows off I guess but I like em. With DCS you're looking for single core performance, buy the big chips if you need the cores for other applications

AMD is claiming a boost in instructions per tick so the theory is 4.4GHz should be as good as Intel running 5.0GHz. There was some hoopla couple days before launch suggesting they did just that, although apparently that was BS. But supposedly it ain't bad. See for example https://www.techspot.com/review/1871-amd-ryzen-3600/ where in *single core* performance a 4.2GHz AMD is about equal to the 4.6GHz intel. The R5 3600X, which bursts to 4.4, should be getting real close to a decent CPU SInce we are talking about VR, remember the goal isn't raw frame rates but how much stuff you can turn on and still run 40 or 45FPS. Here, its basically going to boil down to having the shadows or vis range we want without so much stuttering close to the ground. Step in the right direction, maybe a good enough step

Eh happy as I am with my AMD system, it's a budget build. I got in cheap with a B450 and R5 2600, I'll slap a 3600x in there when I get around to it, not gonna bother to overclock, and it's all close enough, considering it's a game and all. Not everybody looks at it that way.

I wouldn't know. Never wrote a line of code, never got venture capital, never had a budget to model complex electronic equipment or flight physics and don't have the data or math expertise to do that anyway, don't know how CPU's or GPU's work, never had to market a niche software product, never had to adapt 10 year old code to evolving VR technology. So, unfortunately, I am unable to comment :/

It's not possible to have too much CPU for dcs. I have my eye on the ryzen 5 3600x, bursts to 4.4 GHz (with a 10% increase in instructions per cycle over gen2) and feel that's well worth the price for dcs. I'd rather have that than more cores or a fancy mobo Zen2 can't really handle more than 3600mhz ram very well Whichever Mobo you pick, I'd go to the manufacturer website for ram known to run at rated speed. Maybe the newer boards aren't as picky but still

I have it running on a Dell workstation with a e5 running ~3.2 GHz iirc, it's fine

Kinda hard to know how amd cards will do in dcs. There's a theory that it correlates with the number of texture mapping units. Pound for pound Nvidia seems to leave amd in the dust. But you can make up for it with tmus. So a Vegas 56 is weaker on paper than a 1080, but it has over 200 tmus so maybe that's why it can keep up in dcs. Your card has only 160 tmus like the 1080 so it may struggle to keep up. Should be playable, just don't count on a lot of eye candy. 40fps is a perfectly good target Pull up the Oculus tray tool and check out your CPU and GPU render times. If either one of those is >25 you'll get stutters. Some stutters are due to GPU setting too high, eg trying to push pd and Msaa at the same time. But the CPU can also cause stutters, like when you spawn into a busy airport. Let us know what those numbers look like. But I can already tell ya, turn off Msaa, get your PD as low as you can stand it, vis range medium, trees 60%, turn off shadows. That's probably what you're looking at.

Try a PS4 controller.

Sending out a feeler to see what the interest might be in wargaming the current situation in the Strait of Hormuz. I'm particularly interested in the parallels with the Dardanelles Campaign Brief summary: https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/dardanelles-campaign Presently working my way through this: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/s/strait-comparison-lessons-learned-from-1915-dardanelles-campaign.html I put together a multiplayer server, with a mission based on P. Arnold's amazing PG map which includes basically all known SAM sites in the region along with locations of military and infrastructure targets. https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3301349/ Placed a carrier group from a fictional universe where the Stennis sill carries Tomcats and legacy Hornets. Just getting started, still don't have SRS up yet etc. etc. etc, but if you want to check it out, look for PADCOM on open beta. Password: zen I have a really simple strike mission loaded up, I imagine it could be done by yourself if you wanted to. My thinking is, to progress through a series of scenarios that might reflect the order of battle if things blow up over there. Starting with a limited strike against some radar installations and assets. Following which, what? An attack on US naval assets maybe? Possibly the carrier group itself? So, partially a springboard for discussion and wargaming, partially a hybrid of PvE and PvP coop. Partially having fun with ME. If the interest is there I'll start up a Discord and maybe buy another slice o' server, reckon I'll need the ram eventually

Near as I can tell everything except msaa and pd hits the CPU at least some.

Yes Between MSAA, PD and shadows, you can have two but not all three Set your textures and water high, that's not the problem Consider zeroing out grass and clutter, that's a resource suck that doesn't enhance flying in a jet

I just auto-undervolt. I read one review suggesting that worked as well as anything. Regardless, I have a long way to go before I can kick things up to the next level, eg adding msaa. I just want to keep it cool.

OK it's not like I'm an old hand at this, most of what I learned about setting up networks was my mining operation but the basics are the basics. Key is to avoid conflicts I think. Here's what I did. 1. Give each box a fixed IP address. I can never remember how to do this in windows but basically you want to find some network control panel and right click on a connection, and keep hitting "properties" until you see this: It's "Internet Protocol Version 4", click properties. Whatever IP address the router gave you, just enter that as your IP address under "Use the following IP address." I'm sure there's a way of figuring that out in windows, to me its easier to open a command line interface, enter "ipconfig" and look for something like 192.168.1.something, that's it. The router isn't going to intentionally make a conflict, it'll just give you a different IP address everytime you reboot. Don't let it do that. Make your computer say "I'll take this IP address, please" when you boot it up, and hope your kid, or your neighbor's kid who is bogarting your wireless, doesn't get it first. 2. Open up a port on your modem. On the side or bottom of your modem it'll say something like "For advanced settings go to 192.168.1.something" Open up a browser, enter those numbers and you'll see your modem setup screen. You want to got firewall settings, look for a screen like this: See how I entered a port range? I told the modem to let anything coming in on 10308, 10309, or 10310 in to my computer. Now, my router seems to attach that rule to a specific box, which is kinda smart, takes care of the kid problem. Every other router I've used wanted a specific IP address, hence the benefit of using fixed IP addresses. 3. Now you gotta deal with Windows again. First, open up this page and decide if you want to turn your firewall off. For a dedicated server, I would. I don't care if they want my miz files, yall are welcome to them. On somebody else's computer, or if I'm running my server on the same box as I do my banking, I guess I'd leave it on. Which means you gotta start making firewall rules. So you go to advanced settings Select "inbound rules" "new rule" and "port." Once again, select a range so you'll have some options. While you're in there, you should open up all the other ports DCS needs. Here's a list: https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2225915&postcount=5. In addition, I suppose we should open up a range of ports around 8088 for when -- not if, when -- they fix the webgui. 5. Finally, edit C:\Users\DeltaMike\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Config\serverSettings.lua (your path may vary) with notepad++. What if you don't have that file? You have a brand new install of the OB dedicated server and haven't got it running yet? No problem. Just fire up your mission in DCS -- on your game computer, not your server -- and host the mission. If you got your ports sorted, your buddies and you should be able to see it in the server list. Exit out of DCS and presto, serverSettings for that mission will be in your Saved Games config folder. You can copy that over to your server, edit to your satisfaction and it should work. You're looking for this line: See where it says "[port] = 10308" ? That's your computer telling DCS what communication channel you want to use. Now, DCS doesn't really care. It'll roll with whatever port you specify. If you're just running one instance on one computer DCS will default to 10308. You open that port on your router and turn Windows Firewall off and everything will work. But if you have two different computers running two different instances, there are all kinda ways to cause confusion. So, way I look at it, if you really want it to work every time, I think each computer needs its own IP address and its own port. If you tell DCS "I got Guns Over Dubai running on my desktop on port 10308, and The Ninja Cheese Challenge running on a 15-year old HP server in my closet on 10309," DCS is totally cool with that. And things should work out if your router knows it's OK to open 10309 to your HP, if it can find it. And 10308 to your desktop, if it can find that. Your router will do those things for you, if you tell it thats what you want it to do. I'm not sure about this but I think this might apply even if you're running two instances on the same box. "Yo DCS I got Guns on port 10308 and I got Cheese on 10308 too." Sounds like trouble to me, but I wouldn't know. But I think that might explain why one might show up and the other doesn't, just saying. 6. Also, I hate Windows. This kind of thing happens in Linux too, but it's so much easier to keep it sorted and fix it when it breaks. Just thought I'd throw that out there. And that's partially why this isn't a step-by-step thing. I hate Windows so much I can't make myself learn it. So, I really expect you to google up "How do I give my computer a fixed IP address" as you're doing this. I'm just giving you the questions here, not the answers. But, I would submit, they are good questions. ETA: Ok I'll admit I like windows *a little.* It may be smart enough to do this without assigning fixed IP addresses and you may not have to open up your outgoing ports on your home network. Still, a basic understanding of what it's trying to do might be helpful, especially if you have to intervene at some point

For people reading this, just want to emphasize, the dedicated server is working. If you're setting up a server for the first time, set it up in dcs, on the computer you play dcs on, the one with the big GPU right. That'll generate a serversettings.lua file. Transfer that to your server and you'll be good to go. Editing that Lua file is pretty self explanatory. The webgui will be handy when they get it working but you don't have to wait, I just set up a vps over the weekend and it works fine

So if I want to have say J11, F14 and F18 all on the same side and all have datalink, I'll need both a Russian AWACS and like an E3?

our vps is running on 3 cores at 2.5GHz, 6GB of RAM and so far so good. SSD drives make a difference I think but with rendering off it doesn't seem to take much CPU-wise

Maybe not as big a deal as it used to be but probably worth checking the Mobo manufacturer website to see what will actually run at the rated speed

The "x" model goes to 11.

Currently setting up an old Dell T5600. If I didn't already have it lying around I'd say it's a colossal waste of time. The thing is a beast running Linux but Windows is a PIA. Finding drivers that still work is really hard, but if you can get it to boot up off an SSD, you can connect to the dell website, update the bios and download a driver package and odds are you can get the rest of the thing working. If you go that route, you're better off with a single CPU, get the highest single core speed you can get even if it only has 4 cores (which is plenty). Get as much RAM as it'll hold. Worth getting a cheap video card, makes setup easier. Might be worth it I guess if you can get a giant pile o' ram for cheap but dang, it's so easy to get on ebay and hack together a normal PC, I dunno man.

Yep. The rudder pedals are very sensitive yet there's a risk of running off the road depending on the airfield. Don't underestimate it. The F15 isn't actually all that easy to fly, not particularly easy to fly well either. In the short run, mess around with nws-hi which helps. Lots of curve helps but leave X and Y axis alone. Long run, practice. Or just embrace it. Land on the taxiway and drift into your spot. "Like a glove!" Nobody is watching. Usually.

Speaking of upgrading. I'm running 16GB of RAM lagging along at 1700MHz because I wasn't paying attention when I bought it. Looking at HyperX which I know for a fact will run at rated speed with my mobo, options 1. 16GB running at 3466Mhz for $117 2. 32GB running at 3200MHz for $205 I'm kinda leaning toward the 16GB package, I don't mind spending a hundred bucks but not sure I see the marginal value in spending another hundred for 32 cuz it's not clear to me DCS will use it anyway, plus it'll be slower. Thoughts?

That's a very decent CPU, I didn't gain a thing moving from 1700 to 2600. I found the 1700 easier to overclock, probably silicon lottery. Solid CPU. Gen3 supposedly has more instructions per cycle, and I imagine DCS will like that. We'll see Yeah Crimson was the bane of my existence back when I was mining. Only had one Intel box though, couldn't see spending the money