DeltaMike

You need CPU every bit as much as GPU in this game. Look at the ryzen 5 2600 and 2600x, same socket and you should notice a difference. Starting at $160 it's a great investment imo Graphics settings often affect both gpu and CPU, max out your settings with a 1070 and that CPU will likely wind up being a bottleneck Update your Mobo bios before you do anything

I'm waiting to upgrade, but glad I didn't wait. DCS is definitely playable on my system, and while I would like to upgrade my GPU I kinda want to see what the next gen VR devices look like and what it will take to drive it. As it is, I hacked together a system with what I had lying around the house and as it turns out, Oculus handles it fine. A 1070 or a Vega handles DCS fine, and if you're GPU limited like that, almost any CPU can handle it, 3.8ghz plus. You do need RAM, but... heck you could put together an entire system for less than what it costs to buy a 2080ti and have money left over. I mean, I *think* I want a 2080ti, but as VR technology evolves, who knows what it'll take to drive it? I see GPU clusters in our future...

I watched your video but I didn't see a training lesson in DCS... Is it a download or was it right in front of my eyeballs lol

I'm playing a campaign that calls for laser Mavs. I can get them to lock up but can't hit anything. They typically just nose over into the ground. Like the ran out of gas or something. I was tooling around 15 miles out. Do I need to be faster? Higher? Closer? Don't have this issue with IR Mavs, if I can lock it up I can hit it. Might have something to do with jtac, not sure I'm I'm doing the comms right

I was reading Soundslikeust's 2018 benchmarks today and I think he made a good point, that CPU useage isn't really the thing, it all boils down to render time. I imagine that depends on what you're rendering and how you're rendering it. GPU wise, back when I was mining, it depended on the algorithm. What kind of memory was on the card, what the timings were. Architecture of the card. Nothing was ever 100% efficient, every card had its weakness. I'm assuming that might be true for CPU's and motherboards and system RAM as well. Most of what you say kinda makes sense, I figure if your CPU is gagging on something, it's possible neither one is gonna be working all that efficiently. Yet under some circumstances it's screaming along. So it can do the math. Could it be a RAM thing? Maybe?

With a monster rig I'd choose your VR rig carefully. Oculus is good for systems that struggle to maintain 45fps. But the resolution for like odessey and Vive pro and pimax look really sweet. Keep in mind I'm coming at this from a neurological perspective, I'm no engineer. To my understanding supersampling is an inefficient form of AA that has an interesting spin in VR, it tricks your brain into thinking you have more information than you do, long as you keep your head moving. Adding in MSA makes text more readable, probably by enhancing edge detection I think, but running both together flogs your GPU. Personally I think Pimax is on the right track, giving you more pixels to work with. Still, they are sitting right on your eyeball, you can still see em apparently. So there's a lot of things the headset just can't do. A good GPU allows for eye candy. Shadows, raindrops. Scratches on the canopy. That's where you get your immersion. Textures are easy, my rig can run high textures and 1024 displays. No matter what you spend, your instruments are gonna be blurry and it's gonna be hard to spot targets. 2080ti strikes me as a good card, it's a little better than 1080ti but I get the feeling it has untapped potential. And ED seems committed to VR, every update it gets better. I get the feeling people either hate VR or they can't live without it. It's the precise reason I'm back into flight Sims. If you're that way, I wouldn't hesitate. Put it this way. In VR, nothing is ever enough. Might as well go for it. Basically you optimize anti-aliasing first, realising you can only do so much. Add in eye candy to the extent you can. Dealing with units, AI, terrain objects, load distance is probably going to be more of a RAM, CPU and SSD thing. CPU wise, right now you want fewer cores with faster clocks. At least 16gb of fast RAM. So, a decent MB. Good cooling. Sounds like you're gonna buy the best all the way around. It'll pay off, but not in bragging rights. Bottom line is, "pretty" in VR is different from "pretty" on a 4k monitor. Just gotta decide which kinda pretty you want. It's breathtaking. Astonishing, and as a guy who lives life in pursuit of astonishment, I do not use that term lightly. Sunset over the ocean is more beautiful than you can imagine. Which is the thing. The tank I just blew up had jaggies. There are no jaggies in the water, no jaggies in fluffy little clouds still lit by the fading sun. No jaggies where the sun catches the smoke trails of SAM rockets going after some MIG out there. Who is out of sight, out of mind, jaggy tho he may be.

As a Vega user, I kinda doubt it's gonna be anything to scream about. Mine was free basically, I wouldn't have spent like actual money on it. Not for DCS anyway. But, if you're stuck with AMD, I will say the new driver is great, the undervolting utility is like a one click solution. Slots you between a 1070 and 1080, so for the VII I guess you could extrapolate form there.

That would make it hard to climb out of the cockpit, Just-Cause-style

Practice flying straight and level at high AOA, flaps and gear down. Note, you don't have to keep an eye on the vertical speed indicator, just keep the velocity vector on the horizon in the HUD. It doesn't want to stay there, requires a gentle hand on the throttle. Note, you have a ton of drag in that situation, you have to give it a LOT of throttle to keep it there. Takes some getting used to. Once you got that down, *touch* the trim button, you'll see you can dial in a very precise amount of AOA. Next, try some level turns. You'll be amazed at how much throttle you need. Takes a while to get the hang of that. Fingertip control. Relax your shoulders. Breathe lol. Once you got that down, try some straight in approaches. Personally I found it very difficult to figure all that out in the pattern, there's a lot going on in the downwind. To fly a tight pattern you have to be able to predict what the jet is going to do, and use your muscle memory to make it do right. Takes a little practice to develop that muscle memory. Yeah it floats in the flare. I guess I could figure that out but I'm too lazy, I just fly the durn thing into the deck every time.

I think we have to ask whether the Hornet is presently a very good air superiority fighter. Give me TWS and I might be able to do something with it, but it'll still be slow, and short on fuel. Wouldn't it make more sense to have some F15's (or F14's) back there spamming long-range missiles, and let the Hornets zip in close with 9x's once you have the Tomcats on the defensive? I dunno, seems to me that BVR with say 2 vs 2 is playing the Tomcat's game.

Let us know what kind of hardware you have, and what you like to fly, and we can be more specific. Taking into account that link, and my experience tuning a minimum-spec system, I can suggest the following generic advice: SETUP 1. Start with textures high, cockpit displays 1024. Gotta have that. 2. Set terrain texture, grass, trees, preload and visible range to something. I *think* those things affect RAM and CPU more than anything, don't quote me. But whatever you choose, keep that constant for the test. (Unless you have a monster of a system, consider setting those at low for the GPU test.) 3. Set water and anisotropic filtering to something, just keep em constant. 4. Turn off random stuff like lens effects, heat blur etc. for now. 5. Don't worry about resolution or aspect ratio, although you might want to consider not driving a giant 4k monitor at the same time as VR, just sayin TEST CONDITIONS 1. Decide on your tools. If you're using Oculus, you don't get a ton of info from frame rate. Download the oculus tray tool, pick something to monitor. (I monitored GPU render time). 2. Decide on an in-game test. I just do a low speed fly-by of towns in Caucasus. Same track every time. 3. Turn MSAA off. 4. Turn off any external processing eg done by steam or by drivers. 5. Turn shadows and terrain object shadows off. TEST 1. Find the maximum pixel density you can run without stuttering or puking. With an Oculus, you're looking to nail 45fps consistently, once it starts dropping into the 30's, you puke. YMMV ADJUST What adjustments you make depends on what pixel density you can run. If the most you can run is like 1.2, the game is playable but you're not gonna be able to turn shadows on, or run any MSAA. If you can drive 2.0 or more, you have lots of options. In between you just have to figure out what works for you. -- MSAA is pretty, and I read somewhere that's the best solution for reading text in VR. Supersampling with MSAA on top of that. That should help resolution of cockpit instruments and displays. -- You can add shadows back in. Nice if you're flying low. If you're up high you don't really notice. Both come at a tradeoff, you have to decrease pixel density to get those in. Which is fine, some people with high end systems are saying if PD is too high it makes it hard to spot other A/C. All I can say is, PD adds to the "magic" of VR and you have to decide for yourself how little of that you're willing to live with. FURTHER ACTION Once you have your GPU dialed in you can start messing with terrain objects, visual range and preload radius. Don't get greedy if you have a low-end system. I dunno if that's "right" or not but I'm playing and enjoying with a rig that is just barely adequate (if that) so it's definitely worth tweaking. Of course if your CPU clocks at 5+ghz, and you have a 2080ti I don't even know why we are having this conversation LOL

Have you tried the CAT III tutorial? That's straight in. More or less.

High visible range, trees, grass combined with a high preload radius is flogging your RAM. Not sure what terrain texture does, I think it used to load up buildings for you, which doesn't help either. The terrain itself looks the same to me in VR. I *think* all that stuff is CPU and RAM but don't quote me on that. Dialing that back doesn't hurt VR much, I think a lot of that stuff is beyond VR resolution anyway, you might be rendering stuff you can't see anyway. Far as the GPU is concerned, the most expensive stuff in VR is MSAA and shadows. You can get away with water texture and anisotropic filtering. And 1024 cockpit displays should be fine. Suggest 1. Make sure you're only making one pass with supersampling. Note, PD is supersampling. So if you have a PD of 1.2 and you're supersampling in steam, you're flogging your card to death. Pick one. 2. Turn off all shadows and MSAA and see how high you can get PD. 3. If you can run it at like 1.8 or 2.0 without stuttering, you're golden. Me, I would back off on the PD to like 1.5 and see if I can add the MSAA back in. I get the feeling adding in a little MSAA can help cockpit readability. You can also work with the shadows. Not sure terrain object shadows do much but having at least some shadows is nice (wish I could do it but I can't) 4. But, if the most you can do with PD is like 1.4 or 1.5, I'd ditch MSAA and just do PD. Is what it is.

Yeah you can look around things. Refueling probe is hard to get to tho. Right-clicking at weird angles is a PIA

I evidently lied, I cant reproduce getting out of AACQ by hitting the RWS obs button. So, I've found two options. 1. Nav mode. 2. Sensor forward. This will put you into boresight mode if you don't have helmet cueing on, or HACQ if you do. Then, either NWS/undesignate, OR RWS obs button Either way, your settings in AACQ (range, azimuth) will be unchanged when you exit to RWS. If you select another missile, you'll still be in AACQ only now with the new missile defaults. That's what its doing for me. Today.

Pixel density and supersampling with the Oculus tray tool seem to be doing the same thing. VR is kind of weird, we feel like we have access to more information with supersampling, long as you keep your head moving, but it makes edges squirmy and in theory I guess adding in msaa will make text more readable. Which would be great for instruments but it flogs the daylights out if the gpu

I upgraded from a gen1 ryzen7 w/b350mb to Ryzen 5 2600 w/b450 and didn't notice any difference in DCS. I lost the "silicon lottery," was able to push the gen1 to 3.8ghz, can only run 4.0ghz on the gen2 cpu. Beyond that, gen2 apparently has a decent boost mode, improvements from overclocking are marginal and in my case, end of the day probably isn't accomplishing much. I don't think gen2 ryzen is the answer for DCS. If it was me, I'd upgrade the MB, try 16gb of DDR4, put the best m.2 SSD I could afford in there and see what shakes out. With the main question being the motherboard. Might be worth spending a little extra for a MB that OC's well. I dunno about the GPU, I flog the crap out of my pitiful GPU in VR. That said, going to 16gb of RAM solved most of my crashing problems. Adjusting game settings helped the stuttering. If I were going to upgrade, and I might, I have my eye on the 2080. It's all a question of how much headroom you get, at what price, on the margins. How much extra power do you get, for how much more money? They don't charge *that* much more for a 2080 than a 2070, and believe it or not depending on what you're up to, the 2070 strikes me as a low-end card for DCS. If you do swap out your MB, read up how the copy protection works. Depending on how many activations you have left, you might want to de-activate your modules BEFORE you pull the screwdriver out.

Thanks Lex, believe it or not you actually answered several of my questions. I like the vids, keep em coming. We may be goofballs but we appreciate you! The fact that the pattern kinda flies itself is good for multiplayer, guess all it really needs is the occasional advisory. "All flights be advised, there appears to be a fire on the poop deck." "BRC is now 200. 210. 220. Sheesh, stand by." "Negative Mr.Poopypants, the pattern is full!" That kinda stuff

Thanks for the advice guys. This forum is awesome.

Helps to set something up in mission planner and play with it. Among other things you see how SAM sites are laid out. Altitude is good. Range is a trade-off. Closer you are, more likelihood of hitting something. And also the more likelihood of having your hands full. If I know the distance I've had luck shooting targeting radar at about 20mi, more than that is luck, and even then you have to spam it. My experience anyway.

Wow, that's really good. Do you think the MSAA helps? I start liking it at 4x, below that I dunno that I see much difference with it on, seems like cranking the SS up a notch is about the same

That's good news. Supersampling flogs the life out of your GPU. Turning that on its head has gotta help. I hope so; the 2080 series doesn't seem to be *that* much better than 1080ti from what I've read

DCS is seriously easier than TARGET, I agree it can take hours to build a TARGET profile, DCS only takes a few minutes. Grim Reapers has a nice "how to" youtube vid for the F15, follow along and you'll be done

Makes sense. 1v1, seems like f15 drivers like this routine: crank, fire an AIM120, go for the deck, notch, re-engage. That *never* works for me in F18. What does usually work is to crank, fire as I'm cranking back to the other side, then pull back in for a second shot at close range. If opponent has committed to the attack, it's hard for him to get away. Key I think is to maintain altitude, I think once I give that away I'm done. Long as I have the advantage, the jet doesn't even technically have to be flying, which I find amazing. That sucker will do donuts in the air. Sometimes I think ya gotta run, it might start off 1vs1 but those things pop up out of nowhere sometimes. I will say, I've been lucky hugging the ground, it's always when I pop up that I get... well, popped. And, when the tables are turned, I've noticed it's hard to put enough stank on the missile to guarantee a hit outside of 10m if the other guy is running hard. Takes a long burn. Once again, fuel management emerges as a key factor I guess. And yeah it's starting to look like a waste of time to try to fly CAP solo in an F18

Well there's the sitting around doing nothing part, then there's the aviation part. As for the first, a really good SSD really helps. As for the second, I dunno. I honestly like flying more than playing. I was in sim all day last weekend, remember one mission that was like two hours of flying, and 30 seconds of dropping bombs (in one pass, with no idea until Tacview came up whether or not I hit anything). And what made the whole thing worthwhile was the landing. Talking to ATC, getting set up on base. Sun going down over the Black Sea. All of a sudden the SAM battery went nuts. Couldn't see what it was shooting at. Contrails streaking across the sky, lit by the sunset. Weird mix of emotions. Frightening, awesome, sad, beautiful. There's always instant action. On a clear night you can see the carrier from 25 miles out. There's a highway in the sky, and I'll push when ready. Meanwhile there's moonlight on the water, moonlight in the clouds. In our dreams we can fly. I don't know why, and kinda do.