Katj

First of all thank you for a very good response. I mostly agree with all of your statements. I just have a few comments. The U.S. couldn't afford to buy the F-22 in great numbers so it's not surprising that Russia can't afford the Pak Fa, although they may not be comparable aircraft. The Russian campaign in Syria seems to have been rather successful even though they haven't used a lot of guided munitions. Russia probably isn't as sensitive to collateral damage as the US, so the incentive to use more precise weaponry is smaller. All things considered I think the Russians have done an admirable job at developing competitive military equipment. I mean with the decades of communist oppression, the loss of their empire, and all of that. China is up and coming, of course, and it sure would be fun with Chinese assets, a map of Taiwan and maybe some African region in which we can place a virtual proxy war.

Well, that paints an extremely crude picture. A comparison between Russia's GDP and GDP PPP suggests that they get about 3 times as much R&D for each dollar spent as the western countries. How all that money is spent is also important. The US maintains a very large amount of bases all over the world as well as a very large fleet with lots of carriers and other stuff that Russia doesn't bother with. Also India and Saudi Arabia spend a heck of a lot on their military but have zero decent indigenous jets to show for it. What I'm trying to say is; it's obvious that Russia can't afford to keep up with the US in any kind of arms race. But that doesn't mean that all of their jets are crap. After all, the best digital combat (flight) simulator is Russian!

I don't know about revolution, I think some expectations may be too optimistic, it should however remove the biggest hurdle towards getting DCS to run on Linux. That's something I would appreciate.

Luckily the Americans and the French sell their jets to all kinds of countries like Iran, UAE, Pakistan, Kuwait, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Canada, there's really no end to it. So if you're looking for opposition it's not that hard to dream up a fitting scenario.

I think it would be more correct to say that they are dropped when there is a need to drop them, emergency or no. E.g. the Israeli F-16s during operation Babylon. Also I guess pilots may choose to keep them even in an emergency if they can't be dropped safely.

Very nice results, thanks for sharing. I may have to revisit some of my opinions. Could you please upgrade to a 3700x and see if you get any further improvements? ;)

Of course more cores are better, you can run some background processes on them and chances are that if you have 50 threads, every once in a while you will benefit from them in DCS. Maybe when you install the game, load resources, or you might simply get an extra frame per second. I'm not saying there's nothing to be gained from having more than 2 cores. I'm saying that after that it will scale very badly for DCS as things stand today. 4 cores are still better than 2. And 8 cores are better than 6, but you might be hard pressed to be able to measure the difference. Especially if you don't have a very high-end graphics card, something OP doesn't. I've never disabled cores. I don't see the point. I did however disable HT on my first i7. So to summarize my opinion and advice to you guys: If you're not on a budget, get the best CPU. If on a budget, consider spending less on CPU (prioritizing single thread performance) and more on GPU.

Even though there may be many threads, most of the work can still be done on one thread. So at any given time you might not have more than one or two threads that are ready to run. In this situation having more than 2 cores will put you firmly in the lands of diminishing returns. Writing a graphics engine that efficiently utilizes multiple cores is very difficult. Most games are still not very good at utilizing multi-core processors, even though they have been mainstream for 15 years or so. But it seems like we are finally starting to get somewhere.

If your aircraft is bent (and of course they all are to some degree) or otherwise a bit funny you might need some rudder trim to fly straight. But unless your jet is really FUBAR, I don't see why it shouldn't fly straight if the ball is centered and you're not banking. The ball just measures lateral acceleration, and if you're level and the ball is centered, you're not turning. So there are basically 3 possibilities as I see it. Either there's nothing strange going on at all, it's kind of hard to tell from a second or two of video. Or the tanker is not flying ball centered. Or the ball in the Tomcat is lying. Speaking of instrument failure; I actually had an altimeter failure in the Tomcat when I was practicing case 1 landings. It just froze at 1000' or thereabouts. Took me a while to figure out what was going on, but in the end I managed to land safely.

I made the same decision a few weeks ago. Weighing all the pros and cons it finally came down to the fact that in a way I've always hated the Hornet. Also I already had the Viggen so I was not looking for attack capability. So I got the Tomcat. Now, I've just started learning the Tomcat and so far I'm happy with my purchase. I do however feel that it would be nice to have a single seater sometimes. At the same time I appreciate Jesters company at times. Like when I struggle to catch the basket and he is being super helpful in the back seat. But most importantly when he is the only one to see that I got that 3 wire. I also look forward to trying MP multicrew, I haven't gotten around to that yet. Honestly I don't know what you should pick. I think you might be happy with both, but the bug is probably the safer bet. For myself I will probably get a 1 seater fighter at some point in the future. It might eventually be the f-16, but of course I hate that too.

I wouldn't expect much if any increase in fps in DCS because of how poorly it utilizes many cores. In the future, maybe. But that's a big maybe. I would expect 6 cores to be plenty for the life of the motherboard. Some games may benefit from the extra cores right now, but you have to ask yourself how much you want to spend and on what. If you currently use a gtx 1060, that indicates to me that your budget isn't unlimited. So my suggestion to you is spend less on CPU and more on GPU. 3600 (without X) might be best value.

Well, I suppose it depends on how you use your stuff. If you play FPS games and want high refresh rates at "lowish" graphics settings, then I suppose that you might benefit from a faster CPU. If I were you I would consider getting a 3600x and save some money for your next graphics card upgrade. But you know best if you will use those extra cores.

How can you tell that your CPU is struggling? I have a gtx 1060 6 gb and a 4670, which is a slightly worse CPU than yours, and I think my CPU is probably good for another upgrade of the GPU. At least I wouldn't upgrade the CPU without upgrading GPU, that's for sure.

Ok, thank you. I think it's becoming more clear to me. But let me ask you this: Is a pulse doppler radar less sensitive to ground clutter than a continuous wave radar? And if so, why?

Well, yes, but now you're describing an ideal situation and you intentionally left out the important part, the part about the ground return being so much stronger. Are you saying that isn't a problem?

Well, I'm not pretending to be a radar engineer, but a radar engineer that has worked on fighter radars for most of his life told me that was how they worked. I really don't think I made this up. If I misunderstood him, please tell me how. Now, I'm not really into signal processing, but I can imagine that detecting that 0.000017 % difference in frequency might not be so trivial after all when you also take into account that the ground return is many orders of magnitude larger than the return from an aircraft. But I was just assuming stuff, which I tried to indicate by writing "probably".

Exactly, timings between the different pulses (or their frequency if you will). The radar does not measure the frequency shift in the carrier wave. Probably because that shift is so miniscule for non-relativistic speeds. If you think the ground filter is wide for a pulse doppler radar, imagine what it would be for a "doppler radar". (It would most likely be unusable)

We're getting out of scope but a pulse doppler radar does not rely on wavelength shift but rather on change in timings within a series of pulses. This is implied in the name; "pulse doppler". But the principle is more or less the same.

It's the speed in the direction of the radar beam, relative to ground. It's a Doppler thing.

I am certainly a beginner but I don't agree that those modules are unsuitable for beginners. Having grown up with rattling windows, because Viggens came screaming over our house at low altitude, it was the natural first purchase for me. So now I've owned the Viggen for a couple of months and I've had lots of fun. But recently I felt an urge to try some a2a, so I just bought the Tomcat. I got the Tomcat instead of the Hornet so I wouldn't feel tempted to use the Hornet for everything, and forget my Viggen completely. I still mean to use that for strikes. Now, I haven't done much a2a combat yet, I've been practicing things like carrier landings and refueling. But I'm learning and I'm having fun, and in the end that's the point. On topic will probably pick up the Persian gulf map during the sale. I feel like there is Tomcat content coming there, and also fodder for the Viggen.

Yeah, but while it's good to spread out the load it might not matter much to us when we choose CPU. Because there might be 30 threads but 60 % of the work could still be done on one of those threads. In that particular case a 2 core CPU would be enough because the performance on that main thread is what's critical. The other core can easily keep up even if it runs all the 29 other threads and some background processes all by itself. Long story short, good single thread performance is still more important than getting a CPU with lots of cores.

That's because single thread performance has improved little in recent years. I bought a second hand 6 GB 1060 for my old computer with a 4670k. Also got 16 GB extra RAM for a total of 24 GB. I am very happy with the improvement for about 240 EUR spent. GPU is still the bottleneck. Will likely upgrade that one more time before I get new everything. Perhaps I will find VR mature at that point. So my suggestion is buy 8-16 GB RAM, an SSD and spend the rest of your budget on a graphics card. 1070 or better is probably the way to go if your budget allows, mine didn't. In fact, when I realized what a graphics card cost these days I bought the used card I mentioned before and got a few cards worth of Nvidia stock for good measure.

I meant it may be worthwhile to fix from ED's side at some point, especially if we get more multicrew aircraft. But we want lots of things from ED, some pretty pressing, so I'm not holding my breath concerning this feature.

Well, being a SW developer myself I should know better than to make assumptions about code that I know nothing about. Anyway, I wouldn't suggest branching the aircraft in the way you propose. I guess (I did it again) that means that we are essentially flying the multicrew version of the plane in SP, but are free to switch player slots in a way that we aren't in an MP setting. This might still not be all that complex to fix, still worse than I originally hoped, but I can see that it is out of your hands. Continuing to improve Jester may be the more worthwhile route for you guys to invest in.

What? It's not remotely similar. Implementing multicrew might be a lot of work, as is implementing AI crew. But the Tomcat is already both single crew multiseat (like the helos) and multicrew. I have like 5 hours in the Tomcat so far and haven't gotten around to bringing it to MP yet, but as I understand it Jester won't come back if RIO disconnects. But I also read somewhere that this is to be fixed. I don't even know if a RIO can connect to an airborne aircraft or not. But I imagine the best solution would be a seamless transition to/from Jester whenever a pilot or RIO connects or disconnects to the aircraft. And that it would be possible to change seats whenever you're flying with Jester. But if we can't have that, it shouldn't be too difficult to give us a single player version of the aircraft to use in MP.