X-31_VECTOR

Ha, I had last week off, and at the time I booked the vacation, I had planned to spend much of it putting the G2 and a new video card through their paces. Struck out on both counts, obviously. Ah well, first-world problems to be sure...

Absolutely true of the rumored 16GB 3080 variant from a couple months ago, but the latest 20GB 3080Ti rumor is new and fresh. Of course, that doesn't mean it is any more true, and it doesn't mean the card will come into stock in the span of a human lifetime even if NVIDIA does produce it. But it does make sense that they need to respond in some way to the 6900XT, for which AMD claims 3090-like performance for 2/3 the price.

Thanks for the feedback! Gives me hope that I might at least manage some reasonably smooth free flights while I wait on a new card. And I totally agree about the 6900XT or 3080Ti... the 3080's seemingly small advantage over the 6800XT is offset for me by the big difference in VRAM, and the 6900XT at $1000 destroys the already dubious value proposition of the $1500 3090. If the 3080Ti outperforms the 6900XT, I think it will take the price/performance crown. But it's irrelevant if once again no one can buy one through regular retail channels. (FYI for US pre-orderers: My July 13 order from Connection still shows as back-ordered. I'm curious to see how much time passes from dburne's July 8 order shipping to my July 13 shipping, to see at what rate they are working through the backlog.)

Thank you Snake. Time to go add myself to the order list.

I keep checking for an email from Connection (I pre-ordered July 8 ), but then I remember that I haven't been able to find a (retail) 3080 yet, so I don't know why the hell I'm in a hurry to get my G2. If I had it today, I would be connecting it to my 1080, and I'm assuming that will be a slide show. If anyone is successfully using a G1 with a [non-Ti] 1080, feel free to offer me a ray of hope. Otherwise, I am just holding out hope that I can get a 6800 or 6900 AMD card when they come out in the next few weeks. (Though I fear that I have a better chance of getting gored by a unicorn on my way to work than I do of getting an AMD card before they instantly sell out too).

A few questions that I couldn't find the answers for (though to be fair, I did not read all 134 pages of this thread): - What is the "startup procedure" for getting into a flying session? Is there any software that needs to be loaded beforehand? Do you have to calibrate before each session? Or is it just a matter of slipping on the FCUs and hitting their power buttons? Does the camera need to be turned on, or is it always on as long as it's plugged into its USB port? - When not using PointCTRL, do most folks just keep the FCUs plugged in and charging to they're ready to go next time, or will this shorten battery life? Great work Miles! I hope you still find time to actually fly and use your product between filling all these orders.

Awesome, thanks!

Hi hegykc. As I think I had a pretty early version of the pedals, this feedback may no longer be helpful, but just in case: I have found that use of the brakes over time has led to some cracking in the pedals near the mounting bolts. You shipped my pedals in early June, so I think that area has been reinforced in later versions? Do you have a timeframe for when you expect to have your finished version available? Again, thanks for all the great work on these and your other projects!

Propeler, where are you located? I have TM Cougar and Warthog grips I could send, but I'm in the US, and international shipping these days has been quite slow and unreliable.

Apart from the $50 price reduction, it's best attribute compared to the 3080 may be the ability to actually buy one. That said, I suspect it will still sell out in minutes. We'll see who wins the restocking race.

Yeah, if the 6900XT -- at $999 -- actually delivers the claimed on-par (or better) performance with the 3090, it is hard to see the 3090 having any place in the market... unless folks are willing to pay $500 more for a slight improvement in ray tracing. Unless the 6900XT turns out to have awful thermals or emits poison gas or something, I think a lot of people who were waiting on NVIDIA stock -- even those who were planning to go for a 3080 -- will leap at the 6900. Much as I hate to wait until Dec. 8 (or after), that's my new plan.

E55, if you mean hovering: For me, the "light bulb" moment was sitting in a real cockpit watching the cyclic hand of the pilot as he held a perfect hover. The stick was always in motion, but the motions were extremely small. Over-controlling is very easy to do, and leads to more over-controlling until you are hopelessly chasing after the aircraft. Try holding the stick between your thumb and one finger (no deathgrip), and only using your thumb and finger to make inputs -- no wrist, no arm. It can help to remember that you are sitting in a pendulum that is swinging under the rotor disk; the cyclic moves the rotor disk first, and the fuselage follows, and has its own momentum when the disk stops moving. If you're talking about forward flight, DCS UH-1 models all the quirky aerodynamic effects inherent to single-rotordisk helicopters (note: the KA-50 is a different animal entirely because it has contra-rotating rotors and flight control computers). Just one example: as your forward airspeed increases, your lift increases. But it doesn't do so symmetrically. The attacking blades generate proportionally more lift relative to the retreating ones as airspeed builds, and the tendency to roll toward the retreating-blade side will increase. As a general rule, every change in airspeed or altitude requires inputs of cyclic, collective and pedals. And all of this assumes you are using something for the anti-torque pedal axis -- could be rudder pedals, could be a twist-grip on your stick, or anything folks use for the yaw axis when flying fixed wing in DCS. Technically you can map it to keyboard, but I can't imagine that's flyable. All of this might lead you to want to walk away from the Huey, but the moment when you find yourself holding a stable hover indefinitely (you're not quite sure how, but your hands and feet and brain stem have just learned it on their own) makes it all worthwhile. Good luck!

Much improved, thanks.

Thanks Tanuki44!

I second (or third) the suggestion to start with a base. When I transitioned away from the Warthog as my stick, I began by putting the Warthog grip on a Virpil WarBrd base, then added an extension to it. The WarBrd base made a huge difference in hovering and even formation flying. Eventually I replaced the Warthog grip with a Virpil T50CM grip for the extra buttons, and haven't regretted it.

dburne, when you forget your anniversary or significant other's birthday, be sure not to mention that you remember the exact date that you got your first VR headset. :)

I have CV1 (and G2 on order), and while I generally hate the image quality compared to my flat screen, the test for me is how many times in a session I find myself saying "holy sh!t." VR wins by a landslide. I wonder when we will reach the nirvana of having it all -- great image quality, good FOV, an optimized DCS and the hardware to run it all at 90 FPS, plus maybe decent/affordable haptic gloves and FFB stick bases thrown in for good measure. Four years? Makes me want to eat healthy and look both ways before crossing the street, as I'd hate to miss it. :)

This is the element of DCS (and flight simming in general) that is hard to explain to people who aren't into it. It inspires this sort of thing. It draws in people with curiosity, and leads to spin-off hobbies. In my case it was a (vastly less sophisticated) homemade collective, but we all wind up doing all sorts of tweaking, tinkering and learning along the way. I gripe a lot about how I seem to spend a lot more time preparing to play DCS than actually playing, but the truth is that I like doing stuff like creating Stream Deck profiles or trying to get Helios to work almost as much as I like the flying. Both scratch a similarly itchy part of the brain, I suppose. Anyway propeler, you're inspiring, and I hope you've enjoyed the journey, no matter whether it leads to a production-level product. Bravo zulu!

What's odd is that the G2 was supposed to have upgraded lenses from the pre-production models all along; they've been saying it for months. I have a feeling that this will quickly be conflated with the rumors/leaks around a G2 model with eye tracking (the so-called "Omnicept edition"), but I doubt one has anything to do with the other.

Heard all over the world tonight: "Honey, I need a 3090 to help with folding at home. W're trying to cure a disease here babe... this is no time to be selfish and go cheap."

Just to add to the peer pressure, I have a 6700k that I was running at a modest 4.2 Ghz, because that's what my motherboard's "easy overclocking" bios utility said was kosher. And even then, I was getting weird voltages that made me feel like I was abusing my CPU. Then helpful enablers on this forum finally shamed me into trying to take it higher. This time I did a little more research (i.e., watched a couple videos), and did the overclock manually. I'm now at 4.6, my voltages are dead stable (because I set them manually) and my peak temperatures hardly went up at all. I'm using a Noctua air cooler too, not some cryogenic-water-cooling-ice-bucket-challenge kind of setup. And I plan to push the CPU to 4.8, because even at 4.6, the difference was noticeable, especially in VR. Part of my rationale was that I'd had my CPU for a few years, so even if OCing it did negatively impact the lifespan, I would be looking to upgrade it in a year or two anyway if I didn't overclock. Put another way, the longer you've had the CPU, the less you have to lose by overclocking. All that said, it's nobody's business but yours, so if overclocking just isn't where you want to put your time and energy, I sure can't argue with that! Best of luck regardless.

Same here. For me, a GPU is an every-four-years (i.e., every other tech cycle) upgrade. And I don't buy it with the near term in mind so much as asking the question, "Will I still be able to run what/how I want in three years, or four?" I frankly doubt that anything I'm doing now will see a meaningful difference with a 3090 versus a 3080, including DCS. For me, the potential appeal of the (likely massively expensive) 3090 is the idea that it could push the next upgrade out by an extra year. But even then, I'm asking myself whether a 60% cost premium is worth that. If the 3080 (and its successor in two years e.g. a 4080) are priced at $800, then the cost of a 3090 today is almost the cost of a 3080 today and a like-model upgrade in two years. And when I consider that such a hypothetical $800 "4080" type card in two years may likely outpace the 3090, it makes it hard to convince myself to get the 3090. So why do I still want one? Ugh, why couldn't I have a sensible and more affordable hobby, like drug addiction or luxury yachting?

Ha! Yeah, all those glass-sided cases are clearly for single guys. If DCS has taught me nothing else, it has taught me how to fly under the radar.

Thanks. I had thought it might be UK-specific since Sytemactive is "is the exclusive pre-order partner of HP UK," but the statement above is pretty clear. I tried to get a confirmation from Connections, the U.S. pre-order merchant, but the hold music broke my spirit after 20 minutes and I gave up.

For the UK, or for other parts of the world as well? And for the first batch of pre-orders, or for your pre-order?