DCS Black Shark Tweak Guide Alpha Version

Okay I fixed it. Had to import a vanilla graphics.cfg from backup BS folder. I believe it has to do with incorrect installation of LOReload Terrain mod. If you don't install it correctly, it will screw up your graphics.cfg. We talked about it and TAIPAN posted instructions here:

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=826015&postcount=19

So, nothing to do with tweaking and my appreciation still stands (though I need to tweak all over again...). :)

Most of the settings have the same effect though not all. Making a direct copy of the BS settings is not adviced. I prefer not to go in to LockOn tweaking details in a Blackshark thread, this could only bring confusion. After the first official release of this tweak guide I will make a similar guide for LockOn.

Fair enough, sorry for the derail.

Any News?

Not exactly on the subject but I'll ask here. Some of the text in cockpit is pretty smudgy and unreadable even when zoomed in, for example on the weapons panel. I have all my texture settings at high already, so is there any setting I could tweak to make it look like in the screenshot below?

Yes you need to crank up quality textures in the drivers, not only in game.

Seems like that's the only option. It's interesting how it doesn't affect all the text in the cockpit. I'll see if my PC can handle raising quality settings.

Thanks!

Seems like that's the only option. It's interesting how it doesn't affect all the text in the cockpit. I'll see if my PC can handle raising quality settings.

Thanks!

Indeed, Antialiasing and Anisotropic settings will inprove this.

Next thing, the shkval.

 

I'm trying to reduce the severe frame drop when having the shkval on.

 

I go from 50fps to 30fps when I engage the shkval and aim it at the horizon, even if I don't look at the shkval screen! I think it should be not that bad as the shkval only looks at a small portion of the horizon, though it probably gets rendered as your whole horizon visibility settings double.

 

This might not be possible to solve, but who knows. Did anyone find a way to reduce this frame drop / shkval visibility range?

This is the biggest FPS killer in BS( together with placing large amount of units on the small areas) but i think we can not solve that issue without help of someone from ED team!Looks like developers forced fogparam1 12 and fogparm2 1.1 values to evade terible FPS drop with lower setting...By the way,default values for fogparam-s are totaly unrealistic, i mean, deam Nimic carrier is invisible on 10km?! Try to fix that and you see powerlines on 100km on skhval!:mad: Only solution is to delete everything from scene/high folder and i think i will do just that...Maybe i will install Nevada mod too...

About cockpit textures... notice they are not hmmm high quality.... so....

french traduction

pour les français : traduction disponible

french translation available on download section on http://www.checksix-fr.com/

section DCS BS / documents

(and on C6 forum here http://www.checksix-forums.com/showthread.php?t=160256 but that link won't stay long time)

Thanks for that Hellfrog! :thumbup:

Thanks for the guide!

Few notes though.

1. Driver settings: You can safely mark Tripple buffering as an irrelevant setting. It does nothing for Black Shark. The good news is

More here: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=52171&page=2

2. Driver settings: Setting texture quality to other value than highest quality is not needed as I have never seen any performance loss due to this setting. IIRC when I had BS running with 35 FPS stable (no vsync) I couldn't even observe any difference. It's safely to say that even if there was FPS hit it was lower than 3 FPS out of 35.

At the same time the image quality is superior! Take a look at the lighter areas.

Original ~3000x3000 image here http://www.mediafire.com/?am7hd2606akewks

Thanks Frazer for your efforts.

A few items you might want to look at for the next version.

Note: I'm running a AMD Phenom ll x3 720 BE @ 3.3/3.5GHz Summer /winter. Two ATI 4850s Xfire 10.2 drivers. (Its a semi decent system). Testing done in FC2 but I also fly LoMac & BS on this boot item wither other games (FPS) on other OS install.

• ["full Screen"] = false, Everyone wants bigger screens, so no point of running BS windowed. There are even reports that BS windowed runs worse as in full screen mode. Anyway, put "full screen" at true. The only way I could enable Vsync & eliminate "tearing" is with Full Screen off. (Game set @ LCD native rez) Also helped with stutter slightly.
  
• ["visibRange"] = "High",
  We tweaked High, and so, select High here.
  Should be "scenes"= high
  

• far_clip = 80000: FC2 = 14000 in FC2 I use 10000/11000 as it delivers a realistic view distance ( below 100km for distant mountain rang ). PS I'm Mud Moving thus low alt

  
  

• OldLandNoise

  
  back = 10000; --change to 3000/40000 fixed ground texture missing/low-lod, middle distance bright/no detail ground texture on hill sides or between urban areas,(no/little fps cost).

  
   
  

• Bucic already covered "texture" settings.

  
  

• structures = {60, 6000}; Same for BS & FC2. 60-one variable for small structure/some boats/high detail rooftops fadin/popup (my current setting 55) save FPS in urban area & reduce near popups, 6000-Distance to start render large Sturctures (My setting 80000) reduce pop up in tree area & reduce transparency overall (cost FPS).

  
  

• trees = {1000, 9000}; I wanted more trees to cover low "lod" ground textures (tree haze/earlier fadin), set at 10000/11000 (cost some fps)

  
  

• With ATI cards low AA settings helped with "stutter" in busy areas. At high rez high AA not needed.

  
  

• Its hard to setup a test.miz to cover all conditions so tweaks should never be radical as the original DEV team knew what they were doing and gave us what I reckon was a good compromise covering a wide verity of Hard Ware configs. Most config settings we tweak are not linear, are interrelated and work together with hard coded parameters.

  
  

My first objective of tweaking was to increase visual quality, less transparency and reduce pop ups with regard given to a realistic view distance with average atmospheric conditions. (More trees, texture detail and structures).

And then refine these settings with regards to fps.

Its clear fps is dependant on the number of "objects rendered", though not linear it is a relatively flat curve. Hence for most of us with decent GPUs "structures", "trees" & "objects" have greatest impact. (CPU limited). If i overclock 10% I get almost 10% in fps.

This has not changed from the orginal release of Lomac

Most people know this but it might be worth mentioning in next revision.

Thought you might be interested & looking forward to your next guide

Kind regards.......... Shad

Thanks ShadowVonChadwick & Bucic, will take your findings into account for the next (non alpha) release.

Excellent thread, guys, signing up.

Thanks,

Sabre.

It's also worth mentioning that all the "optimizations" settings related to texture filtering will become irrelevant too after the highest quality setting is chosen. They also don't give any noticeable FPS improvement but noticeable quality loss. This is why I marked them as "IGNORE!" here http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=822584&postcount=15

It's also worth mentioning that all the "optimizations" settings related to texture filtering will become irrelevant too after the highest quality setting is chosen. They also don't give any noticeable FPS improvement but noticeable quality loss. This is why I marked them as "IGNORE!" here http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=822584&postcount=15

Hi Bucic

A bit vague about "optimizations". Do you mean BS/FC2 .cfg/lau setting or GPU inhouse setting.

For me on ATI with FC2 ["textures"] = 2, my Anisotropic Filtering setting make a BIG difference.

EXP

Hi Bucic

A bit vague about "optimizations". Do you mean BS/FC2 .cfg/lau setting or GPU inhouse setting.

 

For me on ATI with FC2 ["textures"] = 2, my Anisotropic Filtering setting make a BIG difference.

EXP

No. I call the following nVidia Control Panel Settings bogus settings:

• Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization
  
• Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimizations
  

They become unavailable (and are turned OFF) after settings the general filtering quality to the highest setting. To barely notice any performance difference in DCS you would have to compare the lowest and the highest texture quality settings. Don't even think about comparing the highest against the second highest setting.

Edit:

To make it clear. Both of the listed settings are sort of cheater-degrading-quality-tricks.

As for anisotropic filtering - highest setting also highly recommended unless the system's bottle neck is the graphics card.

once again you bring optimizations to the community, thank you.

once again you bring optimizations to the community, thank you.

Yes, this goes to Frazer in the first place.

Sabre.

I just set up the BS 1.01c according to Frazer's instructions and got about 40 FPS. When ED publish 1.02 patch, which has a lot of improvements, but my FPS has now dropped to about 20. Given that they are now some value in graphics.cfg and options.lua files changed, do you had some recommendations for the setting, please?

If I dare to notice the settings for nVidia GPU (my 8600GT GLH) haven't brought me more FPS, on the contrary I got better results with the default values for the GPU, so I do not know what the most important of these options.

Besides, now I do not know whether can we use MAX affinity tool anymore?

It would be good if you could write in this form: default values are xxxxx, and recommended values are yyyyy - yyyyy. Thanks in advance.

At the moment I do not have any free time to work on the official version of the tweak guide. I guess you are (for some part) on your own to find out your best settings. If you find some good FPS inprovements, please post it here :)

I just set up the BS 1.01c according to Frazer's instructions and got about 40 FPS. When ED publish 1.02 patch, which has a lot of improvements, but my FPS has now dropped to about 20. Given that they are now some value in graphics.cfg and options.lua files changed, do you had some recommendations for the setting, please?

 

If I dare to notice the settings for nVidia GPU (my 8600GT GLH) haven't brought me more FPS, on the contrary I got better results with the default values for the GPU, so I do not know what the most important of these options.

 

Besides, now I do not know whether can we use MAX affinity tool anymore?

 

It would be good if you could write in this form: default values are xxxxx, and recommended values are yyyyy - yyyyy. Thanks in advance.

You don't need to set affinity manually or use DCSMax or anything like it. The game does it automatically now (1.0.2 is the current version).

From what I read it looks like you don't know what certain options in graphics card drivers mean or which have the biggest impact on performance. For that start from the first page of this topic and find that nice graphic I posted where you have a screen from nVidia control panel with settings highlighted with different colors and such. Then go to http://www.nhancer.com/?dat=d_start and read the descriptions of the settings (Chapter 4). No one will do that for you because no one can.

As for default vs recommended it's up to you to take notes (make a log) of what settings you are changing - from what value to what value.

* Installation / Patchday ABC

BIG RED LETTERS: The 1.0.2 patch must be installed over a fresh installation of DCS:BS 1.0.

- Patching over version 1.0.1c is not supported.

- Mods (even if just disabled) will break the patch installation.

So take the opportunity to make such notes this time. The rest is in the topic where the text is quoted from (click the arrow).

First of all I would like to respond to 159th_Viper because the previous thread closed: Sure, I've read directions, but I realized that it can patch over v. 1.01c, and that others had no problems, so even I, with the difference in the drop FPS. If this is the cause, of course I will do from the beginning.

@Frazer: Thanks for your reply, You made a good guide.

@Bucic: Thanks to you for the readiness to help. I read a lot into this thread, but obviously I'll have to turn more attention, I probably skipped some answers. There, for example, I did not know for nVidia nhancer. I saw your explanation and pictures, but I figured that abbreviations and whether it should set the GPU or what? Thanks once again to the prevenance.

@Bucic: Thanks to you for the readiness to help. I read a lot into this thread, but obviously I'll have to turn more attention, I probably skipped some answers. There, for example, I did not know for nVidia nhancer. I saw your explanation and pictures, but I figured that abbreviations and whether it should set the GPU or what? Thanks once again to the prevenance.

Personally I don't recommend nHancer, especially for newbies or even people very perfectly familiar with 3D driver settings. But their manual on 3D settings is superb! The reason why I don't recommend it is because it has very little advantages (exporting/importing application profiles, efficient GUI layout) while being just a same link between a game and one's graphics card as the standard control panels are. The nHancer forum is not filled with "thank you for the great tool, it works perfectly" posts only. Long story short - ask yourself if you really need it.

Sorry, you'll have to rephrase your question about my explanation and pictures. Please post a link to the picture you are referring to, name the problematic setting and try to give me something to work with :) You might want to go through this page on another forum http://a2asimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=12621&start=15 where I already answered some questions.