good performance in 2.5 despite old rig

[Cpt Cuckoo]

try turning all shadows off and reducing or turning off MSAA

 

 

Thanks but I'm already doing that. In fact with these setting below I can get 18 FPS flying level and 24 FPS pointing at the sky. It doesn't really change much when I turn up or down a few more setting, either.

 

 

 

[Aluminum Donkey]

I`m loving the new 2.5.1 update as well, My old rig is purring like a cat.. great fps, smooth experience, looks fantastic.. Thxs ED

 

That's because your 'old rig' is very good by today's standards! If you bought your computer when all that hardware first became available to the consumer, then it probably cost more than any car I've ever driven on regular basis :)

 

What was a GTX 980 Ti when they first appeared, about $1500? I remember wanting one, and nearly laughed and cried at the same time when I saw the price, about 2 or 3 times the pre-release guesstimated MSRP... Mind you, I'm Canadian and we get screwed here on vid cards (and memory) for some reason.

 

Besides, I already had a "high end" GTX 560 1GB :D hehehehe

 

AD

[Aluminum Donkey]

Thanks but I'm already doing that. In fact with these setting below I can get 18 FPS flying level and 24 FPS pointing at the sky. It doesn't really change much when I turn up or down a few more setting, either.

 

Wow, time for a new box, even if it's older and fairly cheap. If the bread situation is a little grim, you should be able to scour Ebay and/or maybe some local computer shops to cobble together a half decent performing desktop rig for relatively few bucks.

 

Keep in mind that flight simulation, especially something like DCS, is always really demanding as far as PC hardware goes. It's almost a miracle of software development that ED have managed to get something like this running so well on a huge variety of consumer grade computers... If it makes you feel better, there are still some dudes on this forum that must have mortgaged a kidney for all the most costly versions of the latest and greatest gear, and they still complain about framerate drops and painfully long loading times :)

 

AD

[Shadow KT]

My rig:

 

CPU: i5 3570K @4.4Ghz - 1.16V

GPU: ASUS Direct CU II GTX560Ti 1GB

RAM: 12GBs @1333Mhz (one of the stuck is not even the same)

SSD: ADATA SX900 128GB (Windows & DCS on it)

 

This is what you call an oldish rig, not a rig with a god damn 9 series card (or even a 7 series to some of the cards). Everything with more than 2GBs makes a lot of difference. My card just doesn't have enough VRAM, not that it is not capable to handle DCS.

 

 

I get average 30-40 fps in Blue Flag on a full server. I get above 40 at some points, but never below 28-29 fps, mostly when on a busy airfield.

 

After the recent memory manager implementation, in the open beta, I load in servers a lot quicker, around a minute and something, not more than 2. This said, it still takes my computer, to load all the textures and stuff in game, the next 2-3 minutes while already in the server (which is alright, because the game doesn't crash on me)

 

If I am to leave the server and rejoin immediately, the server loads in matter of seconds

Edited May 11, 2018 by Shadow KT

[flygav]

Mine ran fine on the 1.5 but 2.5.1.16978.361 Im on thus far will only run offline, I have never been able to run multiplayer, never. It just keeps loading memory until its runs out and hangs. IDK what the problem is and I'm not ready to buy a new pc just to run this so I guess Im out for now.

[Aluminum Donkey]

Mine ran fine on the 1.5 but 2.5.1.16978.361 Im on thus far will only run offline, I have never been able to run multiplayer, never. It just keeps loading memory until its runs out and hangs. IDK what the problem is and I'm not ready to buy a new pc just to run this so I guess Im out for now.

 

How much memory does your PC have?

 

I'm asking because DCS needs a huge Windows pagefile for some reason, regardless of reported memory usage. The newest version typically uses a bit more than half of my 16GB system memory, and a bit more than half of the 8GB video ram, but it crashes if I don't have a big pagefile (20GB total pagefile size). I don't know why that is, I'm not a coder and I don't work for ED :D

 

So, you might be able to get DCS running on your box if you go into your Windows system settings and set up a large pagefile. Windows itself will only make it so large when left to System Managed, if you want a bigger one you have to set it up manually. Try setting it to 20GB, reboot your machine and see if that works.

 

AD

[Lao Fei Mao]

The constant stutter positively caused by the pagefile, most of us set it on the HDD by default, try move it into a faster SSD.

[Shadow KT]

I am guessing all of you guys are on the stable ?

[ouPhrontis]

2.5.0 and 2.5.1 getting very respectable performance at 1080p for an unusual 2009 rig with some modern-ish upgrades.

 

Settings are all on the upper limits except;

Grass; 9000m

Trees; 75%

MSAA; off (FXAA on via Nvidia panel)

 

It's a server workstation HP Z800, dual socket hexacore Xeons, I will try and get some frames-per-second measurements for the curious, but particularly RAM usage numbers (I vaguely recall seeing around 25GB used at one point, but will check).. because;

 

72GB DDR3 ECC 1333Mhz

Two X5675s at 3.04GHz for 24 cores. (DCS is probably not utilising four, let alone all these)*

GTX 1050Ti

 

I will be moving DCS onto an SSD that's mounted via PCIe (onboard controller is SATA2, so this will bypass that limitation and run at full-whack for the SSD).

 

*If you can find these old CAD machines for sale, they go cheap (I bought it for 420GBP with 16GB of ECC and two hexacores), but be warned; they have some enterprise hardware that you'll not find in your normal highstreet shop, so if anything goes phut on you; you're on your own. They are a niche machine and all the RAM (it goes upto 192GB**) and cores are really only useful for CAD or video editing etc, plus the PSU is bespoke tray mount, if that goes phut on you, then you need to find another on fleabay, or jerry-rig something else.

 

**At that ridiculous stage, one could in theory create a disk partition in RAM and have something (DCS) installed on it, though it would not survive a power-cycle

Edited May 12, 2018 by ouPhrontis
just some other musings added

[Mr_sukebe]

2.5.0 and 2.5.1 getting very respectable performance at 1080p for an unusual 2009 rig with some modern-ish upgrades.

 

Settings are all on the upper limits except;

Grass; 9000m

Trees; 75%

MSAA; off (FXAA on via Nvidia panel)

 

It's a server workstation HP Z800, dual socket hexacore Xeons, I will try and get some frames-per-second measurements for the curious, but particularly RAM usage numbers (I vaguely recall seeing around 25GB used at one point, but will check).. because;

 

72GB DDR3 ECC 1333Mhz

Two X5675s at 3.04GHz for 24 cores. (DCS is probably not utilising four, let alone all these)*

GTX 1050Ti

 

I will be moving DCS onto an SSD that's mounted via PCIe (onboard controller is SATA2, so this will bypass that limitation and run at full-whack for the SSD).

 

*If you can find these old CAD machines for sale, they go cheap (I bought it for 420GBP with 16GB of ECC and two hexacores), but be warned; they have some enterprise hardware that you'll not find in your normal highstreet shop, so if anything goes phut on you; you're on your own. They are a niche machine and all the RAM (it goes upto 192GB**) and cores are really only useful for CAD or video editing etc, plus the PSU is bespoke tray mount, if that goes phut on you, then you need to find another on fleabay, or jerry-rig something else.

 

**At that ridiculous stage, one could in theory create a disk partition in RAM and have something (DCS) installed on it, though it would not survive a power-cycle

 

 

Will be interesting to see how that rig performs with the introduction of Vulkan, which may offload more of the grunt work from your GPU to the CPUs, of which you clearly have plenty.

 

Question for yourself, have you actually checked how many cores are being used and their usage? I'd love to hear your feedback.

[ouPhrontis]

It's not utilising enough cores to warrant unparking a load of them, it'll be difficult to ascertain how many are actually being used at once using these crude tools, as typically processes cycle from one core to another, I suspect DCS' core engine is using one, and maybe one or two more for other tasks, but no more than four I reckon, so these screenshots are to be taken with a pinch of salt.

 

As you can see, in the first two I'm at sea with the Harrier carrier T/O practice mission, so I suspect that's why it's only using ~7GiB of RAM. In the third I'm over Caucasus mountains and DCS is using around 14-15GiB.

 

Behold, an olde enterprise server CAD rig running my favourite flightsim;

 

Edited May 12, 2018 by ouPhrontis
added another image

[Slap_Chop]

I just flew the F86 Ground Attack mission on 2.51 release ver with Unlimited Rockets. I can't believe how smooth

everything is on this older rig. I've been updating it over the years new video card, liquid cooler for CPU overclock

and added more RAM but wow I was just giddy. Had to watch my own replay from the

ground. Just so awsum.

 

I know that some guys are having problems that are real but as a former software developer I

know it's nice to hear when things are working OK once in a while.

 

My Specs

I5-750 CPU Clocked to 3.81 GHZ

GTX1060 GPU with 6GB Vid Ram

24 GB RAM

Regular Old Hard Disk Drive 7200 RPM (just Defragged a couple of days ago)

Win 7 Pro.

EdTracker Head Tracking

1920 X 1080 1 Monitor

Onboard Sound Chip.

X-55 Rhino HOTAS

Edited May 14, 2018 by Slap_Chop

[BlackLightning]

Well, I play DCS like every other day, even if for just a quarter of an hour per time, and every time I think that I am using 1.5 and that I won't get any updates anymore, etc., so I am tempted to click the Update button.

However, before starting a 50 GB download I'd like to read your opinions; maybe someone has the same rig and it works well.

 

Here are my specs:

 

Pre-built Asus CM6870:

The motherboard should be a poorer version of the P8H77-M PRO; reading the manual, it looks similar to what I have.

Intel Core i7 3770 @ 3.40GHz

8 GB DDR3

1 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650

AcBel HBA005-ZA2GT 350; it gives a peak of 350W for 30 seconds or 300 continously

240 GB SSD

Windows 8.1

 

 

As far as I've understood reading other people's experiences, the RAM and the GPU are likely to limit the performance.

Buying another stick of 8 GB of RAM wouldn't be too expensive, but replacing the GPU would cost way more and would also mean replacing the PSU: a better GPU needs more power than my current one.