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Posted

Hi all. So, I scrimped and saved for years and dropped a good bit of money on what I thought would be the ultimate PC build specifically for DCSW 2.5. (See specs in my signature.) The goal was to be able to run DCS stutter free at 60+ fps with all the eye candy turned on in even the most graphically challenging areas of the maps, like flying over Las Vegas downtown at low altitude for instance. I've pretty much achieved that with the rig I built when NOT using Helios and utilizing only one screen, but with Helios running on my 27" touch screen at 1920x1080 plus the main screen at 1920x1080, everything gets skippy stuttery, even with a 1T m.2 PCIE SSD, a Titan X Pascal, 32GB of RAM and an I7-8700K. Overclocking to 5+ GHz only made it worse. *sigh* I'm beginning to think that a supercomputer won't even do it. I don't see that any of my cores are getting maxed out, and I would think that the Titan with 12GB of VRAM should handle about anything DCS could throw at it. I do turn off everything in the system tray that's not essential when running DCS, but that doesn't seem to improve things. Very discouraged at this point - I'm like, good grief! What the hell do I have to build to achieve my dream?

 

I know someone is going to say just run one screen and use the mouse to click on the controls, but I've found that TrackIR and Helios are a must for me for immersion, and I'm not really into VR. Plus, the following video illustrates pretty well what it's like when I try and use the mouse and TIR at the same time:-)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQYNvEPi9-s?version=3&start=75&end=102&autoplay=0&hl=en_US&rel=0

 

Have any of you Helios users been able to build a rig that will run two screens stutter free with the highest graphics settings? I periodically see people talk about lower frame rates of 30 or so fps, for instance, but is that a steady 30 fps without lag and stutter, or is it choppy? Sometimes I still get stutter even when maintaining 60 fps with vsynch on. I see folks discussing running 4K smoothly with very high settings, but I can't seem get two 1920x1080 screens to work for me and run smoothly unless I start trimming settings back. If any of you have been able to achieve stutter free performance with Helios running and very high settings, then any tricks or suggestions you might could share with me would be truly appreciated. Or maybe it's just not possible. Hopefully I'm just doing something fundamentally wrong that you guys might be able to help me with.

System Specs:

Win 10 x64 Pro, ASUS Maximus X Formula, i9-9900K @ 4.7 GHz, 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200 MHz, NZXT Kraken X73 AIO Cooler, Titan X Pascal GPU, EVGA Supernova 1000W P2 PSU, C: 1TB Samsung 960 Pro m.2 PCIe SSD, D: 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SATA SSD, HT Omega Claro PCIe 7.1 Sound, Denon AVR-1709 7.1 Receiver, 46" Sharp Aquos Quattron Main Screen, 27" Acer T272HL TouchScreen + Helios, TrackIR 5, ThrustMaster HOTAS Warthog, Crosswinds pedals, SimShaker

Posted (edited)

I double checked the performance again tonight since we've had a few upgrades since the last time I tested, and nothing has changed. Using one screen only, I get smooth performance even when flying in urban areas with most settings at high/extreme and TGP on. Using the same setting with two screens and Helios running, things are smooth until I fly over urban areas with lots of buildings and high poly counts, then the micro stutter gets pretty bad. Some observations were that on high settings none of my CPU cores are running much over 35%, and only one gets that high. Video memory usage is not maxed out, but I see the stutter starts when the GPU usage tops out around 97/98%. GPU temp levels out around 66C. When running on one screen, the GPU usage stays around 91/92% and performance is smooth. I can only assume that I'm not CPU bound, and that the GPU is the bottleneck. I know the 1080 ti is faster than the Titan X Pascal, but has slightly less memory, so maybe I just need to wait until the 1180s come out with the Volta architecture and HMB2, and perhaps that along with future optimizations as DCSW 2.5 is developed further will finally get us over the hump, those of us that run two screens with Helios anyway. I keep waiting and hoping that we will get there eventually. Best wishes to everyone!

Edited by GeneralDynamics

System Specs:

Win 10 x64 Pro, ASUS Maximus X Formula, i9-9900K @ 4.7 GHz, 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200 MHz, NZXT Kraken X73 AIO Cooler, Titan X Pascal GPU, EVGA Supernova 1000W P2 PSU, C: 1TB Samsung 960 Pro m.2 PCIe SSD, D: 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SATA SSD, HT Omega Claro PCIe 7.1 Sound, Denon AVR-1709 7.1 Receiver, 46" Sharp Aquos Quattron Main Screen, 27" Acer T272HL TouchScreen + Helios, TrackIR 5, ThrustMaster HOTAS Warthog, Crosswinds pedals, SimShaker

Posted

I would also check with the guy's in Home Cockpits, someone might have an idea there.

 

The only thing I can thing of that you could try is process lasso and force Helios to 1 core and let DCS have the other 5 etc. That "might" help with the stutters. I would say it's the rendering of the screens? You are asking for a lot with Helios + max settings.

i7-7700K OC @ 5Ghz | ASUS IX Hero MB | ASUS GTX 1080 Ti STRIX | 32GB Corsair 3000Mhz | Corsair H100i V2 Radiator | Samsung 960 EVO M.2 NVMe 500G SSD | Samsung 850 EVO 500G SSD | Corsair HX850i Platinum 850W | Oculus Rift | ASUS PG278Q 27-inch, 2560 x 1440, G-SYNC, 144Hz, 1ms | VKB Gunfighter Pro

Chuck's DCS Tutorial Library

Download PDF Tutorial guides to help get up to speed with aircraft quickly and also great for taking a good look at the aircraft available for DCS before purchasing. Link

Posted

Try running Helios on a different computer. Use single mode fiber and 1gigbit router and 1gb nic. Tie this all together with Thunderbolt. Make sure your mother board supports this.

 

Total price for all this should be 200.00 to 300.00. Gigabyte motherboards seem to support this protocol. Other mfg.s may work..?? Yours being Asus may or may not work.

So, you may have to build another computer using a Gigabyte MB. A bare box type, to be able to run Helios and the lan connection hardware.

 

Laz :D

Posted
Try running Helios on a different computer. Use single mode fiber and 1gigbit router and 1gb nic. Tie this all together with Thunderbolt. Make sure your mother board supports this.

 

Total price for all this should be 200.00 to 300.00. Gigabyte motherboards seem to support this protocol. Other mfg.s may work..?? Yours being Asus may or may not work.

So, you may have to build another computer using a Gigabyte MB. A bare box type, to be able to run Helios and the lan connection hardware.

 

Laz :D

 

 

 

 

Haha ...Grid-DCS

Gigabyte Aorus X570S Master - Ryzen 5900X - Gskill 64GB 3200/CL14@3600/CL14 - Sapphire  Nitro+ 7800XT - 4x Samsung 980Pro 1TB - 1x Samsung 870 Evo 1TB - 1x SanDisc 120GB SSD - Heatkiller IV - MoRa3-360LT@9x120mm Noctua F12 - Corsair AXi-1200 - TiR5-Pro - Warthog Hotas - Saitek Combat Pedals - Asus XG27ACG QHD 180Hz - Corsair K70 RGB Pro - Win11 Pro/Linux - Phanteks Evolv-X 

Posted (edited)

OK, so I guess I lied, or rather the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility that I was using to monitor processor core usage lied. I don't know what "scale" it uses, but I became suspicious of what I thought was a maximum of around 35% core usage on the DCS core. I cross checked with the Windows 10 Resource Monitor and guess what? The last core was maxing out from time to time. Grrrr… After doing some reading about power options in Windows 10, I changed the setting from "Balanced" to "Performance". I didn't think using the default of Balanced would make much difference, but changing it to Performance did seem to improve things somewhat and lessened the amount of stutter I was experiencing. This also seemed to remove the issue I had with the stutter getting worse when overclocking. I'm now running at 5.3 GHz and bought myself some more headroom on the CPU, but not enough for max settings. I also tried turning off hyperthreading, but I found I had more CPU headroom with it turned on which seems contrary to what I had read some time ago. Maybe things have changed over time in that area.

 

 

@lazduc - Thank you for the suggestion of running Helios on a separate computer. I had thought of that earlier, but if I recall the issue is that while you can send the exports to a second PC to be displayed there, there's no way to route commands (buttons, switches, etc...) from the touch screen back to the sim running on the primary PC. Is there a way to do that I'm not aware of?

 

 

@David OC - Thank you, too, for the information on Process Lasso. I might give that a try and see if I can use it to only run DCS on 4 or 5 cores and send everything else to the remaining one or two cores. That might be overkill because I thought I read somewhere that DCS only uses two cores if I'm not mistaken? Still worthy of experimentation.

 

 

The search continues, but that's the fun of it, eh?

Edited by GeneralDynamics

System Specs:

Win 10 x64 Pro, ASUS Maximus X Formula, i9-9900K @ 4.7 GHz, 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200 MHz, NZXT Kraken X73 AIO Cooler, Titan X Pascal GPU, EVGA Supernova 1000W P2 PSU, C: 1TB Samsung 960 Pro m.2 PCIe SSD, D: 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SATA SSD, HT Omega Claro PCIe 7.1 Sound, Denon AVR-1709 7.1 Receiver, 46" Sharp Aquos Quattron Main Screen, 27" Acer T272HL TouchScreen + Helios, TrackIR 5, ThrustMaster HOTAS Warthog, Crosswinds pedals, SimShaker

Posted (edited)

Just to give you some idea of where I am in terms of performance, flying the A-10C over downtown Vegas at around 1000 ft with most of downtown to my right, Helios running, TGP on, and looking straight out the right side of the cockpit as downtown rolls past, I'm getting no stutter with these settings:

 

 

Screen_180711_230859.thumb.jpg.3a598079b2fd14c3ecc6418eec3e9f6c.jpg

 

 

I get better visual quality with MSAA at 2x and SSAA at 1.5x, but unfortunately SSAA still ain't happening without stutter.

Edited by GeneralDynamics

System Specs:

Win 10 x64 Pro, ASUS Maximus X Formula, i9-9900K @ 4.7 GHz, 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200 MHz, NZXT Kraken X73 AIO Cooler, Titan X Pascal GPU, EVGA Supernova 1000W P2 PSU, C: 1TB Samsung 960 Pro m.2 PCIe SSD, D: 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SATA SSD, HT Omega Claro PCIe 7.1 Sound, Denon AVR-1709 7.1 Receiver, 46" Sharp Aquos Quattron Main Screen, 27" Acer T272HL TouchScreen + Helios, TrackIR 5, ThrustMaster HOTAS Warthog, Crosswinds pedals, SimShaker

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