Help with Rig for DCS

[Abr]

Hello, I'm looking to get into DCS Hornet, especially multiplayer but my current computer isn't up to the task. What would be an ideal and affordable setup for Hornet and the upcoming Supercarrier. Price and performance and my main concerns.

 

Thanks!

[BitMaster]

Hey Abr.

 

ideal and affordable don't run together by definition, there is a problem.

 

For CPU you can come by with an Intel 9600k, AMD 3600 or any bigger CPU from Intel and AMD. ideal was a AMD 3700X or Intel 9900k, both with watercooling.

 

Boards for those run anywhere from 100€ upwards, higher priced boards offer more features and usually last longer.

 

Multiplayer needs 32GB RAM

 

GPU wise, there you could save money if you dont need all the bells and whistles there are.

A AMD 5700XT is maybe the best bang for the buck with good to very good performance at FullHD and WQHD. For 4K and VR you need something bigger and much more expensive.

A 5700XT is around 400€ +/- depending on your choice and where you live.

 

SSD is mandatory

 

Controls are your choice, anywhere from 50€ to 1000€+.

 

 

Tell us your budget and what you already have. Then you will get better answers.

[Abr]

Thanks for the speedy reply! Ideal is maybe the wrong word choice. Best compromise is probably more accurate haha.

 

I'd say my budget is $500-$800. Graphics are nice but low sliders are no deal breaker. Already have usb controls from older flight sims.

[D4niel]

Hey Abr.

 

ideal and affordable don't run together by definition, there is a problem.

 

For CPU you can come by with an Intel 9600k, AMD 3600 or any bigger CPU from Intel and AMD. ideal was a AMD 3700X or Intel 9900k, both with watercooling.

 

Boards for those run anywhere from 100€ upwards, higher priced boards offer more features and usually last longer.

 

Multiplayer needs 32GB RAM

 

GPU wise, there you could save money if you dont need all the bells and whistles there are.

A AMD 5700XT is maybe the best bang for the buck with good to very good performance at FullHD and WQHD. For 4K and VR you need something bigger and much more expensive.

A 5700XT is around 400€ +/- depending on your choice and where you live.

 

SSD is mandatory

 

Controls are your choice, anywhere from 50€ to 1000€+.

 

 

Tell us your budget and what you already have. Then you will get better answers.

Im very surprised a veteran member with a high end system in sig would say this game requires more CPU than GPU. I have an FX-3850 4.9ghz CPU, its running 16gigs of 2050mhz ram and my severe bottleneck is a single r9 390, wich is a 512bit memory bus GPU with 8gb memory. 1080p I get around 30fps over Las Vegas (up to 80fps caucasus) and despite allmost max settings, Im bleeding for that extra and crucial +0.5x SSAA (2x SSAA). The max antialiasing vs. allmost max is a huge difference. SSAA or MSAA.

 

So my CPU is chilling when I play DCS and Im currently waiting for another r9 390 to arrive.

 

That said, Im having huge problems with crossfire not working with this game, except two times it did and now I hope I'll find out if its a hardware issue with the third r9 on the way. SO: Nvidia cards seems to be the better choise and most def the popular one.

 

Ram you do need min 32gb for multiplayer. Im reaching the 16gigs on large operation missions in singleplayer. DCS has or had a memory leak that adds 200mb or so to your used ram each time you restart a mission (or maybe even just a new flight in the same mission).

 

So my experience is that this game runs on surprisingly weak CPU, but to get what it shines with, you need a killer GPU to run 60fps+. And YOU WANT max settings! Also keep in mind that the type of GPU should be high bus width and 8gb or more memory, unlike close range FPS games that do not benefit of those parameters.

 

-Slower CPU

-Large GPU

-32gb ram or first 16 and then another 16 later when you enter multiplayer scene.

-No idea of HD, but SSD's are cheap and actually even getting old already :D. Pick second hand 120gb kingstons for 10€ each and put them in a raid 0

[D4niel]

I had to verify Im not giving false info. This is a quick test. Start is game loading and then high intensity flying over Las Vegas. I guess I got my settings better set now, as its about 40-55fps actually, but the GPU vs CPU performance is well seen. I heard few times people say this game uses mostly one core... Not here.

 

GPU usage on the top, FPS on the bottom and cores in the middle:

[Sn8ke_iis]

What Bit said is in fact the case.

 

The current DCS engine is CPU limited for many graphics settings like draw distance, shadows, and AI objects. While resolution and AA settings use GPU mostly. The DCS engine is limited to 2 CPU cores and the rendering pipeline that sends draw calls to the GPU is limited to one core. If you play at 1080p and are trying to hit 120fps the CPU will most likely be your bottleneck as well as VR if you are trying to hit 90/45fps. For 1440p and 4K flatscreen the CPU will be less important as most of the current gen processors (9700K/R5 3600) can handle 60fps.

 

Your picture is very difficult to see but Windows will by default jump rapidly from core to core to prevent overheating and throttling. For DCS you want to turn off all power saving features and let your BIOS and Windows choose the fastest core in your chip. A good quiet air cooler or AIO is highly recommended if liquid cooling is outside your budget.

 

The overall percent usage of your CPU can be misleading as that is calculating from the whole chip being used as a given. You want your fastest core and GPU at close to 100% with good cooling to maximize performance and eye candy. You want the fastest single thread IPC performance you can afford. Multiple cores right now are only beneficial for background programs like TACVIEW, and streaming/recording processes.

 

For the OP. PC Parts Picker has many suggested builds for around your budget. Paul's Hardware YT channel also has some great videos for budget builds.

 

Gamer's Nexus YT does the best benchmarks these days when comparing CPU and GPUs. Just keep in mind the DCS graphic engine is unique so even other DX11 game benchmarks might not be a good indicator of performance.

[Abr]

What about an HP Pavilion:

 

HP - Gaming Desktop - Intel Core i5 - 9400F - 8GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 - 256GB SSD

 

How well would this run DCS?

Is 8GB RAM enough to run at least SP okay?

[BitMaster]

I wouldnt go that route tbh.

 

What comes to my mind was a AMD based system, B-450 Board, a 2nd gen Ryzen 2600, 16GB ( !!!) 3200MHz, 512GB SSD ( 256 is too small ), some cheap tower and a mediocrePSU ( I dont like to recommend these but money is a big issue here ). Sink all the rest in a GPU.

 

You can get that CPU for little money, same with the board, take any 3000-3200MHz 16GB kit, a tower for 45$ and a PSU for 75$,

 

We can elaborate this deeper if you can build it yourself. You could upgrade the CPU later on, a B-450 is compatible to the newest Ryzen. You must cut corners to achieve a full build with 800$. 500$ is not enough unless you get one used as a fair & great deal.

[Abr]

Not sure I would be comfortable building it on my own if that makes a difference.

[D4niel]

Your picture is very difficult to see but Windows will by default jump rapidly from core to core to prevent overheating and throttling. For DCS you want to turn off all power saving features and let your BIOS and Windows choose the fastest core in your chip. A good quiet air cooler or AIO is highly recommended if liquid cooling is outside your budget.

 

The overall percent usage of your CPU can be misleading as that is calculating from the whole chip being used as a given. You want your fastest core and GPU at close to 100% with good cooling to maximize performance and eye candy. You want the fastest single thread IPC performance you can afford. Multiple cores right now are only beneficial for background programs like TACVIEW, and streaming/recording processes.

 

1. The picture is bad, because I uploaded it here, in forum gallery and so its resized from 1080p res.

2. No overheating and not throttling. Not even close. And not using any power saving modes. Not in windows and not in bios.

3. There is no overall percentage usage present in the picture. All 8 cores ar invidually recorder. 2nd-9th graph.

4. You are right about the core count not being useful. Its a fact in many games. Most optimal CPUs for gaming are the 4 core i7 I think.

 

5. DCS uses clearly two of my cores more than 50% each and another two around 20% each. Rest of the cores are allmost idling. Im not running anything other in the background except MSI afterburner itself.

 

6. Im not arguing. I explained facts, measured my claims in case I remembered something wrong and then presented the proof document.

 

7. I remember being quite surprized some time ago when I saw the low CPU usage. In fact, I could dig out my 10-11 year old Phenom II CPU and run the game just as well as with FX-8350. It has 4 cores, same per core performance and it clocks to 4.9ghz also. So it seems the answer is: A 10 year old mid-end CPU with 4 cores would run this game fine.

[Sn8ke_iis]

1. The picture is bad, because I uploaded it here, in forum gallery and so its resized from 1080p res.

 

5. DCS uses clearly two of my cores more than 50% each and another two around 20% each. Rest of the cores are allmost idling. Im not running anything other in the background except MSI afterburner itself.

 

7. I remember being quite surprized some time ago when I saw the low CPU usage. In fact, I could dig out my 10-11 year old Phenom II CPU and run the game just as well as with FX-8350. It has 4 cores, same per core performance and it clocks to 4.9ghz also. So it seems the answer is: A 10 year old mid-end CPU with 4 cores would run this game fine.

 

I'm sorry but that is incorrect. I guess I wasn't clear. DCS only uses 2 cores. One for audio, and one for the rendering pipeline to send the draw calls to the GPU. Feel free to contact one of the Mods who does testing and they will confirm this. Showing usage in a graph doesn't change that as there is much more going on under the hood and there is no way to say that the 4 core utilization you are showing is from DCS as it is not showing application specific usage, only that it is being used. You should do a little more research on these forums before giving out incorrect technical advice as this has already been covered ad nauseam. As I said, you want the fastest single thread IPC performance CPU you can afford. Especially for draw distance, shadows, and AI objects. Even more so on MP servers. Settings like resolution and AA will be more GPU limited. You should read the readme.txt in the root folder of your install and it will cover some of these things. Appreciate you trying to help, though.

 

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

 

Your FX-8350 has about half the single thread performance as the R5 3600 and the Phenom II even less. So that is a very poor recommendation for a new build.

 

Moore's law is very real and for a simulation as demanding as DCS that unfortunately means upgrading every 2-4 years. Especially if you want to play at more than 1080p 30fps. CPU architecture and chipset bandwidth influence performance more than clockspeed. Clockspeed is just a metric of the clock cycle pulses going through the transistors of the processor and is not an accurate gauge of performance between CPUs.

 

Have fun trying to get AMD Crossfire to work in DCS. Let us know how that goes for you.

 

If you want to upload a graph that is legible you need to put it as an attachment or link to imgur or another file sharing service.

[BitMaster]

There is some sort of DX11 Multi Core usage tied into using DCS afaik. Afaik Dx11 in terms of DCS uses "up to 2" cores, so that would make 4 cores being tied into DCS processing the visiual output. It has been explained by SkateZilla in some thread, also stating that DX11 does a very poor job with that multithreading and core usage, so basically it still comes down to 1+1 for DCS.

 

TaskManager, Afterburner and other monitoring software have 2 major drawbacks, first one is that they themselves need CPU power to process, the slower your clock and the less cores you have the more you render the outcome useless, a little bit of Heisenberg there.

The second thing is resolution of CPU monitoring. The CPU's switch between cores faster than you can monitor them, even with the fastest CPUs out there. If your polling is 1sec it's more or less useless as it switches in nanoseconds, so even going up to 1000 pollings per second you would still fall behind but your Monitoring App would need considerable CPU-time to make that happen, which throws us back to my 1st concern.

 

The best is to trust the devs in this matter as they know the source code and know what is actually going on under the hood. We as end users have simply no means to measure and testify.

 

I highly doubt that an antique AMD Phenom from 10 years ago does a decent job in DCS, not even at 6, 7 or 8 GHz under LN cooling.

[DeltaMike]

^Agree with everything you said, Bit. B450 MB's are going for a good price and they are good enough if you don't plan on overclocking, which is kind of pointless for DCS on AMD anyway. Been happy enough with mine.

 

Only downside to AMD is, memory gets expensive. 32gb of RAM really makes a difference in MP and Ryzen wants fast memory, so that's a lot of $. That said, neither first gen nor second gen Ryzen was terrible in DCS, neither was 16gb in memory, so there's the option to start off cheap and upgrade later. Which is what I did

 

OP ya gotta be willing to pop open the hood, opens up a whole new world for ya

 

CPU-vs-GPU wise, I'll note for the record I'm getting by (in VR) with a four year old mined-out Vega56. All the gains have come from CPU and RAM upgrades.

[BitMaster]

I run a 1600 and 2600 in the office and love both, very reliable, easy to maintain, utmost solid builds. I know there are faster CPU's out there but for the current price of a Ryzen 2600 its hard to build a better and upgradable system with the option of also overclocking. It may not be top priority now to oc but the OP may opt in for that once the system was up and running and he gets the feeling for being his own admin and the master of his own luck, aka performance.

 

I see the point in going straight to 32GB, if money allows, I'd rather have the cheapest tower but 32GB than a nice tower and 16GB, what matters here is him having a decent DCS rig and not a shiny bling bling case with LED and USB-C front outlet. I think most could agree.

 

Abr, how much knowledge do you have about PC's and HOW MUCH TIME do you have that you could spend on some YT videos that would show you how things come together. You can order the board with an inserted CPU or even all put together with the stuff that you choose. Sure, that would add 50-100$ that you could save if you invest some time and effort to get to know the essentials. I would pay off tgroughout your future time with PC's. It's fairly hard to run a decent rig and not to dare to open the lid and work the components. I myself have to take my 1k€ GPU apart and redo the thermal compound as it sky rockets towards 65°C, heck...I hate it but I will do it in a quiet hour with some patience and a locked door after 8pm. SO can you, it's no secret how to put a board in a case, 6 -9 screws, add the PSU, 4 screws, plug in the cables, 24pin and 8 pin, plug in the CPU as shown in the manual, mount the cooler with 4 screws, add the RAM modules with gentle force, plug in the GPU and hook up the power for it too, another 8 pin and maybe also a 6pin, snug in the SSD NVMe card, 1 screw...and fire it off. As you see, it's not a myriad of things, it's a finite amount of screws and cables, some reading must be done but 1 weekend should be enough and we are always here to help you though. Have a smartphone ready to take some pics and post them with your current rig and we can see things and guide you. YOu are not the 1st and not the last one we have helped with this.

 

dare it, if we can do it, you can do it too, unless you really say, I have 2 left hands and can't tell a screwdriver from a hammer, then ..yes, it might not be for you. But if you know the tools in a toolbox, have some gentle fingers and know when to apply force and when not, it's no miracle.

 

For 800 you can get there with a DIY but not with a prebuild HP or Dell, that is very clear.

YOu could order it BTO if the cost is 50-75$ and skip a DVD, mouse and keyboard to save every penny you can. Might even use your old case ( which would somehow void contacting us, unless you'd use the smartphone for that ). YOu get the idea...what do you think ?

[MegOhm_SD]

Or wait until you save more money.

[DocSigma]

Not sure I would be comfortable building it on my own if that makes a difference.

 

Building a cpu for the first time could be a bit scary, especially when you dump your hard earned cash into the parts, but it's really pretty simple. Watch a couple of you tube vids. Once you've done it you'll never look back. The most challenging thing is being wise about the parts you choose, making sure the mem. you choose is compatible with the board you choose, etc. Take it from these guys, building is the way to go and it will net you a more powerful system at a lower price. Overclocking needs to be taken with baby steps, but just putting the system together, powering it on, and installing windows isnt as scary as it seems. Most parts pretty much pop into place and even CPU heatsinks just screw down on the socket - no more forcing down a clip worrying about putting too much pressure on the cpu - at least as far as intel is concerned - some amd sockets still use a screw/clip mechanism.

[D4niel]

I'm sorry but that is incorrect. I guess I wasn't clear. DCS only uses 2 cores. One for audio, and one for the rendering pipeline to send the draw calls to the GPU. Feel free to contact one of the Mods who does testing and they will confirm this. Showing usage in a graph doesn't change that as there is much more going on under the hood and there is no way to say that the 4 core utilization you are showing is from DCS as it is not showing application specific usage, only that it is being used. You should do a little more research on these forums before giving out incorrect technical advice as this has already been covered ad nauseam. As I said, you want the fastest single thread IPC performance CPU you can afford. Especially for draw distance, shadows, and AI objects. Even more so on MP servers. Settings like resolution and AA will be more GPU limited. You should read the readme.txt in the root folder of your install and it will cover some of these things. Appreciate you trying to help, though.

 

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

 

Your FX-8350 has about half the single thread performance as the R5 3600 and the Phenom II even less. So that is a very poor recommendation for a new build.

 

Moore's law is very real and for a simulation as demanding as DCS that unfortunately means upgrading every 2-4 years. Especially if you want to play at more than 1080p 30fps. CPU architecture and chipset bandwidth influence performance more than clockspeed. Clockspeed is just a metric of the clock cycle pulses going through the transistors of the processor and is not an accurate gauge of performance between CPUs.

 

Have fun trying to get AMD Crossfire to work in DCS. Let us know how that goes for you.

 

If you want to upload a graph that is legible you need to put it as an attachment or link to imgur or another file sharing service.

Man, at first the good quality of your troll upset me as I knew you pushed me to waste my time once more replying to your... Input. And explaining myself because you made it look like I said or meant something I did not. But then I realized you gave me a great idea about the Phenom CPU and replying to you would be fair. As opposed to what I said that it has the same single core performance as FX-8350 (not as pumpkins, cucumbers or tomatoes!), you researched that its neglibly inferior instead: 1.2 to 1.5 ratio. If only I and nobody else would believe that the graph is not fake, nor its misleading or inaccurate and that the used cores are running at 80%, then the Phenom II 965 still would do its job even in DCS!

 

This leads us to the point: Im currently preparing for a project some people might find interesting to follow and see the results. Will make a blog of progress on three forums, including DCS. Its about well performing in 2020, cheapest possible watercooling rig, featuring aluminum+plastic chinese loop (except the pump being standard) and 3x r9 390 GPUs. Not only it will be silent, but it will be inside a sleeper mATX case on ATX board and 4-6x radiators. It will have FX-8350 chip, but a perfect addition to the DCS forum would be to actually see how a Phenom II 965 works in DCS!

 

 

There is also a good chance you would get the necessary validations then.

 

Your bluff backfires, dude. If you knew why my Crossfire is not working and that it would not, then you would use the opportunity to be smart and educate me about it, instead teaching me about clock speeds not being important. Its one of the first things you learn when planning to build a first rig. Often happens when still a child. The fact that the clock speeds ARE NOT as important as some people think, in case you are not with me.

 

 

Bit: True about the polling. Witnessed that before in a game Cities Skylines. However, DCS does not stutter, so I scratch that possibility of CPU spiking to 100%. And the CPU is cool.

 

Sorry offtopic and Im out!

[Sn8ke_iis]

Man, at first the good quality of your troll upset me...

 

Nobody is trolling you. You should not be taking this personally and my posts were not intended to upset you. You just need to utilize the search feature of the forum to research these issues before you give out wrong information. This is how we learn. There isn't enough time in the day to figure this all out yourself by trial and error, which is why we share this information on forums. It's important any erroneous information gets corrected so as not to confuse new players. A lot of new players and people new to benchmarking have made the same mistakes you did and would be oblivious if not for feedback on threads like these.

 

Nobody here accused you of faking your graph. I'm not sure why somebody would do that unless they have too much time on their hands and a strange sense of humor. I suggested posting it as an attachment so we could get a better look at it to interpret if for you as it's very difficult to read even when zooming in. The fact remains that DCS uses only 2 cores and the developers and testers can confirm that. You should reread Bit's post again as he explained very well why the Afterburner's graphing does not accurately portray CPU usage or how many cores DCS uses.

 

I was genuinely interested if you could get Crossfire to work in DCS which is why I mentioned it. I am able to get SLI to work but that is due to someone very painstakingly and tediously testing SLI compatibility bits in Nvidia Inspector. I was able to find that information by using the search feature. I would never have had the time or motivation to test all those different compatibility bits myself. I'm not aware of anyone getting Crossfire to work.

 

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=201454&page=12

 

That's the thread for SLI. I don't know if AMD has an equivalent utility to test for Crossfire utilization. Good luck with your project.

[Demon_]

Edited December 27, 2019 by Demon_

[DmitriKozlowsky]

I7 or Ryzen, RTX 2060 Super or 2070 Super, 32gb of ram (16 gb min), 2560X1440 panel, 512 GB VME, SSD, or M2 system drive, and SATAIII 6Gb 1TB storage .

 

Expect 60-90 FPS with all high settings, or 120fps with medium settings. @ 2560X1440

[BitMaster]

D4niel,

 

I am utmost sure, that if I or somebody else with similar settings would change the board and CPU to accommodate an outdated AMD CPU the fps would severely suffer at those settings, online, with TS, SRS, TacView, Afterburner and maybe some other goodies running aside ( like VR ! ).

 

One drawback is DDR3, which you cannot overcome. The graphics would suffer as the CPU very likely couldnt feed the GPU at Ultimate Viewing Distance, Shadows and what not else that hammers on the CPU.

 

As Sn8ke_iis said, use the Search function and go back in time and read it up. You just can't void all those testimonials from people in here that have made that experience already.

 

In order to make your test valid, you should also include a 5GHz Intel 7th gen or newer, a AMD Ryzen 2nd or 3rd gen with fast clock speed and throw in a 1080, 1080ti or best, a 2080ti.

 

No one says you cannot play with such an old AMD. All we say with confidence is that it can run a LOT better with a faster CPU & Platform, given a 2080ti as the cornerstone as what to feed.

 

A R9.-390 GPU is easier to feed and saturate than a 5700XT, 1080ti or faster GPU.

 

Going the SLI way is pretty tough, it's not supported and may work but also throw up lots of problems. With Crossfire, which is even more rare to find, you have less ressources to pull wisdom from. SkateZilla afaik used to crossfire his AMD GPU's and it seemed to work. Given a lot patience, knowledge and CHEAP ELECTRICITY it may work under certain conditions.

 

I would never recommend CF to someone, nor would I recommend SLI. It's just borderline and may not work as intended.

 

I am not sure if I understand that correctly, 3 x R9-390, but I dont think you'd cf 3x R9's, that would be a waste of time and energy as it never scales 100%-100%-100%, the 3rd card is more or less useless unless you need some serious heating and have a board that can run 16-16-8. There are just too many things that make this look beyond reasonable means.

 

Do your tests, but to be fair, throw in a decent rig and highish settings to compare. I am sure you will see what we try to say.

[BitMaster]

 

:thumbup: You're the man !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

How on earth do you always find those clips ?

[Demon_]

https://giphy.com/categories

https://tenor.com/

https://gfycat.com/featured/reactions

http://www.gifbin.com/

[Ddaddy]

Don't forget the display if online competition is a goal. Without a quality high contrast monitor you will be at a disadvantage to those that have them and adjusted well.

 

This is a much better task manager for Win imo. Many features and answers/proves some comments here. A tool all tweakers should have.

 

http://https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

 

I use "cleanmem" for the memory leak problem. I just leave it running at startup on everything and it never messes up, just works for all memory leak programs. I've been running it a year now it's 100% transparent to PC and myself. It will help all gamers/simers imo. Go to 8:00 in for those already knowing of mem leak to get my implemented solution. Watch whole thing if you need proof of memleak/pagefile usage/lag.

 

 

So build for the display you are going to use. (1080p @60hz ... 1440p @XX.. 4k @144hz+ dictates considerable deference in hardware $ requirements)

Edited December 28, 2019 by Ddaddy
Youtube fix

[David OC]

Only the video tag will work between the YouTube brackets Ddaddy --->aj04fY9xsSE

 

 

If you want to set time just post the link

 

Edited December 28, 2019 by David OC