Upgrade Suggestions

[FlankerMan]

I definitely can't afford it right now, but if I were to upgrade my PC to play DCS better, what would be your recommendations? I'm thinking going from 16 to 32GB RAM, but what about GPU (I have GTX 1660Ti right now)? Nothing RTX-level expensive, but would a GTX 1080 or AMD RX 5500XT 8GB be the way to go? And, is it even possible to upgrade the CPU (I have i5-9400F, it does fine for now)? I think my 1TB SSD will hold out for quite a while, it loads so quickly! Just a side note, will there ever be a fix to the DCS.exe problem? I can't actually play it right now. It just won't open.

[Sn8ke_iis]

Have you tried running a repair? Reverting to a previous version that you know was working? Other than that if can be difficult to diagnose without crash logs or windows dump files.

 

What motherboard do you have? If it can run a 9400F is should be able to run a 9700K/9900K. It would need to be a "Z" mb to enable overclocking capabilities.

 

As far as GPUs go I would be reluctant to buy new right now. Either go used or wait till the 3000 series are out. Typically the 3060/3070 would be the bang for buck models based on previous nomenclature conventions.

[BitMaster]

With hardware on a budget, I second Sn8ke_iis. Dont buy into GPU now that the new cards are not too far away, your 1660ti is not that bad that it would justify it.

 

What board exactly do you have, a faster CPU might help if that is the bottleneck. You know that you can find the bottleneck with MSI Afterburner ( all cores in graph ), it is either your CPU or GPU, one or the other. If your GPU is running 95+% your CPU is fast enough, if you find your GPU at 85% mostly ( way below 95+% ) it will be the CPU being too slow, again, MSI Afterburner OSD with all cores checked will show you that clearly.

 

32GB is not a bad idea, but not your main problem. In your case, wipe DCS and reinstall from scratch. You may save your inputs and put that back later but I would wipe it all, main folder + saved games and see if that helps. Clean your PC from junk, unneeded software you dont need ( anymore ), check your AV for exlusions, add DCS folder and saved games folder to that list, maybe deinstall it and use the MS Defender scanner, it's a real good scanner meanwhile, I use it too since my AVira Pro ran out in Dec `19. No need to pay and it works with DCS w/o any problems. EXE errors cry for access blockers as the cause, that's why I would deinstall your current scanner, or make very sure it's configured properly. Deinstalling wipes off all "maybe" and "could still be" kind of concerns. START CLEAN...a standard procedure in troubleshooting such problems.

 

Your CPU is 4.1GHz top speed, maybe a faster CPU could help, so tell us your board and use MSI AFterburner once it fires up again so you can tell the loads on CPU and GPU. We dont need to guess, we can judge on facts once we have them in front of us.