DCS Newsletter Discussion 13th October 2023 - Voice Chat | Data Link Development Report | MAD Black Shark Campaign

[BIGNEWY]

21 minutes ago, westr said:

That’s great news. I’m really looking forward to this update. I’ve spent so much £££s over the years on VR and rigs and DCS maps and modules, just want a little more performance and things looking just a little nicer. Would be great to get some VR updates. 

Performance will always depend on the hardware and settings / user preferences, you have to be careful to not bottleneck your system. Hopefully you will see improvement but it is still something to consider. 

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

16 hours ago, NRG-Vampire said:

SSS - Is that for NVidia users only, or for AMD users as well ?
TY

I had the same question, so I looked it up and it seems to be universal.

It’s supposed to add shadow quality without affecting frame rate, it just requires more memory: 

 

“Screen Space Shadows is a feature in Unity3D that calculates screen-space shadows for opaque objects affected by the main directional light and draws them in the scene.⁰ It can be used in combination with shadow maps to prevent bias and low resolution effects in the objects, improve the quality of usual shadow maps without increasing CPU and GPU overhead, and capture small details that would be exceedingly difficult to capture with traditional, non-ray traced methods. Screen Space Shadows can be implemented for objects within the 3 meters range from the camera.¹ The feature requires an additional render target, which increases the amount of memory your application requires. However, if your project uses forward rendering, screen-space shadows can benefit the runtime resource intensity.”

Edited October 19, 2023 by Raven (Elysian Angel)
Added quote

[Hiob]

Not much longer and we can try all the new candy for ourselves. I'm really looking forward to test all of it first hand!

[dburne]

20 minutes ago, Hiob said:

Not much longer and we can try all the new candy for ourselves. I'm really looking forward to test all of it first hand!

 

[westr]

1 hour ago, BIGNEWY said:

Performance will always depend on the hardware and settings / user preferences, you have to be careful to not bottleneck your system. Hopefully you will see improvement but it is still something to consider. 

It’s more the inconsistency between maps, so for example I have a preset in my settings which i find is the best compromise between looking good and smooth performance, with the reverb I find the moment it drops below 45fps the experience is not enjoyable. So maintaining 45fps is paramount. Maintaining 45fps is no problem with Normandy, Channel, Caucasus, PG, Nevada and to an extent Syria (although the draw distance with that map is off with VR, it looks blurry at distance even with high setting, I appreciate that’s not an ED remit) but the potential to add a little more anti-aliasing of some sort would be really welcome. However the same settings with Mariana’s and South Atlantic, and Sinai when flying over built up areas is completely different and is unplayable, and even if I set say the VR preset with those maps it is still unplayable. 
Adding units also really slows gameplay, I hoped MT would help with this but I found with MT it stopped the wobbling clouds and made them look a lot better but I have not noticed much improvement in performance. After about 8-9 years I’ve Just got to the point where I would like to see some performance gains with VR. 
I still love DCS though. 

[BIGNEWY]

1 minute ago, westr said:

It’s more the inconsistency between maps, so for example I have a preset in my settings which i find is the best compromise between looking good and smooth performance, with the reverb I find the moment it drops below 45fps the experience is not enjoyable. So maintaining 45fps is paramount. Maintaining 45fps is no problem with Normandy, Channel, Caucasus, PG, Nevada and to an extent Syria (although the draw distance with that map is off with VR, it looks blurry at distance even with high setting, I appreciate that’s not an ED remit) but the potential to add a little more anti-aliasing of some sort would be really welcome. However the same settings with Mariana’s and South Atlantic, and Sinai when flying over built up areas is completely different and is unplayable, and even if I set say the VR preset with those maps it is still unplayable. 
Adding units also really slows gameplay, I hoped MT would help with this but I found with MT it stopped the wobbling clouds and made them look a lot better but I have not noticed much improvement in performance. After about 8-9 years I’ve Just got to the point where I would like to see some performance gains with VR. 
I still love DCS though. 

I understand but looking at your system setup I would say your 1080Ti will be the bottleneck in VR. I do hope you see improvement, let me know once you get to try and tweak settings.

thanks

[MAXsenna]

Not much longer and we can try all the new candy for ourselves. I'm really looking forward to test all of it first hand!

Crossing my fingers for it to be ready when I get home.

Sent from my SM-A536B using Tapatalk

[Hiob]

13 minutes ago, westr said:

It’s more the inconsistency between maps, so for example I have a preset in my settings which i find is the best compromise between looking good and smooth performance, with the reverb I find the moment it drops below 45fps the experience is not enjoyable. So maintaining 45fps is paramount. Maintaining 45fps is no problem with Normandy, Channel, Caucasus, PG, Nevada and to an extent Syria (although the draw distance with that map is off with VR, it looks blurry at distance even with high setting, I appreciate that’s not an ED remit) but the potential to add a little more anti-aliasing of some sort would be really welcome. However the same settings with Mariana’s and South Atlantic, and Sinai when flying over built up areas is completely different and is unplayable, and even if I set say the VR preset with those maps it is still unplayable. 
Adding units also really slows gameplay, I hoped MT would help with this but I found with MT it stopped the wobbling clouds and made them look a lot better but I have not noticed much improvement in performance. After about 8-9 years I’ve Just got to the point where I would like to see some performance gains with VR. 
I still love DCS though. 

Some maps are just asking A LOT more than others. Both in rendering capacity and probably even worse from the VRAM. Caucasus is the map that is best suited for VR-flying performanse-wise (and by no means a bad choice. Prep it up with Bartheks Caucasus Redone and you have a beautiful map to fly in). Sinai is on the other side of the spectrum - especially at twilight over cities.

Your 1080ti (btw. best GPU to have ever existed!) is probably sufficiant for Caucasus but not anymore for the newer maps. (unless you are willing to drop the gfx fidelity)

[westr]

46 minutes ago, BIGNEWY said:

I understand but looking at your system setup I would say your 1080Ti will be the bottleneck in VR. I do hope you see improvement, let me know once you get to try and tweak settings.

thanks

Sorry I probably haven’t updated my status. I have a 

RTX 3080

i9 11900k and 64gb DDR4 

 

31 minutes ago, Hiob said:

Some maps are just asking A LOT more than others. Both in rendering capacity and probably even worse from the VRAM. Caucasus is the map that is best suited for VR-flying performanse-wise (and by no means a bad choice. Prep it up with Bartheks Caucasus Redone and you have a beautiful map to fly in). Sinai is on the other side of the spectrum - especially at twilight over cities.

Your 1080ti (btw. best GPU to have ever existed!) is probably sufficiant for Caucasus but not anymore for the newer maps. (unless you are willing to drop the gfx fidelity)

Yeah sorry that’s wrong I have a RTX 3080 but I 100% agree the mods you can download for Caucasus are incredible and take it right up there as probably the most convincing map. Just want a some of the jagged edges gone and it would look so much nicer. We shall see, I run 2x msaa, 4x and it’s too much strain on the system. 

Edited October 19, 2023 by westr

[Hiob]

6 minutes ago, westr said:

Sorry I probably haven’t updated my status. I have a 

RTX 3080

i9 11900k and 64gb DDR4 

 

Doesn't help with the VRAM though. (Not much if you have the 12GB model). But at least you can take advantage of DLSS and DLAA.

Edit: btw. I'm blessed with a 4090 by now - and still struggle with certain scenarios on certain maps (with a lot of eye-candy that is though). Where I get 120+ fps with all sliders slammed to the far right on caucasus, fps sometimes still drop to ~30 over Cairo at twilight.

Edited October 19, 2023 by Hiob

[5ephir0th]

3080 10GB you will get out of VRAM quickly, on 12GB version you will be on the edge on modules like Apache

[ngreenaway]

3090 with 24gb vram is a good one to have. It cost a mortgage payment (or it did, at the time), which stings a little tho

Edited October 19, 2023 by ngreenaway

[Hiob]

7 minutes ago, ngreenaway said:

3090 with 24gb vram is a good one to have. It cost a mortgage payment (or it did, at the time), which stings a little tho

 

Well, you can make it run on anything upwards from a, let's say, 1080....but you will have to sacrifice some of the eyecandy (talking strictly non-VR here). Funny thing is, even on lowest settings it is still a vastly better looking flight simulator than the stuff I thoroughly enjoyed in my early gaming years. We're just spoiled by now (in general, not only DCS).

The only thhing that doesn't work is, is a flawed expectation management, like slamming all sliders far right with an entry-tier GPU.

(the only exception from that, I'd say is, when performance on a set given setting degrades from one patch to another, without adding something to justify it...)

Edited October 19, 2023 by Hiob