Bad experience with F-4 so far :( Any advise to make it better?

[lwalter]

Granted I don't have a top end PC (i7-9700F@3GHz, 32 GB RAM and RTX 3070), but I can enjoy flying all my other planes in VR with decent initialization times and smooth FPS, even the most demanding like F-14, F-15E, AH-64D...

Before somebody ask, yes, I'm using DCS multi-threaded version.

Regarding settings, I'm using the default "VR" settings provided by DCS, so I would expect these are rather conservative settings.

After the very long initialization time before I can enter the F-4 cockpit and before all the textures are loaded, I have to add a good 1 to 2 minutes of slideshow with FPS averaging 10 fps. After that time, I can finally fly the F-4 with FPS oscillating between 20-40 FPS. That's OK to do some free flight, but else, I'm just sitting with a barely playable F-4 in my DCS hangar.

Hopefully, somebody here could help me find some settings to improve this situation... other than changing my PC, that would be awesome!

[Hiob]

12 minutes ago, lwalter said:

Granted I don't have a top end PC (i7-9700F@3GHz, 32 GB RAM and RTX 3070), but I can enjoy flying all my other planes in VR with decent initialization times and smooth FPS, even the most demanding like F-14, F-15E, AH-64D...

Before somebody ask, yes, I'm using DCS multi-threaded version.

Regarding settings, I'm using the default "VR" settings provided by DCS, so I would expect these are rather conservative settings.

After the very long initialization time before I can enter the F-4 cockpit and before all the textures are loaded, I have to add a good 1 to 2 minutes of slideshow with FPS averaging 10 fps. After that time, I can finally fly the F-4 with FPS oscillating between 20-40 FPS. That's OK to do some free flight, but else, I'm just sitting with a barely playable F-4 in my DCS hangar.

Hopefully, somebody here could help me find some settings to improve this situation... other than changing my PC, that would be awesome!

Only two suggestions from the top of my head:

deactivate the real time protection of your AV while playing DCS (or at least set an exception for all relevant folders).

Set up a fixed pagefile size (I‘d suggest 32GB).

[Hiob]

 Bonus idea: Make sure wake turbulence is deactivated in the game settings (can be hard on cpu)

Also check the frametime graph for what is bottlenecking you. CPU or GPU

[Harry.R]

That sounds pretty bad. My specs are a little worse than yours, i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 32GB RAM and 1070, Quest 3. I'm using the DCS 'VR' preset, and apart from the glacial wait for textures to load in on loading the aircraft in multiplayer, my experience is then usually pretty smooth (view goes a bit 'muddy' after a while). I'm using 'virtual desktop streamer' rather than a cable connection, this has improved things for me. A friendly streamer by the handle 'Hangman Glenn' gave me some great tips that got me up and running again after some frustrating times moving from the rift s to quest, looking to upgrade soon. Good luck.

[lwalter]

Thanks @Hiob. I'll try your suggestions next weekend.

@Harry.R what kind of FPS do you get, once the "glacial" wait, as you wrote, is finished?

[Harry.R]

On 9/9/2024 at 7:10 PM, lwalter said:

Thanks @Hiob. I'll try your suggestions next weekend.

@Harry.R what kind of FPS do you get, once the "glacial" wait, as you wrote, is finished?

I'm not sure, but it's playable on the AO server with occasional lag spikes not withstanding.Some days it's crystal clear and no lag, otherdays it can 'muddy' very quickly and have some 1 second lag pauses, nearly always near Kob.

[lwalter]

Nothing seemed to improve the FPS in the F-4, but now that I increased my RAM to 64 GB, things are going much better. I have good fps, as good as with other planes.

I wish Heatblur stated that 64 GB RAM was the recommended specs for using the F-4, instead of 32GB.

Now that I have 64GB, all good, but if I hadn't intended to increase my RAM, my purchase of the F-4 would have been lost, since unusable.

 

[Zabuzard]

Nothing seemed to improve the FPS in the F-4, but now that I increased my RAM to 64 GB, things are going much better. I have good fps, as good as with other planes.
I wish Heatblur stated that 64 GB RAM was the recommended specs for using the F-4, instead of 32GB.
Now that I have 64GB, all good, but if I hadn't intended to increase my RAM, my purchase of the F-4 would have been lost, since unusable.
 

Glad it works better for you now :)

64 GB arent necessary to achieve solid FPS in the Phantom. We have tested it with multiple low spec machines with generally good results. When issues happened, it was usually due to unfortunate combinations of hardware or obscure settings deep down somewhere. So its totally possible that someone with a 1070, a 10 year old CPU and 16 GB RAM runs DCS and the Phantom specifically at better FPS than someone with a "NASA machine".

Its unfortunate, but that's kinda how it is - at least in DCS. Very hard to continue improving that experience once at that point.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

During an interview with Simon a number of years ago (5-6 or so), he said that the new version of EDGE (then under development) would benefit from 64GB of RAM, so when I upgraded my PC in 2020, that’s what I got.

Flight sims are hungry beasts (I have seen DCS use 48GB of RAM on multiple occasions - that’s just 1 single application).