DCS World: Help needed

[wasted]

Hallo everyone!

 

I've spent a lot of hours in the skies of classic IL-2 (seems that after 11 years we can call it so) and doing some modding at SAS1946.com but recently decided to try DCS as it seems to be very perspective. But unfortunately I've encountered problems, and I hope that ppl here can help.

 

Situation is next:

 

Sometime ago I have downloaded DCS World and installed. Attempted to run it and I had very bad FPS, like 2 or 3. Then I've decided to try to improve it via editing graphics.cfg and options.lua. Unfortunately nothing helped, everything left as it was.

 

Eventually I've gave up and left it just lying at my hard drive for better times.

 

Then after some time I have bought another gigabyte of RAM and had 3 gbs of RAM installed. After that I have remembered that I have DCS installed and decided to give it a try.

 

But it haven't worked. I've reinstalled and this time I have installed the Direct X that came with it.

 

And surprisingly it run smooth. around 20-25 FPS in the first mission of stock campaign. I flew it a few times and decided to try to tweak it more.

 

And as you can guess after this situation came back to the first stage. I mean 2-3 FPS. I've tried everything. I've read lots of pages of forums etc, but nothing helped.

 

Maybe someone has anything to say about this?

 

here is my com specs (yeah, I know it is old, but I swear that it can run smooth :-X)

 

Intel IV 3000

gForce 7600GS

RAM 3gb

HDD 500gb

 

I hope someone has some solution for this situation

[slowhand]

what op Sys do you run?32 or 64 bit?

[D4n]

My old PC also runs current DCS on lowest settings (everything low, EVERY effect turned off!) with 10-25 fps. Core 2 Duo E6300, 1.86 GHz, 2 GB RAM, geforce 9600 GT (though your 7600 GS is reeeeally outdated... maybe get a cheap Zotac GTS 450 Eco or so... :P)

[JHzlwd]

Hi Wasted,

 

As you will see from the signature lines my system is reasonably high end yet, frame rate can be a challenge. Last year I put a lot of effort into advanced solutions such as minimizing deferred procedure call latency, hard page faults, etc., etc.

 

Here are the things that worked best:

 

(1) In "Options" Bumped screen resolution down from 2550 X 1600 to ordinary hi-def 1920 X 1080 (this is probably not an option for you). Appearance did NOT change but frame rate went up a lot.

 

(2) In "Options" turned down Clutter and Shrubs to the bare minimum for some realism.

 

(3) Chucked out some software that was getting in the way. The worst offender was Gigabyte's utility that loads with Windows. Whatever it's doing, it makes a big hit on performance. I am no longer using a Gigabyte MOBO (for other reasons). Gigabyte makes great MOBO's but for gaming, try dumping the utility from your startup queue. Some ant-virus products can hurt frame-rate too. Bit Defender has a gaming mode that's supposed minimize impact while you play and I found MS Security Essentials good too. You could try turning off whatever you have while gaming. Check for any other stuff that auto-starts but you could as easily use by starting manually. Research this carefully as you do not want to dump anything the OS really needs. A lot of software you buy auto-starts, however, and some is very intrusive.

 

(4) Here's the biggy ... I had a very fast SATA h/d but exchanged it for SSD. The system took off like I could not believe. If you go this route, get a premium SATA III unit. Not all SSD's live up to the hype. I got Sandisk "Extreme" SATA III which performs to the advertised specs. You should be able to find a 250 Gb for under $200 these days. You will never regret it. You can save cash getting a smaller SSD. Even 125 Gb is actually a lot of storage. Keep your h/d for data but have your OS and DCS etc on the SSD.

 

You could try some over-clocking but I found this did not make a lot of difference.

 

I get generally excellent frame-rate these days although it can drop a bit when flying within a couple meters of the ground, which is a seldom situation.

 

FWIW

[Yellonet]

Sadly, the only real solution to the problem is to get a new computer, a Pentium 4 has been old for a long time...