Thanks for this, as a Non profit focused on DCS as a therapeutic tool for our Disabled Veterans and others, we need more sources for information to help allow all to enjoy this sim. Thanks from DCS for Disabilities
@goobernoodles thanks joi if you haven't help us with knowledge or just fly and be chatty. We also handle crisis issue so weird place. We fly we cry we laugh we sometimes need to take a brother and walk beside him as he is a bit lost. But most importantly we are kind.
Interesting. Sent you a note via the website. Not sure if you still take HW donations or not. I have a Reverb G2 and EVGA Hybrid 3080Ti that I can send your way (if you still take HW donations)
I play on a potato that I picked up in 2019 I 5 9 gen processor, over the years I upgraded my GPU to a 3060 RTX 12g of Vram the RAM to 64 gb of Ram & a 2tb ssd, pushing this to a 1080p monitor & playing on high settings. I think the resolution is key to DCS World, if you’re willing to settle with 1080p you can make magic happen. I play on multiplayer servers, Greyflag, Growling Sidewinder, smooth with no issues! -Showdown 1-1 | May
1080p is a life saver for me in VR. Instead of tweaking and settling between stability and performance, I blast at crazy framerates in buttery smooth 1080. - Guru 1-1
idk if optimization is that big of an issue if the sim is playable on a 10yo pc I for instance have played it on a laptop with rtx 2070 (1440p) and it was fine for multiplayer.
@fvhrenheit4813 i9-9900k / 2070super; which i am upgrading to a 7800x3d and 4090 right now. Quest 3. Jagged lines, aircraft disappear roughly 1 nm ahead of me. Busy areas sub-20 fps. A similar game to compare would be WarThunder - stable 70+ fps even in VR, no stutter etc. Its really DCS VR where the game shows its somewhat ugly teeth of bad optimization.
Hello. I agree with you. When I watch videos on RUclips and read comments from users who have super computers, it makes me believe that DCS is unattainable, especially for those of us who don't have enough money to buy the necessary hardware... and sometimes it demoralizes... and makes me give up or not start using this fantastic simulator. Greetings from Venezuela
There are some people in dcs who invest a huge amount of money into it, and still manage to struggle with the game. Don't listen to them. The game is somewhat more expensive (in terms of PC requirements, hardware and modules) than most of the games, but not by much
@@dindrmindr626 how does it run? I have virtually the same specs as you, except an i5 2.3Ghz and I would constantly crash loading into single player. Multiplayer I couldn't load into at all...
@@dindrmindr626 ah, my mistake. I think I first I might have tried it during 2.7, I don't fully remember but I think it wasn't great. I tried again during 2.8 and it was still pretty bad. A few months ago, I tried 2.9 and that was pretty rough as well.
My first thought when I started to watch the vid was "OMG. How is he gonna deal with the VRAM-issue in an older GPU??". The answer came in 5:04 - he didn't. You still need a boat load of VRAM if you want to run on higher settings... This is my I bought an AMD 7900 XT with 20GB of VRAM. The video was interesting to watch. I'm hoping for ED to clean up their code, improve the abstractions (like adding support for Vulcan - won't improve the graphics likely, but it'll clean up old spaghetti code for sure)
Yeah, if you want high settings there's just no way (that I've found) around the VRAM requirement. This was an exploration of minimums where lower settings are an expected compromise for the ability to get in and start flying on a budget. Thanks for watching!
7:49 Whenever I play around with the graphics settings, I also test them by landing the Tomcat on either the super carrier or Forrestal, if it's smooth there it will almost definitely be smooth in any other conditions! I started playing DCS before multithreading was available with a Ryzen 5 3600 and a Radeon RX 5600 XT, and I had a good balance between visuals and smooth gameplay at 1080p using the Forrestal test. I recently upgraded my PC, but I would be able to revert back to my old components and be able to play without complaints. Your video was great at demonstrating this! I hope many people see it and get motivated to try DCS :) Edited to correct spelling 😅
That 4770 is a legendary intel part. The technology it is based on is ancient, but it was this technology that allowed intel to dominate the market for ten years. If anything, an 11 year old i7 is multitudes better than a new 13th or 14th gen that doesn't work, suffers driver issues, has confusing recommendations for settings, runs too hot, and/or degrades rapidly from oxidization due to widespread manufacturing defects, meaning that you want AMD for newer machines, but old intel parts are known for being pretty nice. It's interesting to see that GrowlingSidewinder uses a PC identical to mine. DCS is also another good argument against raytracing; we don't need no stinkin' raytracing!
I was running DCS on an FX-8350 CPU, and GTX 1080 GPU, and it was okay at 1080p, but when the MT version came out it was literally game-changing. It was the same for X-Plane. Just being able to utilize the other cores removed a huge bottleneck that was holding the games back. I have better hardware now, but it was surprising how much that hardware could push if you were happy at 1080 or 1440.
Glad I found this video........ I've been curious as to why my NVidia GTX 970 never stuttered with Medium parameters set but NOW, suddenly even Low stutters. Back in my days on Mac, RAM upgrades gave you instant satisfaction. I've doubled RAM in Windows systems and saw no appreciable difference in performance as if it didn't need it so it just runs the same.
Just so you know, even with a much more powerful system, (3090 and 12900K) I get that thrashing and choppiness. I fixed it by bringing down the max framerate to between 60 and 80. I think you will find that if you do the same, it will eliminate the issue for you as well.
it seems to be particular aircraft for me. I have a 4070 / 5950x / 128gb ram and some aircraft DESTROY my fps.... the kiowa is a good example. I can fly around all day but its like i hit this wall where fps goes to shit.. 30 ft away from kiowa im fine, 25 feet game says nope.
I use a Ryzen9 3900x, 32 gig ram, sata SSD, RTX3060 ... My monitor is a 42 inch TV at 1080p I can play with all the pretties turned on because 95% of the time im in the KA50... I fly on multiplayer servers flying low looking up at the tree tops.
I’m running DCS and mostly fly the payware F16 with an old AMD phenom 2 Black edition CPU and RX580 video. Track IR and Thrustmaster Cougar HOTAS. It’s not at minimum settings and looks good and quite flyable after few seconds in game. Price of PC equipment doesn’t warrant a new motherboard yet.
Thanks for showing people this. I play DCS and battle of stalingrad on a GTX 1070 and an I7-6700k, sometimes at 1920x1080, and sometimes on my original Occulus Rift. I also have a decent HOTAS setup (X-52 Pro and rudder pedals), but have found Tuuvas's Xbox controller setups to actually be easier to play and dogfight with, while cutting out hours of endless control tomfoolery, so arguably you dont even need a joystick for this game (though it does help with immersion). I havent bothered to upgrade this stuff because franky, I'm a broke boi, and, I also just havent felt like it's needed yet. This game can be amazing with a tricked out super computer... But since it was created in a bygone era, it's actually most optimized on older hardware.
The most frames you lose on big maps like Syria or Afghanistan with lots of details activated and ultra seettings with hi res. There you will quickly find your old setup inadequate. Flying over the Mariannas or over Caucasus in a 2 Ship in 1080 might even run smooth on a Core2 with a GTX1050 today.
When you add the 2 letters of V and R to DCS and use a headset like the pimax crystal then even the 4090 can't keep up. It could also be that DCS isn't really optimized to take advantage of modern CPUs.
Great video 👏 Sometimes we have to turn off our FPS counters, put the Forum aside for a while and just sit in our chair and fly. I've been flying these sim since 2005 and what I've seen most are people running tu buy a top computers but who fly poorly (or not at all). On the other hand, I've seen people who couldn't afford very good equipment but who destroy the DCS skies. I confess that our DCS community is a bit toxic. "You don't use VR? Then you don't know what you're missing". "I'll only play if it's in 4K at over 200 fps". None of this is necessary to have fun. Having fun is what matters. In fact, with the internet came a lot of frustration. It gives us the feeling that we are failures and everyone else is successful. That we're the only ones who don't use VR, that we don't have a home cockpit at home. However, the reality is completely opposite. As they say in a movie... it's not the plane, but the pilot. So a top PC won't make us a good sim pilots but rather how much time we spend with our ass in the chair (just like anything in our real life). Congratulations once again for the video. 💪👏🍻😎
One problem I realize DCS has compared to typical games is its sandbox nature which allows players to build their own missions. It’s always going to be possible to build something bigger than your machine can handle. Especially if you’re using VR. And a mission that was made three years ago and strained your hardware even then won’t be as playable on the current version of the game with all its further improvements.
On a i7 4790K and GTX 1070 DCS runs very well. It runs with 60fps, twice as much as MSFS and up to 3 times as much as X-Plane 12. The reason is that many parts of DCS are ancient and already ran on Pentium IVs and Athlon XPs, the code is really fast for todays standards. What does make is stutter is mission with many units in them, units seem much less optimized than terrain.
First time viewer, have been into DCS since 2022, got a rig in 2023 and now currently upgrading due to Alienware’s bad liquid cooler design on the r14 Ryzen. At first I thought about moving the ssd’s to a new build, but this video opened my eyes. I’m going to just add a 240 aio, upgrade from a 5800x to 5800x3d (since DCS now does multithreading and my 5800x got crispy), AW 3090 (just to jump from 10gb AW 3080 to 24gb vram), and a 1k power supply. Yes, it’ll be about as high as you can get for an AM4/DDR4 combo. Also, you got a new subscriber🎉
@@takeoffwithjakesoft thanks! I’m not much on subbing on the first time seeing a channel, but the audhd in me truly enjoyed the structure of your videos.
I think it's worth mentioning that you want to have enough storage. DCS is big, especially when you start getting a bunch of modules and maps. A fast SSD will help cut load times down. I know SSDs have been the standard for a while now, but it's worth mentioning.
I'm able to play "light" training missions no problem just using a 5600G with integrated graphics. It's all low settings at 1080p, but does pretty well. It never gets 60 FPS. But, it doesn't usually drop below 30 either. The hardware bar for DCS is actually fairly low. Just need a HOTAS.
I actually dont agree here, because the mission complexity is actually a majority of problems with DCS performance, you case only applies if you want to fly simple missions with under 20-30 AI units max. Try to go for more bigger MP game or any of the community attempts of dynamic campaigns and the DCS's optimalization and outright AI scaling issues will pop-up when you try to go over 40+ units OR with ground units movement and ground units radars even much sooner. DCS has a big problem, and historical reenforced, AI scaling issue on that old engine that only gets worse with DCS updates (even multithreathing, all AI and game simulation is still on single core). (bragging warning as now switching to an ex DCS mission maker trauma since your video implied how good this DCS running old engine is): I for one, also speaking as mission maker that got burned by ED's forever breaking of backwards compatibility, would rather have 2-3 year iterations of DCS (e.g. imagine MS FlightSim 2020 vs MS FlightSim 2024) with stable scripting codes between iterations much more than this "always half-broken" and "forever non-scalable" engine that keeps us forcing to follow whatever ED releases. After some years I realized I am spending most of my time reparing my old missions as ED decides at random that some scripts/triggers/etc suddenly do something else while ED dedicated servers still need periodic reboots in 3-4 hours to behave correctly. I exited DCS simply due to the release model ED decided to follow that is soon outright going to hit a wall of being unmaintanable, just like the recent F15/M2000 Razbam fiasco proved.
This video is really targeted at beginners. The point I was trying to make is that if you're just starting out, you can jump in and start learning the procedures, systems, basic airman-ship, and combat tactics with a modest setup. As you have described yourself, you don't fit into this category and so of course you'll have a different perspective. I'm NOT saying that that DCS doesn't have problems or that better hardware can't give a better experience.
@@takeoffwithjakesoft yeah, but on this point DCS badly needs a competition, because I for one no longer even am asking friends to come and try DCS because I know the "endgame" in DCS is just terrible. So why even start. DCS on this point became a buttons simulator and I belong to the camp with Enigma's quote: "DCS has lot of buttons to push, but nothing to achieve with them". Dynamic campaign is now "in progress" for freaking 13 years!! Stability of scripting for mission makers was an issue 10 years ago and was never solved with ED's release model. So on this point, I am pointing begineers to Il2/WarThunder/VTOL VR/BMS to get feet wet with flight sims, .... and to actually get a better gameplay competetive flights. DCS only has those buttons ... not much else. PS: And don't get me started on the dogfighting AI in DCS that has no problem to start rate fighting inside mig21 or just randomly hit the ground when fighting you. Another area where DCS is just sub-part to most of competition.
Up until a couple years ago, I ran DCS on a then 10yo i7-920 with a 750ti video card &16GB RAM on a 45" 1080P TV with no issues. In 1080p, you aren't really going to even notice the difference between low and high settings. But I do recommend at least 16GB RAM and an SSD. Frankly, I still have most of the eye candy turned off, and don't see much of a difference in 4K, other than a huge improvement in frame rate. IMO, most of the graphics bells and whistles just waste cycles and do little to nothing to improve graphics quality. There is a bug that's been in the game from day one that newcomers need to know about. Water is the layer that the world is built on, and your computer is going to be processing the water even when you can't see it. Always set water to "low" to boost frame rate unless you have a pretty high end rig and just *have* to see tiny wave caps from 20-30K feet!
That’s debatable. BMS is imo a more accurate sim. The graphics are a bit dated and the selection of only 2 aircraft pales in comparison to DCS, but the environment is much more immersive.
100% true. Keep in mind the advertised update coming to use multithreading should help performance with newer CPU's. BUT that update doesn't upgrade graphics at this time. To be fair, imo the graphics are fine for what it is and are aging well. The game from a nerd stand point is amazing for it's age what they did back then. Better or upgraded engine would help with player/asset count and better ground detailing more than sky, clouds, weather, and high altitude. The Multithread should help with player count as the server should be able to keep track of assets better/faster. Watching the Grim Reapers and the scenarios that has been a huge limit for the amazing content they put out.
I have used VR with DCS since its start, and the amount of RAM and GPU power it consumes these days is high (38 GB RAM if hosting a server), with 10 GB GPU in VR (even with 3080 ti, and it struggles in rendering scenes). DCS is less attractive without VR. It is a highly accurate flight sim, missing the g-force metal and plane turn rate tweaks. I used the SU at the start, a game-like sim, and now I'm using the fully simulated fleet like the F18, A10, F16, etc.
Excellent video and just shows you don't need top shelf gear to get good playability. The same applies to FS2020, where you get less and less benefit as you go towards top shelf components. Perhaps FS2024 will be written to make use of more CPU cores etc...here's hoping. For the vast majority of folk however, it's not only DCS they play (obviously), thus they purchase the best components to cover other games that do benefit from this, and, try to build in headroom for even more demanding games in the future. The sane amongst us realise the benefits of sensible purchasing then holding onto components for as long as possible.
Code can easily be complied into a much newer compiler decode/encoding system. Since DCS is simply a flight simulation that takes tabulate information a makes it graphical. It may take a little more work and understanding however why fix when it works. Some of the encapsulated coding still works since it is still 0s and 1s.
I’ve been playing DCS on a Lenovo Legion Y laptop since 2020 without any issues. My specs are i7 9750, 1660Ti, 32 GM RAM, 1 TB M2 ssd. At mostly high/medium settings and optimization at 1080p, I get very decent FPS in the mid 70s/upper 60s even in Multiplayer. Only thing I miss out on is DLSS. FSR creates a lot of ghosting so no point using it. Otherwise, it’s a pretty decent experience on a modest rig.
I have a very mediocre system (Ryzen 5 5500, AMD RX 6700 TR) and it runs DCS great on an Ultrawide monitor. Its really nice, but I've into VR now and just can't play without it. Maybe its just the limitation of my cheap Quest 2, but I have to dumb down the graphic a lot and put up with a lot of aliasing and such when I play, especially MP. Would like to see you do a similar project on VR.
This is so true. I played for the longest time on a i7 7700 with a 1070 and it would do quite well at 1080p on multiplayer servers. The best thing I ever did for performance was moving dcs to its own nvme ssd. You don’t have to have the newest fanciest stuff to play dcs. Track ir is nice though.
Well, I still have 16G RAM and and a GTX 970 card, and I will tell you that I run DCS fine - with the notable exception of the most recent 2 maps, Afghanistan and Kola.
I run DCS on 1080 p with Ryzen 7 1700 and GTX 1070 with 32 g RAM. Runs very smooth in SP. In MP though it sometimes gets choppy but the issue was neither the cpu nor the gpu it was RAM, so I upgraded RAM from 32 to 64 and now it works like charm
Hey, Thanks for the video, I was thinking that my "Gaming" system I bought a few years back was no longer going to cut it, I saw the PI VR headset and got depressed, now with your "review" I see that my Radeon 6700XT is just fine for me.
I'm using a gtx 1080 and a Ryzen 5 5500, both of which you can get very cheaply in used condition. It's capable of running something between medium and high settings without problems in 1440p and can be overclocked/undervolted a bit as well. I tested a 2080 for about half a year and this was capable of high settings already, but the difference is actually not that great. Unless you want to play in 4K or VR, you don't need something special. I recommend 32GB of RAM, even if it's cheap. All in all my hardware (including HOTAS, monitor, head tracking) cost me about 700€. I bought most of it used from ebay etc.
I have lots of fun on DCS, have to keep myself away from most PvP servers but I'm able to take the most that I want from it. And that's on an i7 7700HQ, Nvidia 1050ti and 16Gb of RAM
I have an i5 9th gen and a 2060 super, going back 2-3 years I could only play solo (mp servers were just too demanding) cut to now, exactly the same rig and I can happily play in multiplayer servers with 20-40 people all at the same area with little to no issues!
Pancake mode (Monitor) 1080p, you can get away with entry level stuff Beer goggles (VR) you're gonna prefer 2080 level and up for entry (with lower specced VR sets slowly phasing out, the upgrades tend to ask more and more) I was doing alright with HP Reverb and 3060ti/8600K, Multiplayer around 35 fps at low-mid level eyecandy, with OpenXR helping out in resolution and foveated rendering What DCS loves though, is RAM having stutters, I found my total system memory requirement, running DCS with side-programs, to be 56gb (24gb than I had installed) first thing I did was dedicate an SSD drive for a 100gb pagefile, it helped, next I did was simply upgrade to 64gb. This relieved me from any stutters
Actually your correct for the most part but if you dive into the specs of a Ryzen 7 vs modern Ryzen 9 the Ryzen 9 has better read write and overall computing power per single core... DCS is optimized for Dual core cpu's.. So When building dont look at the amount of cores look at the computing power of the actual cpu in single core and dual core processing ! When doing that you will find even modern cpu's actually out do the old.. So yes it is better overall using modern CPU and GPU. I am a hardcore simmer and when i built my new setup with Dcs in mind i found this info i shared above !
I have a 1660 super and a 5 2600 and dcs runs well. I play on high/max graphics and even high fidelity models run well and i can expect to get constant 165fps with fc3 planes. Ed has improved the framerate a lot
I would also say that the core engine and renderer in DCS is optimized fairly well. But additional eye candy that ED likes to add could often completely ruin the performance
It is totally playable on older pc´s, i am on laptop with ryzen 5 4600h, rtx 2060 with 6gb vram and 16gb ram and it is really good even at 1440p, dlss on balanced and low-medium settings. Just go a fly. Of course you will not be able play biger missions with that ram, but for most of servers at least in my experience is that performance enough ;)
This is true still today. Actually bringing in the MT version gave me even more fps. :) Playing DAILY with not even so bad graphics (just a bit under high settings though msaa i have even higher :P) even with my older GTX 960 4gb! OFC that has been a high end gpu but 10 years ago... Just saying: DCS scales very well, and yes you get easily wrong picture from big content makers computers. My friend is working among irl flight sims and tipped me, that you dont need more than 24 fps to flight sim. Its so immersive head gets used even to lover framerates. (i5 haswell 4960k+20 gb ddr3 + SATA 3 SSD.. so I dont even have m.2 and still dcs has better frame rate lately in every upgrade :) When motor is old, they know how to tune it. What is not talked enough is that if one seriously is going on with dcs and buys many modules one NEEDS huge ssd space. So I would start there: get gaming computer x, no matter what as long it is gaming computer with gpu that has been good since 10-0 years and get big solid state drive. DCS scales itself pretty nicely to GPU you have. More never the better it looks and runs, many games just runs better, but dcs is very good driving different kidn of filters / specs in gpu timeline. It doesnt brake or look bad without something, it just looks better with something. So if you have 200gigs of free ssd space for starters, just do it. My friend even plays fc3 planes with gamepad in his cough THOUGH ofc he has experience among em with hotas also, but still. It doesnt need 12k cockpit model with breathable oxygen masks and radios and spacesuits. And oh. I before played with lower settings ~60fps but after tried higher, after that tip my friend gave me, I played mouth open for about 2 months before I even remembered "oh yeah my frame rate has dropped to 30 with these new settings" but DCS had came some overwhelming experience with em, I never changed em back to those older settings. My tip is just try it, you will see that even 19fps goes if it doesnt freeze from time to time. IRL sims many have pretty low fps, as they tend to save their calculations to something more important. AND it really is enough to go just over that magic 24, it just works different ways in ones brains than lets say some shooting game or mmorpg. In sim one usually also has time / anything really isnt about 0,000000001 secs react times like with CS etc.. :) DCS goes well with older computer, as long as you have SSD space and "have been good since some years" gpu and over 16gbs ram
With regard to the 1660, the 'silicon shortage' units of 2020-2021 have GDDR5 RAM made in the GDDR6 fabs, and as a result the RAM can be *ludicrously* overclocked to something like 180-190% over stock. the GPU itself can accept 125-150% over stock too - and DCS running on an overclocked GPU in that configuration with little to no performance shortfalls. I do have an RX 6700 XT 12GB these days, and it is the performance bargain most ideal for DCS, from experience.
I have a 5800x and a 3070. 32gigs of 3200. I run DCS almost maxed out in 4k. I do turn off features that really aren't that noticeable anyway. I just pre-ordered a Quest 3S and plan to use VR with it.
i saw the biggest difference when version 2.9 came out. don't forget to try the multithreaded version depending on your cpu you could be leaving some performance on the table by not using it
I find that there are certain maps, certain maps and certain missions that might give you issues, just do not full up the mission with a lot of stuff you do not even need in the mission
as someone who still used (and sim's) an old rig, dcs has had its ups n downs with performance, but for me the lag is low speed over terrain where it gets ordinary. 32gb ddr3 intel i7 2600K (yes 2600K) evga gtx 970 samsung evo 1tb ssd. asus maximus gene-z
I’m running a Asus MB from 15 yrs ago with a 2600k I7, Gtx 1660 and 32 big ddr3. Actually runs pretty well unless you really load up a complex mission.
I play on triple screen with 11520x2160 and a powerful graphics card is necessary. Also, the RTX series with DLSS is a huge boost. It comes down to resolution. How many pixels are you crunching on a screen. So, yes, a RTX is necessary if a person wants the crisp detailed graphics. It's 2024 and the RTX 2050 is on the way. It's time for people to upgrade from the GTX cards. Games no longer rely on raw power but are using better code and A.I. to enhance graphics. You won't get those enhancements on a GTX card. I would like to point out that all game engines are old. They upgrade them overtime, making them more powerful and capable. Most engines are modular, allowing the game logic, graphics, sound and many other components to be upgraded or replaced as time goes on, individually. It's also why DCS is now capable of multithreading and Nvidia's latest DLSS features. DCS will be upgrading to Vulcan because of this as well. So, saying it's an old game engine shows that many don't understand how game engines work or how they progress into newer versions. Very few engines are created from scratch anymore.
Really well made analysis! I too have Problems with dcs since the latest updates. I stutters every 3 seconds massiveley. I have everything turned to mid and now a mission with 5 Aircraft and 10 ground units on caucausus isnt even playable because of the stutters. Never had those problems at the beginning of the year. My rig is: RTX2080ti, i9900k, 32gb RAM. What are your thougts?
I was running it just fine on a 16 gig i7 rig w/ a 970 gtx. I'm on a 64 gig i9 w/ a 3080 rtx, and the difference is hardly noticeable. Yes, I know everybody has a 4090 these days, but I doubt that would even be noticeable either except in very specific situations (streamers, recorders, etc.).
1080p and 1440p are easy with an older system. Try playing in VR, though-there's not enough GPU power for it. You need at least 72 fps (or 45 if you can handle frame generation; I can't), but 90 fps is even better. I'm a 3080 Ti user, and I still have to make many compromises with the game's graphical settings in VR. On a 3440x1440p flat screen, I can max out everything with a locked 144 fps.
I play on laptop with a 2070. I find this game depends mostly on the server. If i load into a server with 30+ aircraft all taking off or manouvering around me its unplayable. But under 20 aircraft doing missions is no problem. Try your rig on an aerobatic server that's almost full, and you'll see.
Im playing DCS on i5 9600k 4.6ghz boost GTX 1660Ti 6GB 32GB DDR4 MSI Z390-A Pro SSD 970 evo plus so a little better then your test rig and it runs great, im usually flying on full mp servers with fps between 60-90 fps on 2k with mixed settings like lower tree view range and lower anti alising to make it run smooth.
What about the incredibly large disk space.. Don’t get me wrong, dcs is a fantastic game, but I think eagle dynamics should at least consider optimizing the game and maybe even move on to work with newer tech..
I think it's a bit like how most pro-gamers seem to prefer a 27 inch screen because it's less real-estate to navigate with the mouse (i.e. faster and easier on the wrist). It's easy to get caught up in the "what looks absolutely amazing" vs what's practical and more effective ...
I think you might want to make sure you dont have a damaged CPU as well. The Intel micro coding issue was greatly exacerbated by DCS gameplay. Make sure your CPU wasnt one of those effected. Im getting my RMA now.
Doesn't DCS MT (Multi-Threading) now use multiple cores? I tried it and I think it made everything much smoother. Also I used to run DCS on some horrible old hardware when Black Shark came out, I think I had a Pentium 4 and 2GB of RAM....if that. Sure it was clunky but playable and I soon upgraded to a world of difference but I don't think the bare bones of the game have got that much more complicated since then.
I hope they will change entire graphics engine someday and fix that SPOTTING! In War Thunder, BMS spotting isnt a problem but in this still cant see plane from mile away properly.
The only reason I need to upgrade my PC (I have almost the exact setup you do, just with 32 gigs of ram and a ryzen 5 5700G) is because I play DCS in VR, and on servers like 4ya with millions of assets, it stutters a bit and loads slow. When I play flatscreen I can run DCS at essentially max graphics no problem
Nice mythbusting! Yeah too many people are convinced DCS requires a monster machine, it just doesn’t. The people who have trouble are trying to run VR with the settings turned up too high or they’ve done something to screw up their rig with some crazy under the hood tweaking. There are even these “experts” who will tell people on the forums that it’s impossible to build a machine that can even run the game well which is just baloney.
Hi - I don't play play/own DCS but am a hardware nerd and always wondered about this game requirements. Thanks for giving me a basic idea. Would have been interesting to see what happens when you disable HT (hyperthreading). Many popular game deliver decent/playable performance with these old i7s (4c 8t) but downgrading to i5 (4c 4t) often times leads to a stutter fest.
I run DCS on a 9th-gen i5 laptop with an RTX 2060 and 32GB of RAM, usually on high settings. Occasionally, an update will improve performance, but other times it causes the game to run poorly. If you watch my videos, you'll see how DCS performs on a laptop and how it has taught me to keep my sanity over the years, haha.
Just don't try to run it in VR. My system isn't ultra high end, but I'd call it very much adequate for flight-sims. i7-14700KF, 32 GB of RAM, RTX 4070 Super, games installed on fast M.2 SSDs and I just upgraded to a Quest 3 for VR. For comparison: I had performance issues with the Reverb G2 I used before, but with the Q3, IL-2 VR now runs very reliably/stable and with quite a few bells and whistles turned on - even in busy SP career-missions which, AFAIK, are probably the most demanding scenario in that title. I can run slightly above medium settings at 90 Hz, high-ish settings at 80 Hz (currently my go-to mode) and high to very high settings in 72 Hz. And, if anything, multiplayer seems to run better than SP career, but I don't fly a lot of MP, so I'm not 100% on that. DCS OTOH runs great on my monitor, even with very high settings and all that enabled - and even SP VR runs pretty well at 1.4x PD. At least on the Caucasus map as that's the only one I own. But as soon as I try VR MP with the same settings that work perfectly fine in SP VR, everything turns to crap. And that's with DLSS enabled and set to "Performance" and a lot of detail-settings turned to "very low indeed". Doesn't seem to matter what I do or how stable the game seems to run after I spawn into the world. After a while, things will start to get jerky, FPS will start to jitter around for no apparent reason and God help me if I decide to change servers without re-starting the whole game. And that's with me on empty servers with a ping of under 20ms. I do run OpenComposite/OpenXR and I did try starting DCS in both OpenXR- and OculusVR-modes - didn't seem to make a difference. Slight caveat: My last few missions/tweaking sessions were all done in the AH-64 and I'm pretty sure the nature of helicopter flight at tree-top level makes for different challenges on the engine and hardware than flying around in an F-18 at 30,000 ft. The only thing that makes me feel a little less worried about my setup/hardware is that fact that I keep finding examples of folks running RTX 4090s (and systems to match) having to drop their refresh-rate to 72 Hz (or whatever lowest setting their head-sets have) *and* to lower their in-game settings. Given the power of the 4090, this seems to point to some sort of sub-par optimization on the part of DCS. At least when you try to fly MP in VR. Plus with the latest downgrades in settings that I made, my GPU only gets up to 80 to 85% usage - the CPU hovers around 40% all the time and temps look totally fine on both. By contrast, IL-2's settings can push my GPU to well above 90% but there are no jerky stutters or anything like that. Even if the framerate drops in very busy scenes, I don't really notice it while flying - only when I happen to record a mission and then review the FPS-counter later will I see those "mini-drops".
As a low spec gamer for many years, I keep seeing people calling 60fps as unplayable. I have to disagree. I play a fair amount of flight sims, many of them fairly old, on a very mid PC. I can play Elite Dangerous or MSFS 2020 on a 1080 monitor at 60fps all day and never miss a frame with a GTX1660 super. Yeah, 144Khz looks pretty smooth, but is it _required?_ I don't think so. I don't think human eyes are that fast, I may be wrong, but humans have pretty slow eyes in the animal world. Sometimes I think gamers can get a little over impressed by what something _should_ look like. Kinda the way Hi Fi aficionados get over music media and hardware. They'll swear that a recording on vinyl is "Just Better" than a CD, then get taken down a few pegs when the vinyl is exactly the same as the CD on a spectrum analyzer, if not a little worse, because the vinyl record was made with a CD master. I think we fool ourselves just a little bit into thinking something _is_ better just because we paid more for it and we think it should be.
I mean it can be played with quite old stuff. I run my hp reverb g2 on a 1070 that is from 2017 I think. The problem is that compared to something like il2 I don’t think most dcs servers get a feel of real missions if they aren’t pre planned massive missions. It’s just people flying around alone most of the time and just try to shoot others down so to enjoy dcs more I want the better quality because if you have all those buttons in the cockpit I want to be a lie to use them
GPU :GTX 1060 CPU :AMD FX 8350 8 Core RAM: DDR3 2x8 GB Mostly 20-30FPS everywhere but less stutters i feel like. (Med Settings i think) ( in my opinion this is still playable but i wish i could get better stuff)
I run DCS on a 12700kf, MSI z690pro a WiFi DDR5 MoBo, 32gigs of 4800mhz ram, EVGA 3060ti FTW3 Ultra Gaming, still get stutters here and there while loading on the ground, but I run at high graphics, on a 1080p 75hz monitor, and keep a pretty solid 75 fps
I got me a custom built game rig that set me back $8k. Not the highest available but respectable. So I am pretty happy with overall performance. I want more emphasis on AI behavior than eye candy. Especially with Combined Arms. And basic scripts like CAP and Engage. A 2 ship CAP of Tomcats with Phoenix’s and when they detect an enemy approaching the fleet, one goes from 30k feet to the deck and the other turns 90 degrees. The first gets to the deck then hits ABs to get back up to 30k feet. Eventually it gets bingo fuel and lands at an enemy base, not the carrier it took off from. Stupid shit like that drives mission planners nuts. Fix your shit ED!
You don’t even need high specs for VR. You could run DCS in VR on a 4790k and a GTX 1080. You’d probably have to stick to the Caucasus map and not record your gameplay. DCS doesn’t scale well in VR with hardware upgrades and it’s really disappointing for me, but good news to someone on a budget.
You don't even need a dGPU to run DCS. A recent, fast mobile APU with a good iGPU like the Ryzen AI HX 370 with Radeon 890M could likely run DCS well at 1080p at lower settings nowadays.
I have the new top of the range 14th gen pc and have a lot of problems running dcs with and without vr DCS is the only game I have problems with stuttering and freezing its unplayable I’ve given up trying to fix it
e-Cores are the reason. Try to disable the e-cores in Bios just once to see the result! Don't worry, you can simply change them back on later. There are programs for disabling them via software when you want to play dcs and then switch them back on. But to test it - Disabling the e-cores is the easyest way. DCS has a problem with the task sceduler on processors with Power and Efficiency Cores. I heard it is better on Win11 but I wouldn't change to W11 if you'd hold a gun to my head.
Thanks for this, as a Non profit focused on DCS as a therapeutic tool for our Disabled Veterans and others, we need more sources for information to help allow all to enjoy this sim. Thanks from DCS for Disabilities
That's a really, really cool idea for an organization. Kudos.
@goobernoodles thanks joi if you haven't help us with knowledge or just fly and be chatty. We also handle crisis issue so weird place. We fly we cry we laugh we sometimes need to take a brother and walk beside him as he is a bit lost. But most importantly we are kind.
Interesting. Sent you a note via the website. Not sure if you still take HW donations or not. I have a Reverb G2 and EVGA Hybrid 3080Ti that I can send your way (if you still take HW donations)
@hansangb I still dint know hiw to use the website features as we are building it and I'm not a professional developer LOL
I play on a potato that I picked up in 2019 I 5 9 gen processor, over the years I upgraded my GPU to a 3060 RTX 12g of Vram the RAM to 64 gb of Ram & a 2tb ssd, pushing this to a 1080p monitor & playing on high settings. I think the resolution is key to DCS World, if you’re willing to settle with 1080p you can make magic happen.
I play on multiplayer servers, Greyflag, Growling Sidewinder, smooth with no issues! -Showdown 1-1 | May
That makes a lot of sense actually, and I would agree with everything you just stated
1080p is a life saver for me in VR. Instead of tweaking and settling between stability and performance, I blast at crazy framerates in buttery smooth 1080. - Guru 1-1
MAY!! NO WAYYY the goat on gsoc
it stutters for me n thts it really only in certain servers tho
Almost anything will run smoothly if you're willing to downgrade to 1080.
Address the elephant in the room: VR and optimization.
He appears to be targeting entry level players, VR is a big ticket item.
@@belevezero2279 VR is the cost of a used quest 2. Its cheap as chips.
idk if optimization is that big of an issue if the sim is playable on a 10yo pc
I for instance have played it on a laptop with rtx 2070 (1440p) and it was fine for multiplayer.
I dont get why people have issues with VR. Its fairly easy to configure if you do some research and know anything about VR.
@fvhrenheit4813 i9-9900k / 2070super; which i am upgrading to a 7800x3d and 4090 right now. Quest 3. Jagged lines, aircraft disappear roughly 1 nm ahead of me. Busy areas sub-20 fps.
A similar game to compare would be WarThunder - stable 70+ fps even in VR, no stutter etc.
Its really DCS VR where the game shows its somewhat ugly teeth of bad optimization.
Hello. I agree with you. When I watch videos on RUclips and read comments from users who have super computers, it makes me believe that DCS is unattainable, especially for those of us who don't have enough money to buy the necessary hardware... and sometimes it demoralizes... and makes me give up or not start using this fantastic simulator. Greetings from Venezuela
I feel MSFS 2020 is more this realm than DCS.
There are some people in dcs who invest a huge amount of money into it, and still manage to struggle with the game. Don't listen to them. The game is somewhat more expensive (in terms of PC requirements, hardware and modules) than most of the games, but not by much
Back when DCS was just the A-10C and Ka-50, I played on an i5-2500K, 16 GB RAM, and a GeForce GTX 560 Ti.
@@dindrmindr626 how does it run? I have virtually the same specs as you, except an i5 2.3Ghz and I would constantly crash loading into single player. Multiplayer I couldn't load into at all...
@@dindrmindr626 before you upgraded
@@dindrmindr626 ah, my mistake. I think I first I might have tried it during 2.7, I don't fully remember but I think it wasn't great. I tried again during 2.8 and it was still pretty bad. A few months ago, I tried 2.9 and that was pretty rough as well.
This is GOLD, particularly for new DCS pilots.
My first thought when I started to watch the vid was "OMG. How is he gonna deal with the VRAM-issue in an older GPU??". The answer came in 5:04 - he didn't. You still need a boat load of VRAM if you want to run on higher settings... This is my I bought an AMD 7900 XT with 20GB of VRAM. The video was interesting to watch. I'm hoping for ED to clean up their code, improve the abstractions (like adding support for Vulcan - won't improve the graphics likely, but it'll clean up old spaghetti code for sure)
Yeah, if you want high settings there's just no way (that I've found) around the VRAM requirement. This was an exploration of minimums where lower settings are an expected compromise for the ability to get in and start flying on a budget. Thanks for watching!
7:49 Whenever I play around with the graphics settings, I also test them by landing the Tomcat on either the super carrier or Forrestal, if it's smooth there it will almost definitely be smooth in any other conditions!
I started playing DCS before multithreading was available with a Ryzen 5 3600 and a Radeon RX 5600 XT, and I had a good balance between visuals and smooth gameplay at 1080p using the Forrestal test. I recently upgraded my PC, but I would be able to revert back to my old components and be able to play without complaints.
Your video was great at demonstrating this! I hope many people see it and get motivated to try DCS :)
Edited to correct spelling 😅
how much frames in multiplayer?
I honestly miss the old 1.5 graphics, it had a vibe to it
Except for the air explosions, they were such an immersion killer.
That 4770 is a legendary intel part. The technology it is based on is ancient, but it was this technology that allowed intel to dominate the market for ten years. If anything, an 11 year old i7 is multitudes better than a new 13th or 14th gen that doesn't work, suffers driver issues, has confusing recommendations for settings, runs too hot, and/or degrades rapidly from oxidization due to widespread manufacturing defects, meaning that you want AMD for newer machines, but old intel parts are known for being pretty nice.
It's interesting to see that GrowlingSidewinder uses a PC identical to mine. DCS is also another good argument against raytracing; we don't need no stinkin' raytracing!
Yeah, that i7 4770k has had incredible longevity.
I was running DCS on an FX-8350 CPU, and GTX 1080 GPU, and it was okay at 1080p, but when the MT version came out it was literally game-changing. It was the same for X-Plane.
Just being able to utilize the other cores removed a huge bottleneck that was holding the games back.
I have better hardware now, but it was surprising how much that hardware could push if you were happy at 1080 or 1440.
same vibe, i play simulation games in a FX-6300+GTX1060
Glad I found this video........ I've been curious as to why my NVidia GTX 970 never stuttered with Medium parameters set but NOW, suddenly even Low stutters. Back in my days on Mac, RAM upgrades gave you instant satisfaction. I've doubled RAM in Windows systems and saw no appreciable difference in performance as if it didn't need it so it just runs the same.
Just so you know, even with a much more powerful system, (3090 and 12900K) I get that thrashing and choppiness. I fixed it by bringing down the max framerate to between 60 and 80. I think you will find that if you do the same, it will eliminate the issue for you as well.
it seems to be particular aircraft for me. I have a 4070 / 5950x / 128gb ram and some aircraft DESTROY my fps.... the kiowa is a good example. I can fly around all day but its like i hit this wall where fps goes to shit.. 30 ft away from kiowa im fine, 25 feet game says nope.
I use a Ryzen9 3900x, 32 gig ram, sata SSD, RTX3060 ... My monitor is a 42 inch TV at 1080p
I can play with all the pretties turned on because 95% of the time im in the KA50...
I fly on multiplayer servers flying low looking up at the tree tops.
42inch on 1080😮 .. TV..😮.
Next step : 4K + HDR.
Good speed 🪽
I’m running DCS and mostly fly the payware F16 with an old AMD phenom 2 Black edition CPU and RX580 video. Track IR and Thrustmaster Cougar HOTAS. It’s not at minimum settings and looks good and quite flyable after few seconds in game. Price of PC equipment doesn’t warrant a new motherboard yet.
Thanks for showing people this. I play DCS and battle of stalingrad on a GTX 1070 and an I7-6700k, sometimes at 1920x1080, and sometimes on my original Occulus Rift. I also have a decent HOTAS setup (X-52 Pro and rudder pedals), but have found Tuuvas's Xbox controller setups to actually be easier to play and dogfight with, while cutting out hours of endless control tomfoolery, so arguably you dont even need a joystick for this game (though it does help with immersion). I havent bothered to upgrade this stuff because franky, I'm a broke boi, and, I also just havent felt like it's needed yet.
This game can be amazing with a tricked out super computer... But since it was created in a bygone era, it's actually most optimized on older hardware.
The most frames you lose on big maps like Syria or Afghanistan with lots of details activated and ultra seettings with hi res. There you will quickly find your old setup inadequate. Flying over the Mariannas or over Caucasus in a 2 Ship in 1080 might even run smooth on a Core2 with a GTX1050 today.
When you add the 2 letters of V and R to DCS and use a headset like the pimax crystal then even the 4090 can't keep up. It could also be that DCS isn't really optimized to take advantage of modern CPUs.
I'm running a 4080ti on 64gb of RAM and my VR runs just fine.
Great video 👏 Sometimes we have to turn off our FPS counters, put the Forum aside for a while and just sit in our chair and fly. I've been flying these sim since 2005 and what I've seen most are people running tu buy a top computers but who fly poorly (or not at all). On the other hand, I've seen people who couldn't afford very good equipment but who destroy the DCS skies. I confess that our DCS community is a bit toxic. "You don't use VR? Then you don't know what you're missing". "I'll only play if it's in 4K at over 200 fps". None of this is necessary to have fun. Having fun is what matters. In fact, with the internet came a lot of frustration. It gives us the feeling that we are failures and everyone else is successful. That we're the only ones who don't use VR, that we don't have a home cockpit at home. However, the reality is completely opposite. As they say in a movie... it's not the plane, but the pilot. So a top PC won't make us a good sim pilots but rather how much time we spend with our ass in the chair (just like anything in our real life). Congratulations once again for the video. 💪👏🍻😎
One problem I realize DCS has compared to typical games is its sandbox nature which allows players to build their own missions. It’s always going to be possible to build something bigger than your machine can handle. Especially if you’re using VR. And a mission that was made three years ago and strained your hardware even then won’t be as playable on the current version of the game with all its further improvements.
On a i7 4790K and GTX 1070 DCS runs very well. It runs with 60fps, twice as much as MSFS and up to 3 times as much as X-Plane 12.
The reason is that many parts of DCS are ancient and already ran on Pentium IVs and Athlon XPs, the code is really fast for todays standards.
What does make is stutter is mission with many units in them, units seem much less optimized than terrain.
First time viewer, have been into DCS since 2022, got a rig in 2023 and now currently upgrading due to Alienware’s bad liquid cooler design on the r14 Ryzen. At first I thought about moving the ssd’s to a new build, but this video opened my eyes. I’m going to just add a 240 aio, upgrade from a 5800x to 5800x3d (since DCS now does multithreading and my 5800x got crispy), AW 3090 (just to jump from 10gb AW 3080 to 24gb vram), and a 1k power supply. Yes, it’ll be about as high as you can get for an AM4/DDR4 combo.
Also, you got a new subscriber🎉
Welcome to the channel!
@@takeoffwithjakesoft thanks! I’m not much on subbing on the first time seeing a channel, but the audhd in me truly enjoyed the structure of your videos.
I think it's worth mentioning that you want to have enough storage. DCS is big, especially when you start getting a bunch of modules and maps. A fast SSD will help cut load times down. I know SSDs have been the standard for a while now, but it's worth mentioning.
I'm able to play "light" training missions no problem just using a 5600G with integrated graphics. It's all low settings at 1080p, but does pretty well. It never gets 60 FPS. But, it doesn't usually drop below 30 either. The hardware bar for DCS is actually fairly low. Just need a HOTAS.
I run DCS with a i7 2700k GTX 1080 32gb Ram on a 50" TV, Multi Thread made a difference and I'm a happy camper
I actually dont agree here, because the mission complexity is actually a majority of problems with DCS performance, you case only applies if you want to fly simple missions with under 20-30 AI units max. Try to go for more bigger MP game or any of the community attempts of dynamic campaigns and the DCS's optimalization and outright AI scaling issues will pop-up when you try to go over 40+ units OR with ground units movement and ground units radars even much sooner. DCS has a big problem, and historical reenforced, AI scaling issue on that old engine that only gets worse with DCS updates (even multithreathing, all AI and game simulation is still on single core).
(bragging warning as now switching to an ex DCS mission maker trauma since your video implied how good this DCS running old engine is): I for one, also speaking as mission maker that got burned by ED's forever breaking of backwards compatibility, would rather have 2-3 year iterations of DCS (e.g. imagine MS FlightSim 2020 vs MS FlightSim 2024) with stable scripting codes between iterations much more than this "always half-broken" and "forever non-scalable" engine that keeps us forcing to follow whatever ED releases. After some years I realized I am spending most of my time reparing my old missions as ED decides at random that some scripts/triggers/etc suddenly do something else while ED dedicated servers still need periodic reboots in 3-4 hours to behave correctly.
I exited DCS simply due to the release model ED decided to follow that is soon outright going to hit a wall of being unmaintanable, just like the recent F15/M2000 Razbam fiasco proved.
This video is really targeted at beginners. The point I was trying to make is that if you're just starting out, you can jump in and start learning the procedures, systems, basic airman-ship, and combat tactics with a modest setup. As you have described yourself, you don't fit into this category and so of course you'll have a different perspective. I'm NOT saying that that DCS doesn't have problems or that better hardware can't give a better experience.
@@takeoffwithjakesoft yeah, but on this point DCS badly needs a competition, because I for one no longer even am asking friends to come and try DCS because I know the "endgame" in DCS is just terrible. So why even start. DCS on this point became a buttons simulator and I belong to the camp with Enigma's quote: "DCS has lot of buttons to push, but nothing to achieve with them". Dynamic campaign is now "in progress" for freaking 13 years!! Stability of scripting for mission makers was an issue 10 years ago and was never solved with ED's release model.
So on this point, I am pointing begineers to Il2/WarThunder/VTOL VR/BMS to get feet wet with flight sims, .... and to actually get a better gameplay competetive flights. DCS only has those buttons ... not much else.
PS: And don't get me started on the dogfighting AI in DCS that has no problem to start rate fighting inside mig21 or just randomly hit the ground when fighting you. Another area where DCS is just sub-part to most of competition.
@@BlackbirdDrozd Those are all valid points, just ancillary to the topic of the video.
NGL youtubers having big computers is a Marketing tactic
Graphics at low settings are pretty good. Honestly i dont care for eye candy it gets in the way of spotting anyway
low looks ok but a mix of medium to high looks really good, looks alot better then wt on max for example
Spotting in VR is bad for me . Flat screen no problem
Up until a couple years ago, I ran DCS on a then 10yo i7-920 with a 750ti video card &16GB RAM on a 45" 1080P TV with no issues. In 1080p, you aren't really going to even notice the difference between low and high settings. But I do recommend at least 16GB RAM and an SSD.
Frankly, I still have most of the eye candy turned off, and don't see much of a difference in 4K, other than a huge improvement in frame rate. IMO, most of the graphics bells and whistles just waste cycles and do little to nothing to improve graphics quality.
There is a bug that's been in the game from day one that newcomers need to know about. Water is the layer that the world is built on, and your computer is going to be processing the water even when you can't see it. Always set water to "low" to boost frame rate unless you have a pretty high end rig and just *have* to see tiny wave caps from 20-30K feet!
On the one hand, it is the most accurate combat sim out there, on the other, the amount of bugs and broken stuff is overwhelming.
That’s debatable. BMS is imo a more accurate sim. The graphics are a bit dated and the selection of only 2 aircraft pales in comparison to DCS, but the environment is much more immersive.
100% true. Keep in mind the advertised update coming to use multithreading should help performance with newer CPU's. BUT that update doesn't upgrade graphics at this time. To be fair, imo the graphics are fine for what it is and are aging well. The game from a nerd stand point is amazing for it's age what they did back then. Better or upgraded engine would help with player/asset count and better ground detailing more than sky, clouds, weather, and high altitude. The Multithread should help with player count as the server should be able to keep track of assets better/faster. Watching the Grim Reapers and the scenarios that has been a huge limit for the amazing content they put out.
I have used VR with DCS since its start, and the amount of RAM and GPU power it consumes these days is high (38 GB RAM if hosting a server), with 10 GB GPU in VR (even with 3080 ti, and it struggles in rendering scenes). DCS is less attractive without VR. It is a highly accurate flight sim, missing the g-force metal and plane turn rate tweaks. I used the SU at the start, a game-like sim, and now I'm using the fully simulated fleet like the F18, A10, F16, etc.
Excellent video and just shows you don't need top shelf gear to get good playability. The same applies to FS2020, where you get less and less benefit as you go towards top shelf components. Perhaps FS2024 will be written to make use of more CPU cores etc...here's hoping.
For the vast majority of folk however, it's not only DCS they play (obviously), thus they purchase the best components to cover other games that do benefit from this, and, try to build in headroom for even more demanding games in the future. The sane amongst us realise the benefits of sensible purchasing then holding onto components for as long as possible.
Code can easily be complied into a much newer compiler decode/encoding system. Since DCS is simply a flight simulation that takes tabulate information a makes it graphical. It may take a little more work and understanding however why fix when it works. Some of the encapsulated coding still works since it is still 0s and 1s.
I’ve been playing DCS on a Lenovo Legion Y laptop since 2020 without any issues. My specs are i7 9750, 1660Ti, 32 GM RAM, 1 TB M2 ssd. At mostly high/medium settings and optimization at 1080p, I get very decent FPS in the mid 70s/upper 60s even in Multiplayer. Only thing I miss out on is DLSS. FSR creates a lot of ghosting so no point using it. Otherwise, it’s a pretty decent experience on a modest rig.
I have a very mediocre system (Ryzen 5 5500, AMD RX 6700 TR) and it runs DCS great on an Ultrawide monitor. Its really nice, but I've into VR now and just can't play without it. Maybe its just the limitation of my cheap Quest 2, but I have to dumb down the graphic a lot and put up with a lot of aliasing and such when I play, especially MP. Would like to see you do a similar project on VR.
This is so true. I played for the longest time on a i7 7700 with a 1070 and it would do quite well at 1080p on multiplayer servers. The best thing I ever did for performance was moving dcs to its own nvme ssd. You don’t have to have the newest fanciest stuff to play dcs. Track ir is nice though.
Well, I still have 16G RAM and and a GTX 970 card, and I will tell you that I run DCS fine - with the notable exception of the most recent 2 maps, Afghanistan and Kola.
No you don't lol
Love the Mover quote at the end!
i played dcs on a 1060 on high for a long time and i was perfectly fine getting around 50-70fps on avg
I run DCS on 1080 p with Ryzen 7 1700 and GTX 1070 with 32 g RAM. Runs very smooth in SP. In MP though it sometimes gets choppy but the issue was neither the cpu nor the gpu it was RAM, so I upgraded RAM from 32 to 64 and now it works like charm
Hey, Thanks for the video, I was thinking that my "Gaming" system I bought a few years back was no longer going to cut it, I saw the PI VR headset and got depressed, now with your "review" I see that my Radeon 6700XT is just fine for me.
That's the GPU that I use. It's fine for non-VR.
I'm using a gtx 1080 and a Ryzen 5 5500, both of which you can get very cheaply in used condition. It's capable of running something between medium and high settings without problems in 1440p and can be overclocked/undervolted a bit as well. I tested a 2080 for about half a year and this was capable of high settings already, but the difference is actually not that great. Unless you want to play in 4K or VR, you don't need something special. I recommend 32GB of RAM, even if it's cheap. All in all my hardware (including HOTAS, monitor, head tracking) cost me about 700€. I bought most of it used from ebay etc.
I have lots of fun on DCS, have to keep myself away from most PvP servers but I'm able to take the most that I want from it. And that's on an i7 7700HQ, Nvidia 1050ti and 16Gb of RAM
I have an i5 9th gen and a 2060 super, going back 2-3 years I could only play solo (mp servers were just too demanding) cut to now, exactly the same rig and I can happily play in multiplayer servers with 20-40 people all at the same area with little to no issues!
When war thunder give stable 72fps in vr, dcs wont even launch a mission on low. Thats enough to describe it.
Pancake mode (Monitor) 1080p, you can get away with entry level stuff
Beer goggles (VR) you're gonna prefer 2080 level and up for entry (with lower specced VR sets slowly phasing out, the upgrades tend to ask more and more)
I was doing alright with HP Reverb and 3060ti/8600K, Multiplayer around 35 fps at low-mid level eyecandy, with OpenXR helping out in resolution and foveated rendering
What DCS loves though, is RAM
having stutters, I found my total system memory requirement, running DCS with side-programs, to be 56gb (24gb than I had installed)
first thing I did was dedicate an SSD drive for a 100gb pagefile, it helped, next I did was simply upgrade to 64gb. This relieved me from any stutters
Actually your correct for the most part but if you dive into the specs of a Ryzen 7 vs modern Ryzen 9 the Ryzen 9 has better read write and overall computing power per single core... DCS is optimized for Dual core cpu's.. So When building dont look at the amount of cores look at the computing power of the actual cpu in single core and dual core processing ! When doing that you will find even modern cpu's actually out do the old.. So yes it is better overall using modern CPU and GPU. I am a hardcore simmer and when i built my new setup with Dcs in mind i found this info i shared above !
I have a 1660 super and a 5 2600 and dcs runs well. I play on high/max graphics and even high fidelity models run well and i can expect to get constant 165fps with fc3 planes. Ed has improved the framerate a lot
Nice video! I have a 1660 myself, it does just fine. New sub.
I would also say that the core engine and renderer in DCS is optimized fairly well. But additional eye candy that ED likes to add could often completely ruin the performance
It is totally playable on older pc´s, i am on laptop with ryzen 5 4600h, rtx 2060 with 6gb vram and 16gb ram and it is really good even at 1440p, dlss on balanced and low-medium settings. Just go a fly. Of course you will not be able play biger missions with that ram, but for most of servers at least in my experience is that performance enough ;)
if you are playing at 1080 thats using the majority of the CPU over the GPU.
I think you just saved me five grand... Thanks VERY much!
This is true still today. Actually bringing in the MT version gave me even more fps. :) Playing DAILY with not even so bad graphics (just a bit under high settings though msaa i have even higher :P) even with my older GTX 960 4gb! OFC that has been a high end gpu but 10 years ago... Just saying: DCS scales very well, and yes you get easily wrong picture from big content makers computers. My friend is working among irl flight sims and tipped me, that you dont need more than 24 fps to flight sim. Its so immersive head gets used even to lover framerates. (i5 haswell 4960k+20 gb ddr3 + SATA 3 SSD.. so I dont even have m.2 and still dcs has better frame rate lately in every upgrade :) When motor is old, they know how to tune it. What is not talked enough is that if one seriously is going on with dcs and buys many modules one NEEDS huge ssd space. So I would start there: get gaming computer x, no matter what as long it is gaming computer with gpu that has been good since 10-0 years and get big solid state drive. DCS scales itself pretty nicely to GPU you have. More never the better it looks and runs, many games just runs better, but dcs is very good driving different kidn of filters / specs in gpu timeline. It doesnt brake or look bad without something, it just looks better with something. So if you have 200gigs of free ssd space for starters, just do it. My friend even plays fc3 planes with gamepad in his cough THOUGH ofc he has experience among em with hotas also, but still. It doesnt need 12k cockpit model with breathable oxygen masks and radios and spacesuits. And oh. I before played with lower settings ~60fps but after tried higher, after that tip my friend gave me, I played mouth open for about 2 months before I even remembered "oh yeah my frame rate has dropped to 30 with these new settings" but DCS had came some overwhelming experience with em, I never changed em back to those older settings. My tip is just try it, you will see that even 19fps goes if it doesnt freeze from time to time. IRL sims many have pretty low fps, as they tend to save their calculations to something more important. AND it really is enough to go just over that magic 24, it just works different ways in ones brains than lets say some shooting game or mmorpg. In sim one usually also has time / anything really isnt about 0,000000001 secs react times like with CS etc.. :) DCS goes well with older computer, as long as you have SSD space and "have been good since some years" gpu and over 16gbs ram
I had a PC my uncle gave me, ran it on a 1017, the game was so smooth at max level.
With regard to the 1660, the 'silicon shortage' units of 2020-2021 have GDDR5 RAM made in the GDDR6 fabs, and as a result the RAM can be *ludicrously* overclocked to something like 180-190% over stock. the GPU itself can accept 125-150% over stock too - and DCS running on an overclocked GPU in that configuration with little to no performance shortfalls.
I do have an RX 6700 XT 12GB these days, and it is the performance bargain most ideal for DCS, from experience.
I agree. I've got a 6700 XT myself for my main gaming PC. It's been a solid performer and a great value.
I'm still using a PNY GTX1660 and its surprising how well it can run some titles (including VR titles) but it is time to upgrade
I have a 5800x and a 3070. 32gigs of 3200. I run DCS almost maxed out in 4k. I do turn off features that really aren't that noticeable anyway. I just pre-ordered a Quest 3S and plan to use VR with it.
Need F-4 performance test, that's a real beast when it comes to FPS
i saw the biggest difference when version 2.9 came out. don't forget to try the multithreaded version depending on your cpu you could be leaving some performance on the table by not using it
I find that there are certain maps, certain maps and certain missions that might give you issues, just do not full up the mission with a lot of stuff you do not even need in the mission
Take that budget old PC and add a cheapish SSD and get more RAM and it would probably help a bit. It's great to see.
as someone who still used (and sim's) an old rig, dcs has had its ups n downs with performance, but for me the lag is low speed over terrain where it gets ordinary.
32gb ddr3
intel i7 2600K (yes 2600K)
evga gtx 970
samsung evo 1tb ssd.
asus maximus gene-z
I’m running a Asus MB from 15 yrs ago with a 2600k I7, Gtx 1660 and 32 big ddr3. Actually runs pretty well unless you really load up a complex mission.
More RAM for that scenario 64GB
I play on triple screen with 11520x2160 and a powerful graphics card is necessary. Also, the RTX series with DLSS is a huge boost. It comes down to resolution. How many pixels are you crunching on a screen. So, yes, a RTX is necessary if a person wants the crisp detailed graphics. It's 2024 and the RTX 2050 is on the way. It's time for people to upgrade from the GTX cards. Games no longer rely on raw power but are using better code and A.I. to enhance graphics. You won't get those enhancements on a GTX card.
I would like to point out that all game engines are old. They upgrade them overtime, making them more powerful and capable. Most engines are modular, allowing the game logic, graphics, sound and many other components to be upgraded or replaced as time goes on, individually. It's also why DCS is now capable of multithreading and Nvidia's latest DLSS features. DCS will be upgrading to Vulcan because of this as well. So, saying it's an old game engine shows that many don't understand how game engines work or how they progress into newer versions. Very few engines are created from scratch anymore.
Really well made analysis! I too have Problems with dcs since the latest updates. I stutters every 3 seconds massiveley. I have everything turned to mid and now a mission with 5 Aircraft and 10 ground units on caucausus isnt even playable because of the stutters. Never had those problems at the beginning of the year.
My rig is: RTX2080ti, i9900k, 32gb RAM.
What are your thougts?
I was running it just fine on a 16 gig i7 rig w/ a 970 gtx. I'm on a 64 gig i9 w/ a 3080 rtx, and the difference is hardly noticeable. Yes, I know everybody has a 4090 these days, but I doubt that would even be noticeable either except in very specific situations (streamers, recorders, etc.).
1080p and 1440p are easy with an older system. Try playing in VR, though-there's not enough GPU power for it. You need at least 72 fps (or 45 if you can handle frame generation; I can't), but 90 fps is even better. I'm a 3080 Ti user, and I still have to make many compromises with the game's graphical settings in VR. On a 3440x1440p flat screen, I can max out everything with a locked 144 fps.
I play on laptop with a 2070. I find this game depends mostly on the server. If i load into a server with 30+ aircraft all taking off or manouvering around me its unplayable. But under 20 aircraft doing missions is no problem. Try your rig on an aerobatic server that's almost full, and you'll see.
Im playing DCS on
i5 9600k 4.6ghz boost
GTX 1660Ti 6GB
32GB DDR4
MSI Z390-A Pro
SSD 970 evo plus
so a little better then your test rig and it runs great, im usually flying on full mp servers with fps between 60-90 fps on 2k with mixed settings like lower tree view range and lower anti alising to make it run smooth.
I have no issues at in VR the updates have helped a lot
It's all fun and games till you go on an online server, no matter the settings my ram is at 100% and the game stutters like a PowerPoint
What about the incredibly large disk space..
Don’t get me wrong, dcs is a fantastic game, but I think eagle dynamics should at least consider optimizing the game and maybe even move on to work with newer tech..
I think it's a bit like how most pro-gamers seem to prefer a 27 inch screen because it's less real-estate to navigate with the mouse (i.e. faster and easier on the wrist). It's easy to get caught up in the "what looks absolutely amazing" vs what's practical and more effective ...
I think you might want to make sure you dont have a damaged CPU as well. The Intel micro coding issue was greatly exacerbated by DCS gameplay. Make sure your CPU wasnt one of those effected. Im getting my RMA now.
Doesn't DCS MT (Multi-Threading) now use multiple cores? I tried it and I think it made everything much smoother. Also I used to run DCS on some horrible old hardware when Black Shark came out, I think I had a Pentium 4 and 2GB of RAM....if that. Sure it was clunky but playable and I soon upgraded to a world of difference but I don't think the bare bones of the game have got that much more complicated since then.
I hope they will change entire graphics engine someday and fix that SPOTTING! In War Thunder, BMS spotting isnt a problem but in this still cant see plane from mile away properly.
1:38 In other news water is wet
The only reason I need to upgrade my PC (I have almost the exact setup you do, just with 32 gigs of ram and a ryzen 5 5700G) is because I play DCS in VR, and on servers like 4ya with millions of assets, it stutters a bit and loads slow. When I play flatscreen I can run DCS at essentially max graphics no problem
Nice mythbusting! Yeah too many people are convinced DCS requires a monster machine, it just doesn’t. The people who have trouble are trying to run VR with the settings turned up too high or they’ve done something to screw up their rig with some crazy under the hood tweaking. There are even these “experts” who will tell people on the forums that it’s impossible to build a machine that can even run the game well which is just baloney.
Hi - I don't play play/own DCS but am a hardware nerd and always wondered about this game requirements. Thanks for giving me a basic idea. Would have been interesting to see what happens
when you disable HT (hyperthreading). Many popular game deliver decent/playable performance with these old i7s (4c 8t) but downgrading to i5 (4c 4t) often times leads to a stutter fest.
I run DCS on a 9th-gen i5 laptop with an RTX 2060 and 32GB of RAM, usually on high settings. Occasionally, an update will improve performance, but other times it causes the game to run poorly. If you watch my videos, you'll see how DCS performs on a laptop and how it has taught me to keep my sanity over the years, haha.
Hey, I'm sub'd and have seen your videos. I would not have guessed you're running on a laptop, it looks good!
@@takeoffwithjakesoft Thank you so much! It just occured to me, the newer modules are usually the ones that kill my frames.
Just don't try to run it in VR.
My system isn't ultra high end, but I'd call it very much adequate for flight-sims. i7-14700KF, 32 GB of RAM, RTX 4070 Super, games installed on fast M.2 SSDs and I just upgraded to a Quest 3 for VR. For comparison: I had performance issues with the Reverb G2 I used before, but with the Q3, IL-2 VR now runs very reliably/stable and with quite a few bells and whistles turned on - even in busy SP career-missions which, AFAIK, are probably the most demanding scenario in that title. I can run slightly above medium settings at 90 Hz, high-ish settings at 80 Hz (currently my go-to mode) and high to very high settings in 72 Hz. And, if anything, multiplayer seems to run better than SP career, but I don't fly a lot of MP, so I'm not 100% on that.
DCS OTOH runs great on my monitor, even with very high settings and all that enabled - and even SP VR runs pretty well at 1.4x PD. At least on the Caucasus map as that's the only one I own. But as soon as I try VR MP with the same settings that work perfectly fine in SP VR, everything turns to crap. And that's with DLSS enabled and set to "Performance" and a lot of detail-settings turned to "very low indeed". Doesn't seem to matter what I do or how stable the game seems to run after I spawn into the world. After a while, things will start to get jerky, FPS will start to jitter around for no apparent reason and God help me if I decide to change servers without re-starting the whole game. And that's with me on empty servers with a ping of under 20ms.
I do run OpenComposite/OpenXR and I did try starting DCS in both OpenXR- and OculusVR-modes - didn't seem to make a difference. Slight caveat: My last few missions/tweaking sessions were all done in the AH-64 and I'm pretty sure the nature of helicopter flight at tree-top level makes for different challenges on the engine and hardware than flying around in an F-18 at 30,000 ft.
The only thing that makes me feel a little less worried about my setup/hardware is that fact that I keep finding examples of folks running RTX 4090s (and systems to match) having to drop their refresh-rate to 72 Hz (or whatever lowest setting their head-sets have) *and* to lower their in-game settings. Given the power of the 4090, this seems to point to some sort of sub-par optimization on the part of DCS. At least when you try to fly MP in VR.
Plus with the latest downgrades in settings that I made, my GPU only gets up to 80 to 85% usage - the CPU hovers around 40% all the time and temps look totally fine on both.
By contrast, IL-2's settings can push my GPU to well above 90% but there are no jerky stutters or anything like that. Even if the framerate drops in very busy scenes, I don't really notice it while flying - only when I happen to record a mission and then review the FPS-counter later will I see those "mini-drops".
As a low spec gamer for many years, I keep seeing people calling 60fps as unplayable. I have to disagree. I play a fair amount of flight sims, many of them fairly old, on a very mid PC. I can play Elite Dangerous or MSFS 2020 on a 1080 monitor at 60fps all day and never miss a frame with a GTX1660 super. Yeah, 144Khz looks pretty smooth, but is it _required?_ I don't think so. I don't think human eyes are that fast, I may be wrong, but humans have pretty slow eyes in the animal world.
Sometimes I think gamers can get a little over impressed by what something _should_ look like. Kinda the way Hi Fi aficionados get over music media and hardware. They'll swear that a recording on vinyl is "Just Better" than a CD, then get taken down a few pegs when the vinyl is exactly the same as the CD on a spectrum analyzer, if not a little worse, because the vinyl record was made with a CD master. I think we fool ourselves just a little bit into thinking something _is_ better just because we paid more for it and we think it should be.
I mean it can be played with quite old stuff. I run my hp reverb g2 on a 1070 that is from 2017 I think. The problem is that compared to something like il2 I don’t think most dcs servers get a feel of real missions if they aren’t pre planned massive missions. It’s just people flying around alone most of the time and just try to shoot others down so to enjoy dcs more I want the better quality because if you have all those buttons in the cockpit I want to be a lie to use them
And i forgor to mention, but the multiplayer menu and spawn selection make my pc looks like a goofy goober
I can run DCS maxed out at 4k on my i9/3080 amd 32 gigs of ram.
Unfortunately, when I plug in VR it nose dives to sub 20 FPS on low setting 🙄
GPU :GTX 1060
CPU :AMD FX 8350 8 Core
RAM: DDR3 2x8 GB
Mostly 20-30FPS everywhere but less stutters i feel like. (Med Settings i think)
( in my opinion this is still playable but i wish i could get better stuff)
I run DCS on a 12700kf, MSI z690pro a WiFi DDR5 MoBo, 32gigs of 4800mhz ram, EVGA 3060ti FTW3 Ultra Gaming, still get stutters here and there while loading on the ground, but I run at high graphics, on a 1080p 75hz monitor, and keep a pretty solid 75 fps
Great video!
What software did you use to display the FPS and bottle neck message?
It's built into DCS. If you press RCTL+PAUSE it will bring up the performance monitor.
My pc have
i5 650
Nvidia gtx 750 2 gb
And 10 gb ram ddr3
Can start dcs can play but multiplayer game crash
I would never play DCS without VR again, it is like night and day.
I got me a custom built game rig that set me back $8k. Not the highest available but respectable. So I am pretty happy with overall performance. I want more emphasis on AI behavior than eye candy. Especially with Combined Arms. And basic scripts like CAP and Engage. A 2 ship CAP of Tomcats with Phoenix’s and when they detect an enemy approaching the fleet, one goes from 30k feet to the deck and the other turns 90 degrees. The first gets to the deck then hits ABs to get back up to 30k feet. Eventually it gets bingo fuel and lands at an enemy base, not the carrier it took off from. Stupid shit like that drives mission planners nuts. Fix your shit ED!
You don’t even need high specs for VR. You could run DCS in VR on a 4790k and a GTX 1080. You’d probably have to stick to the Caucasus map and not record your gameplay. DCS doesn’t scale well in VR with hardware upgrades and it’s really disappointing for me, but good news to someone on a budget.
You don't even need a dGPU to run DCS. A recent, fast mobile APU with a good iGPU like the Ryzen AI HX 370 with Radeon 890M could likely run DCS well at 1080p at lower settings nowadays.
I play on high with a GTX 1080 and a I7
I have the new top of the range 14th gen pc and have a lot of problems running dcs with and without vr DCS is the only game I have problems with stuttering and freezing its unplayable I’ve given up trying to fix it
14th gen CPUs are known to have instability issues
e-Cores are the reason. Try to disable the e-cores in Bios just once to see the result! Don't worry, you can simply change them back on later. There are programs for disabling them via software when you want to play dcs and then switch them back on. But to test it - Disabling the e-cores is the easyest way. DCS has a problem with the task sceduler on processors with Power and Efficiency Cores. I heard it is better on Win11 but I wouldn't change to W11 if you'd hold a gun to my head.
Remember that only 1or2 vores are handling DCS there for you can not look at all cpu at once.
I run it very well with....GA-Z68XP-UD3, i7-3770K, 32GB DDR3 1600mhz, RTX 2070, (x3) SATA SSD drives it will maintain 60+fps @2560x19080p