Hi all,

I need some advice on what settings to turn down to give my FPS a hike.

My specs
Gigabyte X58A-UD5 | Intel i7 930 | Corsair H70 | ATI 5970 | 6GB Kingston DDR3 | Intel 160GB G2 | Win 7 Ultimate 64 Bit |

Yesterday I was flying with everything on max in the P-51 and checked my FPS I was getting around 20-10 most of the time and turning down settings such as cockpit res and FSAA from 16Q to 12 (IIRC) made no difference!

Any advice?

Hmm...that doesn't sound right. I have a core i5-2500k/GTX470 combo and don't have any FPS problems. In fact, no matter what settings I tried I couldn't get FPS in the P-51 ground attack instant mission to drop below 25. With my standard settings (all maxed, TSSAA off, ground clutter reduced to 500m, 8x MSAA, 1920x1080 res) I get around 30-40 FPS in cockpit in the aforementioned mission.

Drivers are up to date?

Are you maybe running some insane screen resolution?

The only slowdown I get (and is really annoying) is when I use the TGP in the A-10C and it scans over trees, becomes a slideshow then catches up and I have over corrected.

Take away the Mirrors, useless and resource hogs...

A 5970 is a DUAL GPU Card with onboard XFire, and the GPU Cores are underclocked to save heat.

The 2GB of Total Ram, is really only 1 Per GPU, So You really only have 1 GB.

DCS Doesnt Support XFire (some people can get it to work, but everyone else dont)

How many screens?
What resolution?
What are the rest of your settings?
can you post a screenshot like this?:

Does tree shadows even do anything, I turn it on and there's no tree shadows for me lol.

Thanks for the response chaps...

Here is my settings.




I also have a second small monitor setup, I might turn it off and see if that is effecting the fps.

So I am off to turn some of the FPS killing settings off lets see what that does

Okay well I tried these settings but my fps in the cockpit didnt change...

I don't know the little caveats behind an ATI card but,

Try the following changes:

scenes - medium
heat blur - off
res of cockpit displays - 512 (not every frame)
MSAA - 4x
Reduce:
Clutter/brushes
Try enabling windows aero
Make sure mirrors are off.

Report back.

Okay did a bit more testing, mirrors are what is causing drop in fps, with out mirrors I get an FPS of roughly 20-25 with mirrors depending on what it shows 15-25.

I have another thread on the DCS forum and apparently the CPU not GPU is what the DCS engine uses more of.

Thanks, I tried that but no difference at all... this adds more credence to the CPU being my bottle neck

btw for anyone that is curious... here is the difference between some MSAA settings:
off vs 4x

4x vs 8x

tsaa on vs off:

Well, some of the biggest causes of frame rate drop can be resolution and textures. Can you try running 1600x900 at medium textures?

Also, another thought... bad software, drivers, and or hardware might be causing you problems. Follow these steps:
- Clean out your computer case, blow / vaccum out any dust. (I physically had to take my GPU apart once because it was clogged)
- Scan your computer for virus / malware issues
- Uninstall all of the unnecessary or unused programs that automatically startup
- Update every driver on your computer is the latest stable version
- Install a monitor of your core temps and GPU temps run a stress test to make sure they don't go out of spec. Overheating usually means that a component is failing

Once you're sure your system is running the way it is supposed to, then you can worry about DCS.

I had no problems getting it to work. It sees DCS World as "DCS A-10C", but it works fine if I say "manual detect" and point it to the DCS World folder.

Anyway, I'd suggest killing all the shadows (tree, cockpit, and shadows = X) to see what happens, and then slowly add them back to see.

You could try dropping vsync, and I keep my FSAA at 4x because higher just seems to be unneeded here.


The Jedi Master

Drop Cockpit displays to 256 (not every frame), drop MSAA to 2x, (4x Max), HDR Off.

MySettings:
MED Preset,
Text.=High, Scene=High, Civ Traffic=High, Visibility Range=High, Water=High,Heat Blur=On, Shadow=High,
Resolution=6048x1080, 5.6 Aspect Ratio, Monitors: Custom LUA (1 Viewport, GUI Center Screen only),
Pit Displays=256px, MSAA=2x, HDR=Off, VSYNC ON, TREE SHADOWS=OFF, FULL SCREEN=ON, Cockpit Shadows=OFF, TSSAA=Off

Airfield 25-40FrPS.
in Flight 60 FrPS VSYNC (Up to 75-100FrPS w/o VSYnc)
CBU Explosion/Aircaft Explosion on Ground = Sub 10FrPS until Smoke or CBU Particles are Off Screen.

Dropping to a Single 1080P screen doesnt boost my frame rate, so it's a engine problem.

The 5970 is still 2 generations old now. My GPU in it's stock state can beat yours in every benchmark.

Holly COW my idle CPU temps are 41 Degrees

I haven't cleaned it for a few months and just checked my dust catcher, seems my PC is in desperate need of a clean... and its snowing outside

Put water to low, it's a known resource hog.

Cleaned and I am back to 30 degrees, there was a silly amount of dust, luckily the H70 is easy to clean.

Knew it, same with mine infact.
Glad I've helped.