Hello,

Steam sales are here and I'm going to buy the Blackshark 2. It's unfinished bussines from 10 years ago and I'm hyped to tame this beast.

I suffers many stutters playing the free plane in Instant Action (free flight). I will buy the BS2 from Steam, so I can return it. But with the training missions and others things, 2 hours fly fast.
So can you give me advice for the configuration and things I have to know to run DCS smoothly.

My PC:

Intel Core i5-4690k (I don't overclock for fear of PC degradation).
EVGA GTX 1070 8GDDR5
G.Skill F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL (8gb RAM DDR3)
1 TERA HHD
NO SSD

Yeah, I dont have an SSD and I'ts not the last gen but with the GTX 1070 I run all game at max graphics.
An SSD is easy to install so I'm not against to upgrade. But I only want to play DCS Black Shark 2 at single player. So much requirements for an old game baffle me and I'm not sure with an SSD the game will run perfectly smooth. I heard bad things about DCS engine and it's optimization.

Damn this is a long post...
Thanks again!

More RAM would help Gattsu

I have only 8 Gbs as well and I get pauses in the game

Yep, more RAM. I too unfortunately only have 8Gig and have stutters along with about a 4min mission load times just to get into the air.

Not necessarily....I have 32GB RAM, (paired with good CPU, GPU and SSD).....DCS still stutters


....unless you mean 128GB where the entire game and terrain could be loaded into RAM?

What Paradaz says is true Gattsu,

I have similiar specs as you and my next upgrade will be RAM. May or may not help. I'll be going to 16 Gb RAM, not 128 Gbs

More RAM may help, or it may not. With the current prices of RAM (£150 for a 16GB kit!!), it just doesn't make sense to recommend someone spending that for ONE UNOPTIMIZED GAME that may or may not benefit from that expenditure. Do not spend money to make up for ED's incompetence.

An SSD, however, will help! It may benefit DCS or it may not, but it FOR SURE will benefit your boot times, program and game loading times, and so on. £150 or thereabouts can get you a 500GB SATA or even better, an NVMe drive!

Mate, my spec is

I5-2500k, gtx 780 3gb, 8gb ram

Let me tell you this i had huge stutters that really made the experience unplayable until.................i bought a SSD.........a change from day to night......I didn't gain any FPS but the stutters has simply gone.

To add more piece of information, my pre ssd setup had no problem to run practically any game except for ARMA 3 and DCS due to stutters but both has been fixed with the SSD.

To be fair, these micro-stuttering issue has been present for AGES! I remember reading about it back when I was still playing DCS, so 5+ years ago? So it's present on some computers and SSD being a "fix" has been known for quite a while now

The RAM issue is new

The stutters are due to all the objects being displayed now. And with light sources, shadows, etc. Modern flightsims have realistic terrain with trees,
cities - a lot of objects.

Your real-time cache of these objects is placed in RAM, so more RAM the better. When you fly past the objects that are located in RAM, software
retrieves the new set from external memory - disc, or SSD. Disc lookups are slower than FLASH (SSD).

So if you have the money, buy more RAM, and a nice SSD drive.

BTW, ED has optimized the latest code pretty good. The graphics engine they developed works extremely well. I get +40fps with all graphics options
maxed on my meager laptop. Stutters are from min RAM and using disc drive.

A quick google search and I've found complaints of micro stutters as far back as 2015, so like I said, it's not new, it's not due to the new engine, it's not due to the trees. All I can say is it may be due to ED's poor code? Maybe? Anyone have a better excuse?

More RAM is better, yes, but find me another game that demands 16GB or more otherwise you'll get a performance hit? Other games (Batman) that worked better with 16GB RAM was blasted and poor coding was cited as the reason that it won't work with 8GB RAM.

I doubt if "batman" is as demanding on system resources as a flightsim....poor comparison IMO.

In 2015 video cards did not have the amount of vram resident on board, system ram was less (prior to 64bit os), etc.
It's a problem of scale.

If you want to complain, stick with ED's business model. That's where the real problem is.



I

Demanding or not, it runs better on 12GB or more RAM and if you say it's not as demanding as a flight sim, then it all points to poor coding.

XP11 on 5896x1080 with a fourth screen at 1920x1080 running gauges on a single 980Ti over New York City flying over Central Park and I got good FPS, no stuttering, and below 50% usage on my 16GB RAM system.


This guy had TWO Titan X's on SLI and still got micro stutters so I doubt it's an issue of scale
Notice the post was made 2015.



I so wish the issue was just with ED's business model

Problem is the code, it also leaves RAM unused and rather loads new textures from HD hence the stutters and it has been same for 7 years.

If I read that response from the stackoverflow site, it might have more relevance. Iceecl, you a software dev? Or can give the use case where "it leaves ram unsued"?

I bought Blackshark 2 today and it runs very smooth. I did have only one stutter.

I think I will buy an SSD of 500GB to reduce loading times (4 minutes).

DCS and R6 Siege have big loading times. Falcon BMS not so much.But Ice, do you play Falcon BMS on an SSD? Are the loading times much better with an SSD?

Thanks for all the comments,

An SSD will make loading times of ANY application or game faster but in most cases wont affect the performance as most apps/games are loaded into RAM hence why that is normally the first place to look for a performance boost.

The reason DCS (and some other flight sims) like an SSD is that as you are flying over the terrain, the new data is preloaded and transferred from hard disk into RAM and the SSD with faster access, read and write speeds will achieve that more efficiently. A mechanical drive may not support the transfer speed required (the hard disk whether mechanical or SSD will always be the slowest part of this process anyway) but on the same token a system that is tight on RAM will transfer the terrain data from hard drive to ‘page file’.......and the page file (essentially a ‘RAM staging post’ is just another area of the hard disk, and obviously has nowhere near the access speed of system memory.

neither did I have no stutters in the past but after DCS 2.0 stutters became a thing that i couldn't fix but just lowering gaming settings. As i said, it got fixed only after i bought an SSD.

@Gattsu

Stutters can be divided into disc-loading ones and rendering-related ones. Paradaz described the former well and I can definitely recommend buying any SSD to get rid of them. Best hardware thing I ever purchased from playing DCS point of view and that was even with budget 240GB option, rather than some superfast and expensive M.2 unit. All other flight sims I use benefitted greatly as well. Rendering related microstutters is another story and as a 1070 user I'll say you won't be able to go full retard with gfx settings, though I guess it also strongly depends on resolution of your screen you and min fps you aim for. Some tips are universal, however. For example, DCS is using deferred rendering nowadays, so in-game MSAA is a big no-no and you'll be better off with disabling it completely (using external, post processing methods like FXAA or SMAA instead), or using only the lowest x2 setting if you really, really can't live without it. SSAA introduced in OpenBeta version is also a framerate killer so forget about it. With so little memory in your current config, be careful with memory-heavy options like preload radius. With stock-clocked CPU of yours don't go over the top with CPU-heavy options like civil traffic. And so on...

On a sidenote I can also confirm that release 2.5.0. version is the one with infamously high memory consumption and lots of gfx microstuttering, while 2.5.2 OpenBeta fixed both these issues for me, so If you're not afraid of Betas, I'd recommend using that one (it's not like the release version is much more stable and polished anyway, to be honest...).

And while you're at it, do yourself a favour and get Mustang's texture mod for Caucasus map, it offers superior visual experience compared to default textures, with negligible cost in performance.
https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=207541

Maybe if I type the sentence to the other site, it becomes more relevant here?
I don't need to be software dev to check my system stats.
The case where it doesn't use available RAM -- every flight?

Go for the SSD, it is one of the best upgrades you can get for your PC! My BMS is on an NVMe drive. I've never really compared loading times of BMS on SSD vs HDD, by the time I played BMS, I was already on an SSD