i wish i'd found this video ages ago, i stopped playing DCS awhile back because i was so fed up with performance. After watching your video(and messing around in DCS for an hour) I was finally able to get some decent performance! I also discovered how badly Marianas runs compared to Persian gulf!(like 2x performance). Quick tip, if your on a low end card(like a RX570 4GB) the actual textures dont make much difference(maybe 2/3 fps low vs high on both!), going from 2xmsaa to off made a huge difference. Visible range is another big one.
I noticed that to on Marianas. Very choppy flying over the islands even above say 1000' but the other maps are smooth on the same settings. Didn't seem to matter whether there were a lot of objects to display or not.
@@RKDriver you just have to keep testing settings, there have also been some recent improvements to performance! I have noticed that between multiplayer and solo there is less difference in fps. Marianas however will not run on certain hardware. Like an RX570 for example(thankfully i have since upgraded to a 6700XT and am very happy with it). I think Marianas simple requires more Vram than other maps, but i could be wrong. My RX570 had only 4gb, my new gpu has 16gb.
I noticed that your CPU sometimes goes as high as 90%, I run i5 10700K and I never got it over 20%, it's usually hanging at 17% most of the time. Perhaps I could squeeze more juice if my CPU would compute more? What do you think?
Oh boy, you have just outdone yourself. This is truly invaluable content, you answer many long unattended questions for this niche community. Thank you very very much. Keep up such great work.
Glad you enjoyed it! I was looking for these answers myself since DCS 1.2! Something had to be done. It's not perfect, not scientific at all, but I hope it will help. 😎
This is THE BEST video for DCS players seeking graphics quality versus performance "hit" that I have had the pleasure to find on the internet. Thank you for your hard work! I will be sharing this video with everyone I know that plays any PC game with hardware limitations.
To notice cockpit global illumination you have to fly close to water, or fiels, or desert and play around with plane orientation. Also transitioning from one zone to another changes color of cockpit illumination. It also changes depending on a time of day. Load up early in the morning and take screenshots every 2-10 minutes, you will see a difference while sun is rising.
Awesome video! Even for finetuning in DCS 2.9 this has been very useful! I hope you make an updated version for 2.9 soon! As a few important things have been added since. Like SSS, DLSS, DLAA. Also interesting to see what the ~average FPS hits are now when using the MT version of DCS
Nice job man! Appreciate the amount of work that goes into this as I am currently doing this test and compiling results for VR users. Stay tuned for the video if you are a VR user!
Thank you for doing this video. This was EXACTLY what I was looking for to see how much of a difference the settings would make and which ones I could I use and not use to get the game experience I'm wanting without having to purchase an even more powerful gaming computer than I've already bought. Perfect video. Thanks again.
Nicely done - thank you for putting this together and providing some useful commentary about what each setting does and doesn't affect. I learned a lot from this - very helpful.
Smoke density does not change how dense smoke itself is. It rather controls how many chimneys will put out smoke when looking over the landscape. Thank you for the helpful video! Seeing the differences in visual quality makes it easier to find nice settings for oneself.
FYI, the biggest difference not shown in this video about the Water setting is that only on 'HIGH' will the water have reflections. This is crucial for immersion because when flying over a small lake near mountains or hills, the 'HIGH' setting will show the reflections of those mountains and hills etc, off the surface of the water. Anything lower than that setting seems to avoid reflections and kills the immersion for me. I definitely recommend the 'HIGH' setting for Water ;)
@@ARSAMES007 I don't really know how else to say it, anything lower than HIGH appears to have no reflections on the water so if there's a massive hill or mountain nearby, you won't see it reflected on the water. Just looks silly and unrealistic. So I highly recommend water set to HIGH to avoid that
Great video thank you! FYI I just realised Cockpit Resolution only updates when you exit to desktop and start the game back up, in case anyone else wonders why the setting does nothing.
To add to MSAA, it's more than an FPS killer. It's an antialiasing that preserves information, while settings like FXAA (or otherwise, your "standard" anti-aliasing setting in a game) will destroy it. For instance, speaking from my experience directly... If you were to have no anti-aliasing whatsoever and you were trying to spot a plane in the distance as it approached you, without zooming, the aircraft may not even render as a pixel until it's within 8km. Now standard anti-aliasing or FXAA will take that resolution of your monitor, and essentially BLUR it for the sake of removing edges. It's a fast anti-aliasing that costs very little performance, but you lose information. Additionally, since this AA is just basing itself off your otherwise un-AAed screen, that approaching aircraft will still only appear on your screen when it's within 8km, but now because your image is essentially blurred, that little pixel-dot will appear much bigger. Additionally, aircraft against the ground become harder to track as the noise from trees, buildings etc blurring the edges makes them turn into a mass of color noise that's hard to track. Now use MSAA. What makes MSAA interesting (and if you have VR, it's somewhat like PD) is it will first render your frames at a resolution higher than your monitor (or whatever resolution you set to), then scale it back down to fit your monitor's resolution. This preserves information that would otherwise be lost. At that higher resolution your frame was rendered at, you can see a pixel of that approaching aircraft off 20km away. Now when that frame is scaled down to fit to your monitor's resolution, that pixel is still represented, though now just as a _slightly darker_ pixel than the surrounding area, but visible nonetheless. Additionally since edges are preserves, it is easier to track aircraft against the ground clutter and buildings etc. I've used MSAA to spot small WW2 birds up to 35km away in DCS. It costs some FPS, but I found MSAA at x2 is that perfect sweet spot between performance and situational awareness
Brilliant video thanks. I keep my card pegged at 60FPS as I have TrackIR and dual screens for MFD export. This video has really helped me get the best settings whilst keeping 60FPS. Things like dropping tree quality and visib distance from their max has quite a perf benefit for no real drop in immersion.
Since my PC is below minimum required specs for DCS, running the game some what smoothly, but still making it enjoyable to watch has been a fight I have been having for about 3 years. This video really helped me by seeing the differences. Thank you good sir and I wish to see more helpful content
Awesome video dude. Thanks for your efforts. Very interesting results and it makes me think that there are some graphical settings that are best suited for choppers and maybe Combined Armed type play, i.e., close to the ground and/or slower moving aircraft. I play 100% in VR and there are some settings that are 100% worthless under VR since the eye candy is, by default, much less. Your video confirmed it for me and I can adjust accordingly to squeeze out those extra FPS.
Dude! That is a fantastic bit of effort and comparison. Massively valuable. I'm on a 2070, but otherwise we're quite similar. I'm playing with what I want, and your vid has allowed me to see what I might expect if I do X or Y or Z and I'm a little better informed about what I might be able to just bump right up for no FPS impact, and what I need to be more choosy about. Just brilliant. I had some items low because I thought they would have a large effect, and I've now bumped them right up, and I had other things high (just because) when I now see they might impact FPS a lot, while not really adding much to what I think is important. Wow! Thanks for this great reference!
A lot of work there brother, but worth it's weight in gold. Highly informative and as they say, "A picture paints a 1,000 words!" Well done sir and thanks for sharing. P.S. with that sort of effort you earned an easy sub!
Thank you for this excellent tutorial which allowed me to significantly improve my settings and the quality of my displays without almost any impact on my FPS - Bravo
With this update i have more fps on the ground and some better performance here and there BUT i used to have 60-70 fps with high fidelity planes and 70-80 fps with low fidelity planes in cockpit. Now no matter what the plane i have max 65-67 fps in cockpit. CPU amd 2700X--GPU gtx 1060 6gb--RAM 16GB
Im not so much about framerate numbers as I am about smoothness. Many time during this presentation the frame rate seems to stutter really badly yet your framerate remains unchanged. It is a youtube thing perhaps? This was over all extremely helpful, thanks mate! I was able to turn down some stuff (clouds, water, cockpit lighting and AF) and not notice much if any negative difference in visuals yet still got a lot more frames.
Thank you for making this! Now we can compile a list of all settings, their effect on FPS, as well as seeing how each setting makes a visual difference. I saw several that were the same _or better_ at a lower setting.
THANK-YOU, this is BY FAR THE BEST comparison I have ever seen online. I owned my OWN animation company in the '90s so I know this sh*t. You have to KNOW what your playing with and how to get the best of what you own. Congrats again on a FANTASTIC side/side comparison!!!......P.S. Microsoft STOLE EVERYTHING from Commodore Amiga operating systems!!!!! Prove me wrong!!!
I just found this video at 2am hoping to improve my horrible sub-30 FPS at low altitudes tomorrow, and I really think this is gonna help, thanks for the great content dude
This is great! Good to know some of them seemed to change with the update. Playing with the settings can be tedious but worth it - this will definitely help me out!
Ambient occlusion is the light reflection off other surfaces. So you get tunnels and overhangs which are lit by light bouncing off other surfaces below them and not just global light sources.
Would be nice, but this is a tonne of work and you'd have to do it over for each type of headset I would think. Now if he wants to kick off with the Rift S, I'm happy with that!! 😉
Beautiful work and comparison! I was gonna do something like this my self but found this so no need and no way I could reach your quality of work either. I just bought a Radeon 6900xt and after being able to pretty much max everything including MSAA x4 and SLAA x2 I was still sometimes reaching the mid 30s FPS. I’ll do some more experimenting between the two to find the sweet spot. MSAA and SLAAcompletely off makes a huge difference in visuals as well as FPS but some AA is clearly worth sacrificing for the reflections we didn’t know we wanted. Thanks again!
I've spent like 5 hours performance tuning DCS to work with my Quest 2 and a laptop with an RTX 2060, and this video helped me get like ~5fps more for a better looking game in 10 minutes.
Can you give me your settings please? how much fps on average do you get? I have a Y540 with 90W RTX 2060 and I just bought Rift S, thank you in advance and happy flying!
"The quantum computer we need to play at max settings is not available to us yet".............what a comment....so true.......30 years ago we were playing with a Spectrum ZX and Amstrads 464 with green/monochrome monitors Arkanoid with blocky monolithic graphics and today we have the pleasure to choose between ambient occlusion and droplets on the glassy bubble canopy and still complain........come on.....Enjoy the magic of present tech even if you make out of it 30fps......its still magic......long way since back then.....:-)))) Great work buddy....actually Excellent!!! Well done for yr time and effort but above all for sharing it with us all. Fly safe from Athens Greece 😅😅😅
Made the adjustments except left raindrops off. Definitely an improvement. My FPS went down a fair amount though. From averaging 100 to averaging 50. AMD Ryzen™ 5 5600X W/RGB Air Cooling(3.7 GHz up to 4.6 GHz, 32 MB L3 cache, 6 cores) HyperX® 32 GB DDR4-3200 RGB SDRAM (2 x 16 GB) • WD Black 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ TLC M.2 SSD, 1 TB 7200 rpm SATA HDD • NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3060 (12 GB GDDR6 dedicated)
SSAO is a kind of shadow/lighting that effects when two objects are very close together, such as corners between instruments and the panel, the ground along the bottom of walls, etc. It darkens the shadows there or brightens them to simulate light that should or shouldn't be bouncing. IMO it's one of the most important things in game graphics which adds kind of a depth to the image.
There is a bug in the game that's still around from the beginning. The water layer is being calculated under the terrain even when flying over solid land and it's not visible. Setting water to low (or medium if you fly Navy jets and want better water) reduces overall game overhead. More important if you have an older computer or less powerful one, but good to know about in general.
Excellent video I'll definitely share it in my group as well as play with the settings. Just got a 3080ti that Im trying to get the best FPS and graphics out of this definitely will help.
Very well put together mate very well presented many thanks. I just have everything on max except SSAO and SSLR. Run it in 4k on my EVGA 3090 FTW3 ULTRA Gaming 24gb card 😎
One video idea would be to test out how much performance different cockpits need. For example side by side f14 and f18 how much fps you get in each cockpit. I heared some people worry about the jf17 of f14 because because it has bad fps in cockpit.
If you own Supercarrier, use water. If you fly Heli's ground effects matter, not clouds. If you fly jets, blur, clouds, and AA may matter if you want to show off to your friends. Remember, it's ALL about the FPS!! Cheers Fellow DCS Pilots. I salute you ALL!! .....P.S. The U.S. Military tracks/stores your performance...just in case they need pilots ASAP...just an FYI ;} How better to train potential pilots for FREE!
Anisotropic filtering changes the sharpness of textures rendered in distance. The biggest visible effect of cockpit global illumination is when you fly from above ground to above sea. In the test is missing comparsion of how much the water details changes the wake effects behind moving ships. In Depth of Field test is not visible bokeh because it needs some special conditions to be able to see it. E.G. look into the sun through trees. The chimney slider changes the ammount of smoking chimneys. Lens and dirt effect is much more visible in outside view.
![DCS 2.7 | Side-by-Side Comparison of EVERY Graphics Option [BENCHMARKS + VISUALS]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
