The Complete Guide to Better DCS Spotting | DCS World 

Could you post what specs you have please?

@@pkandy2 12900k, 3090, 32 ram, ssd

do you still use these settings now with MT and dlss because I see to have troubles with seeing targets in vr and i have a hp reverb g2 and everything is kind of hard to see a plane even in front of me

@@modelotime2456 No, I have a 4080 now. Back then I was using a 1080. I am using DLAA with 1.2 PD on the VR tab. I still don't have trouble seeing planes at 10-20 miles. What specs do you have?

Seconded

absolutely

FOR THE ALGORITHM

whats ur reshade setting?

Can you detail these upscalling options ?

Agree, we can only hope. I still don't understand while ALt-enter to stretch makes the buttons unclickable in a game where a single airframe costs as much or more than a full AAA game does.

SSAA should definitely be off unless you have rendering power to spare, it's wasteful of GPU power and MSAA does almost as good a job (they do combine though so performance is the only reason to not use both). SSLR and SSAO shouldn't have any negative impact on spotting, and have only minimal effect on performance, so if your frame rate can withstand them, turn them on. (SSLR in particular will make your nice shiny plane appear to reflect itself off its own skin. Looks good!) Anisiotropic doesn't really reduce jagginess, rather it improves texture sharpness when the surface the texture is on is viewed at an oblique angle. (Like when sitting on a runway looking down it. Note how the runway markers sharpen up with it high and get blurry and ill-defined with it low.) Oh and Alt+Enter is the secret weapon! Use it with Full Screen checked on too (and in my case my resolution is set the same as my display, 1920x1080). Unfortunately its setting is not saved and also resets whenever you switch out of the sim, but you'll get higher frame rates (at least on a regular display, not sure how it works in VR if at all) with it. (There's no indication of which mode its in other than using the RCtrl+Pause frame rate counter and your own eyes.) And no, it is not disabling VSync, it doesn't create the horizontal tearing we expect to see with VSync disabled. It's just either locking each frame to the same amount of display time, or letting it show (complete) frames as soon as they're available and the next display refresh happens. So an uneven rate, but faster and, at least for me, far preferable. I run a 60 Hz display, and rarely get the full 60 unless looking up at the sky. Alt+Enter (which is a Windows DirectX command, hence it works with either Alt key where DCS commands differentiate between Reft and Right Alt) will let me unlock it from whole number divisors of the display rate (so, 30, 20, 15, etc...) and get "in between" rates, like say 47. I can't recommend this enough, and it may let you turn up other graphics settings that you currently have down for performance reasons. Oh and I'm not sure what you mean by "chaos" or not being able to click the plane cockpit. Try hitting LAlt+C which switches mouse modes between head pan/tilt (which has no effect if you're running a head tracker like Track IR) and cursor/clicking mode. If there's no mouse cursor, hit LAlt+C and it should appear. (That's such a vital function I've remapped it to space bar.) I have done all of this with either a single or two displays, by the way. (Though I don't currently have any DCS content on the 2nd display, I use it for manuals, websites, SRS, etc. Possible it might be different if you have DCS set up to put MFCDs, etc, on your 2nd display.)

You've also convinced me to try Reshade again. I'm generally against modding the game outside the Saved Games folder, but will give it a shot and let you know what kind of performance hit (if any) I see. Appreciate that you don't think every single filter is good or necessary, some people go way overboard with it.

Ah! Just installed it and am trying it now and I just noticed something interesting! That stuff I said about Alt+Enter above NO LONGER WORKS! It's now giving me about 45 FPS which I could only get before by pressing Alt+Enter (otherwise it would lock to 30 by default, at least unless I'm looking away from stuff and am able to reach the full 60 that my display supports). So Reshade interacts with this somehow. (I was also getting 50 FPS on this same mission, view angle, before installing Reshade. I may consider that 10% loss too much of a performance hit to be worth it, but on the other hand it's nice to not have to constantly check Alt+Enter to see if I'm at an optimal framerate so I'm going to try it for a while and see what I think.)

Correction: Alt+Enter still needs to be pressed the first time to get the best frame rate. (Which still has no effect on my ability to click on the sim, so I'm not sure what you're describing there.) But unlike before Reshade, once activated, it seems to stick and pressing it again won't turn the frame-rate back to locked to whole number divisor of your display's rate. That's still a plus. (Haven't tested yet if Alt-Tabbing out of DCS will still knock it back to that mode.) Also, it seems that even when I disable all Reshade I still have the performance hit, so Reshade simply being installed seems to come with some performance hit. (On the plus side, the filters I'm running don't add noticeable performance hit beyond that.) This is only based on one quick test I did before installing Reshade though, so it's possible it's spurious data. Unfortunately it seems the only way to A/B this is to uninstall Reshade entirely (unless there's a way to quickly make it not load -- anyone know of one?) Another issue, tried your recommendation about permissions for the ini files and it didn't help. Running DCS as administrator did though, but I don't like to do that. (Particularly with made-in-Russia software! Yikes!) But the good news is, once you have it set up, you can then launch DCS normally and, as it won't be writing to its ini files anymore, you'll no longer get the warning message. (But still, you ran Putin's software with full admin power once. Did it send your private data to Russia? Who knows? Still, I risked it.) I'd also advise against using the Curves filter as it pushes shadow detail down into pure black. Yeah, your eye will always gravitate towards the higher contrast of two images, but if that happens at a loss of detail/content, it's not worth it to me. I also didn't bother with the "Vibrance" filter (which seems to actually just adjust color saturation), leaving only the Luminance Sharpening on (and tweaked to taste). I'll run like this for a while and see if my framerates still feel acceptable. I was right on the edge before, and really don't want to reduce other quality settings. The sharpening helps, but also looks like what it is, creating halos around edges. Combination of helpful/fake looking. (This is no-doubt why DCS doesn't apply sharpening by default.)

@@AdmiralQuality Hi, I'm also on the fence about this. Since it's been 2 months I'm curious did you end up keeping reshade or found it has too much performance hit?

It does not.

you're already at the best resolution for spotting. Lowering resolution is useful for people at higher res. The other tips should work for you as well.

@@Rhyn0 Thanks, I appreciate that. I pretty much already run those settings for the most part. Now if only I can have my actual eyeballs be better. Track IR and a zoom slider on the HOTAS really help.

Make sure reshade.ini is not read only or hidden, then in the proprieties tab ->Security your user has Modify permission(or full control). If that fails launch DCS as administrator. hope it helps

@@Rhyn0 I'll try running DCS as an administrator. Had tried all the others previously without luck. Thanks for the help!

No, just use the other settings

It has always had an impact on fps.. if too much try x2

imgur.com/a/n7UcE9q

Run dcs as admin

@@Joemate23 You are a.... legend. How did you figure??

Reddit haha

simply skeaing the shape of the hostile plane is a triangle mesh with a very high resolution and from this mesh the gpu needs to decide, how to show them as pixels. The further away the plane is, the less pixels are available to display the plane. Now most games want to prevent the plane from vanishing, so they say, the plane needs to be atleast a certain amount of pixels. Then on a 4k display those pixels are way smaller than on a hd display (for same screen size). So your enemy plane will be be more visible since it occupies more of the screen area and thereby is easier to spot.

We can only help future devs start with smart scaling in mind.

@@Rhyn0 yes this is true. Thanks for the info btw

What control panel?

Same