Well, the graphical changes are huge. But aside from them there are new airbases and some new non-flying models. The UI is hi-res and looks pretty modern now. There is a new communication wheel that mirrors (and improves on) the DCS/Heatblur wheel. But overall the changes are incremental. If you are running a struggling system, there’s no reason to leave 4.37.
1st Campaign mission and all started well. I rescaled the view to 90% and that made the world normal sized (no more F-15s the size of airliners). I disabled grass and shrubs which made a barely noticeable (but not zero) difference in frames, which were acceptable. Unfortunately, the game crashed during climbout.
Just in case someone has a lot of time invested in their control binding configs.
I’m rebuilding them in an attempt to standardize them, not only between aircraft, but between simulations. Not as hard as it used to be, now that more DX assignments are available and because you can create a DX SHIFT (not shift 
) assignment. So far, my DCS and BMS configs are the lining up pretty well.
did I see there A/G OPS !? do they simulate israeli F15C variant capable of dropping eggs ?
Falcon BMS 4.38 setup for low-end systems, for those who wanted more than 30-40 fps.
Falcon BMS User.cfg
// No trees, no grass
set g_bParallelRenderThread 1 // multicore support ( 1 is default, i think)
set g_bNewTerrainRenderTrees 0 // If you want the new trees to be rendered
set g_bNewTerrainEnableDynamicLights 0 // If New Terrain and new trees will use dynamic lighting
set g_bNewTerrainRenderShrubs 0 // If you want Shrubs to be rendered
set g_bNewTerrainRenderGrass 0 // grass
// reflections, shadows and fancy graphics
set g_bEnvironmentMapping 0 // 0 for more performance , reflections
set g_bWaterEnvironmentMapping 0 // 0 for more performance, Reflections
set g_bShadowMapping 0 // 0 for more performance, Shadows
set g_bShadowOnSmoke 0 // 0 for more performance, Shadows
set g_bReducePSFires 1 // 1 for more performance
set g_bHdrLighting 0 // Disables the HDR lighting (default 1/true).
set g_nAnisotropicValue 0 // AF (0 is default)
set g_nPostAAMode 0 // FXAA on/off (0 - off default)
// various gfx optimizations
set g_fNewTerrainProceduralDistance 0 // 12 km default in 3d: .gtdist x
set g_bNewTerrainProceduralUse1024Textures 1 // 0 default 2048x2048
set g_fNewTerrainTessellationFactor 0.2 // default 0.5 - 3d: .tessfactor X
set g_bNewTerrainPhotorealForce4KTiles 1 // default 0, forces 4k instead of 16k Photoreal if installed
set g_nNewTerrainHiresTilesDistKM 16 // default 32 km, may affect VRAM usage
set g_bRenderNewTerrainToENVMap 1 // default 1 reflections will look much worse (Instead of terrain there will be fog color)
set g_fNewTerrainFrustumCullingFactor 1.0 // default 1.0 - culling of GPU rendering. 3d: .ntfrustum X
set g_nPrefilterENVSampling 1024 // default 1024, – Decide how many texturing passes the Environment mapping. Reducing the default value may help with performance.
Thank you sir! Will come in handy for the budget rigs we have in squad. But by jove what an update. Can’t fly tactically anymore, spend so much time oohing and ahhing. Sure it’s not dcs fidelity down low from 5k up it’s… Immersive! And i really like what they have done with atmospherics, doesn’t have a gamy look at all. Highly recommended, preforms great though I cannot speak for vr
Two successful Campaign hops in a row (ie, no more game crashes)! Both were in the F-15 and both were about an hour, my time, with generous use of time acceleration. Some rare short stutters but I have BMS on a big HDD so I can’t blame the game. The first sortie was with the 4K tiles and the 2nd (I think) was with the 16K. TBH I am not so sure I went through the right steps to tell the game which to use. Either way, whatever I was flying over looked terrific in VR and ran acceptably well. I bagged a MiG-23 with a long shot on the first mission and both a MiG-23 and MiG-29 on the second. My wingman really flew smart on the second mission as well. (She bagged five–and SURVIVED). I really like the AI in BMS. I can’t say if it has improved over 4.37 but I was not expecting Cpt. Flores to survive that furball. She turned cold at just about the moment I was hoping she would. We made a sexy overhead approach back to Osan and THAT was about as much fun as single-player can get!
A rando shot from the 1st sortie.
The new UI.
Any tips for unloading the CPU to circumvent stutters, my GPU (RTX4060), RAM (64GB) and drive (NVMe) shouldn’t pose a problem. Seems my ancient i5-6600K with 4 cores is the bottleneck - would love to replace it but it’s basically the best CPU my mobo can accomodate. DCS runs fine on this hardware. What times, BMS is more demanding than DCS …
hopefully they will polish the performance with time
I also like what DCS has achieved , improved graphics with improved performance
multi-threading to the rescue ! ( have read somewhere that f4.0 has some sort of m-t , probably thay can expandon that ; @MigBuster iirc you mentioned it before ? )
That’s quite a CPU/GPU performance mismatch! Like @NEVO is saying, it is quite a credit to DCS that it can run so well with an old-gen brain. It also makes sense that BMS struggles given that so much more is happening (usually) in the bubble.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any tips for CPU. The performance of the new BMS 4.38 is why I told to developers: The DCS looks better and runs better.
Falcon is fully demanding for strong core performance. I have 70-300 fps with RX 5700 XT 8 GB VRAM with a default setup in 1440p (that means (8k textures) in air based on altitude and when looking, but when go down a closing to terrain my fps drops to 50 or lower to 30 fps.
I also realized that a new BMS 4.38 little bit buggy. When tried to activate AA and switch back to default, fps did not go up to previous values. The same when enabled/disabled grass for a test.
The fix is a computer reboot. A close and start game again did not help.
Unfortunately, you have too new a GPU and too old a CPU. This combination means that a bottleneck is at the CPU side. I remember very well when changed MOBO P67 with i5-2400 overlocked to @3,8Ghz and 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz to X570 with R7 3700X and 32GB DDR4 3600Mhz with old GTX 1060 6GB (before I was changed it to RX 5700 XT).
I got 3x higher fps (average + max), and mainly no anymore drops to 0-5 fps like with a previous CPU but a minimum doesn’t go lower than 40 (2019). I was literary shocked because I thought that a legendary Sandy Bridge overlocked CPU should be enough for the modern Pascal GPU. The opposite was true.
Nowadays, if I buy a new GPU such as RX 9070/XT I’m sure that it will be a bottleneck for a new GPU with the current R7 3700X even tuning it for the highest possible core performance (no overclocking).
So I’m considering if I might buy the R7 5700X3D for AM4 or buy a more expensive but more performance AM5 PC. I would like to new ones but out of money.
PS: I wish I won in lottery. 
Actually, situation with the new BMS 4.38 remained me situation from history when flew Falcon 4.0: Allied Force. I mean those fps drops of course.
Hard to believe nowadays but I was able and willing to fly it with lower than 30 fps.
Yes it was MT in 1998…unfortunately nothing is ever that simple.
Blockquote - Page 10 BMS 438 Tech manual.
BMS for all its improvements is still partly based on the ancient Falcon 4.0 code, which was not optimized for today’s multi-threaded, multi-core CPUs and GPUs capable of parallel processing. The code renders views in a more serialised way, one after the other. So, the more views we render and the more there is to see in a particular view, the slower everything gets. As such it benefits more from a fast CPU than a multi-core one.
If you look at Task Manager or Resource Monitor, you will notice that the CPU and/or the GPU are now better utilized than previous versions of BMS. Both are still idling to some degree, but the BMS coders have stretched the potential of the Falcon code beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, and they have pushed the limits even further with 4.38. For example, BMS now uses a dedicated thread for all graphics rendering, which decouples it from the simulation thread and allows it feeds the GPU with as much throughput as possible.
Blockquote
Nevertheless, we are not yet at a point where all the parallel processing capabilities of current hardware can be exploited to the fullest, so a single fast GPU is preferable to a SLI or Crossfire configuration of slightly slower
ones.
BMS 4.38 is a completely new ball game when it comes to performance. The upgraded terrain engine, hi-res textures, new cockpits, and high poly count models make the BMS world much more detailed and will require
faster hardware than 4.37 to run smoothly. This is especially the case for VR users who want maximum details turned on. Many users will be required to upgrade their hardware or do some tweaking with settings to get acceptable performance. Users will have the option to reduce textures to 4K (versus 8K) with a script which can help with performance. BMS can take advantage of the very latest CPU and GPU hardware.
I have installed 4.38 and for me it has gone without a hitch. It even automatically allows you to select either 4.37 or 4.38 in the launcher.
Internal gfx settings are the only thing I use because they have been recommended. So max AA, vertical sync to on - as I have a 4K 60hz monitor that just caps it to 60 fps (yes I run it at 1440p) - I don’t need to go higher for anything.
So in Windows in power saver mode which caps the CPU I have ran TEs like the Link 16 one and it is same as 4.37…like running Word. I will have to run the campaign at some point in the future.
I need to save all the runway charts as images due to the program on the tablet I use and will be doing some free flight IFR for the time being.
How good is the ATC in 4.38? I was following vectors to final yesterday, which seemed very fluid and believable, but was rudely interrupted by my wife reminding me that it was time to dad-Uber one of kids from volleyball. At the time, I was at 2000 ft and 200 kts, so must have been close. Did not have the field in sight though.
Pretty good for a default in game system especially compared to other combat sim/ games. Need a lot of compromises in there though as the comms manual explains. You can sub to AI based ones now for MSFS2024 but have not tried those.
A lot of work has gone into it sorting out the traffic over the years. The approach will depend what you want to do…but you have to look at the comms manual.
I always do the overhead break because I HATE being told what to do. Plus the break just looks cool. I find the ATC to be convincing. Really nothing they do bursts my suspension of disbelief.
Does your home airbase ever get attacked, thus wiping out the ATC peeps? Just curious; a WWIII-like scenario I figure the first thing to go is the tower, ASR (Radar), and navaids? And most/all radios
No offense as I think ATC was once your profession. But if the tower, radar and navaids were taken out, I think ops would manage, at least in M/VFR conditions. The runways would be my target of choice. I have had my airbase’s runway and AAA assets taken out. But I can’t recall having lost the tower.