Glad you were able to get that GPU. You chose a very good time to get started in DCS, the past two years have been horrible for video cards but it’s just gotten a lot better last month.
If you had said that before, I would have recommended an RTX 3070 (or RX6800 if that one is cheaper) or better.
Although you might not be getting the performance to justify such a card anyway with that older cpu/motherboard combination.
Honestly, I fly DCS VR exclusively and while it can be a ton of fun, it definitely has its downsides.
And those downsides are worse to someone just getting started in DCS.
Namely:
- need an even beefier pc
- annoying when learning: I cannot easily read guides or follow video on tablet or second screen
- need a ton of buttons mapped on HOTAS: no easy keyboard access while blinded by the VR headset.
So for now, I would recommend you to get some form of headtracking and keep it on the 2D screen: TrackIR 5 has been the standard for ages now, but the plastic is flimsy and the price high. Alternatives are DelanClip and Trackhat (both are lower cost than TrackIR, but same working principle) and FaceTrackNoIR (tracks faces, usually lower quality tracking but also cheaper and simpler to understand)
Then if you like it a lot, you can try VR but I would only do that after having reasonably mastered a module and being sure you want to do this for a while. With a new pc and a HOTAS with many buttons, it gets expensive fast.