What they said ^^^
Before I dive in here: Below assumes you understand that I’m Used To It - how it looks. An acceptable level of graphical detail that keeps it performing (smoothness). My priorities are: Immersion. VR brings it, stuttering and choppy FPS ruins it. So I’m willing to sacrifice visuals perhaps more than most.
I fly mainly (lately anyway) the Syria map, in VR. Similar system: 5900X, 3080Ti, 64GB RAM, Varjo Aero.
Only big changes I have compared to what you showed:
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Terrain Shadows - OFF: Still get cloud shadows which is the most important one to me; gives the entire ‘scene’ more depth.
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Visible Range - High: reduces object count (when the widget that shows this is working)
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Water - LOW: Haven’t tested this in a while honestly; High used to have a big-ish hit on my system; Medium didn’t look significantly better than low. Again, been a while since I tested these.
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I periodically run a ‘cleaner’ to shut off/disable processes I don’t care about; my PC does only flight sims (DCS 90% lately). I have a 7 yo PC that does what I need for everything else just fine. Keeping my [new, 2 yo] system as clean as possible. When I first did this it smoothed things out overall. That was a couple of years ago. Would it still make a difference? I’ve not gone back to test it == would be PITA to do.
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I use DLSS on Balanced, 0.5 sharpen. When this feature first came out for DCS there was a noticable difference between the choices. Not sure how much anymore; I was new to DFR. Now dropping it with this ON to, say, ultra performance may show a larger performance delta? < I was to focused on the numbers and not “just flying” [the game] - enjoying it.
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Many tuning tips have a short shelf life as the engine, plugins (DFR), 3rd party code, drivers, etc. make for a moving target. The BIG things like clouds, vis. range (affects object count), shadows, resolution (DFR) and the like are where I seem to see larger improvements over time.
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Varo Aero + DFR (Dynamic Foveated Rendering the Pimax Cristal has this now too): Without digging my G2 out and trying it for comparison I’m not sure how large a difference that makes; my G2 numbers (same system and settings) were lower for sure but that was several updates ago and could be engine improvements?
I guess the above are ‘mid range’ settings, in place for 2 generations - old PC vs new one, same settings. The new one (listed at the start) keeps me above 70 FPS on everything I do (vs ~45 on the old one), and 85+ (max 90) most of the time, running a ‘world generation/scripting engine’ in the background to bring some life to DCS: “make my own fun” .
The number of objects being processed has more effect on performance on my system thus the 3rd party ‘object generator’ (High vs Ultra vis. range shows improvement without me really thinking about it, IOW: I’m “used to it” - this vis. range): the map makes a difference.
No idea how it would perform online as I don’t have the time for that (I play when I can)
Without spending another $2,000+ on, say, a 4090, I’m happy; the 4090 I’m sure would make it ‘look purty’ but not convinced the sim would run smoother overall?. Last update did introduce a small bit of stutter that I’ve been able to reduce, but not completely eliminate; seems to be more of an I/O issue (data access thing) than GPU/CPU[1].
[1] This may be my scripts but I’ve worked hard to ‘spread the load’ here and haven’t found evidence, yet, this is the issue, ie; the same code in use in the latest version and the previous one.
PS: a algorithm, internal to DCS, that adapted to the current load on the system might be nice but seems such a low-level thing it would require too much code re-wiring to happen. Tough to pull off.