Need to Roll Back to an Earlier DCS - but What Version?

I was playing up until about a year ago and I'm not sure what version it was - thought it was 2.0? I just reinstalled yesterday and the short of it, is I can no longer get satisfactory performance or visual quality with my long-in-the-tooth gaming rig with this new engine. Previously I was able to run at 1080p with settings above Medium (had normal shadows, 4x AA and a number of other settings one notch above the medium baseline) and could acheive FPS mostly in the high 50's, occasionally dipping into the mid 40's.

Now my frame rate are as low as 30 if I run with those same settings. With some testing and tweaking, about the only setting I can run above the medium baseline is 2x AA and I have to reduce tree object down to 50%. That gives me FPS for the most part in the high 50s, but I now get these jarring stutters where I drop down into the 30's when I pan with TrackIR in certain situations.

Fortunately I don't have too much of a $ investment in the game, only owning Flaming Cliffs 3 DLC. The biggest disappointment was after a few tests wit the CCIP on the A-10A, it still was broken. If that was fixed, I might consider sticking with the new engine, but that would be the only reason. Yes I know I could buy the A-10C, but I have too many other flightsims to warrant a purchase like that. The only other DLC that appeals to me is the F/A-18 as it's the only available aircraft for the game that my country actually flew. Disappointing I won't be able to fly it, but I'll live without it to be able to just play this game with some visual fidelity and decent performance. I really only want to play FC 3 in SP now, so I'm looking to roll back to an older edition of the engine.

I'm running the Steam edition and what listed under the Beta tab is an experiment in confusion. There's "Final-1.5.8 -final 1.5x version", "openalpha - Public alpha versions (2.x)", "openbeta - Public beta versions" and "stable-1.5.6 - The last 1.5.6 version (old render eng...)" Not knowing what I was last running, I haven't got a clue if any of those would give me that back.

If anyone could give any feedback on which version of the engine would be the correct one, I'd really appreciate it.

The antialiasing on version 2.5 is the single most fps-killer of the 2.5 version. You dont say what specific hardware you use, on my rig the GPU is an nvidia and I got better results turning off the AA on DCS and enabling it on the nVidia control panel.

You probably should roll back to 1.5.8 version ... but you will then be using the old Caucasus Map; on my humble opinion its better to use 2.5 with only 2x AA (on the driver) and use the new Map, than be on the old map even if it allows a higher AA.

FC3 is a fine DLC .. and before year end you should be able to upgrade it to MAC (aka FC4) ... tough ED hasnt yet stated what the upgrade price will be.

That's good feedback Rudel - thanx. I really haven't tried Nvidia aliasing or tweaking settings from within Inspector, so I will give that a bit of a go before I thrown in the towel.

As I said, my PC is long-in-the-tooth: i5 2500 quad core @ 3.3, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, Geforce TX 680 w/2 GB, Win7 64, SATA 3 SSD . Old, but it does run BMS Falcon, FSX, IL-2 CloD Blitz, Elite Dangerous and Strike Fighters 2 with all the bells & whistles. Which is why I don't need DCS to be the bleeding edge edition of the engine - have lots of other sims to play.

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As I said, my PC is long-in-the-tooth: i5 2500 quad core @ 3.3, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, Geforce TX 680 w/2 GB, Win7 64, SATA 3 SSD . Old, but it does run BMS Falcon, FSX, IL-2 CloD Blitz, Elite Dangerous and Strike Fighters 2 with all the bells & whistles. Which is why I don't need DCS to be the bleeding edge edition of the engine - have lots of other sims to play.

I discarded my previous sims .. I dont have too much free time, so I prefer to concentrate just on DCS.

On your PC the weaklink is the GPU .. perhaps you could check 2nd hand cards, for example the GTX970 is now quite cheap but has twice the performance of your GTX680 .. and afterwards you can still sell the older card to recover some of the upgrade cost.

I discarded my previous sims .. I dont have too much free time, so I prefer to concentrate just on DCS.

lol Neither do I, but I keep playing them none the less. :)

On your PC the weaklink is the GPU .. perhaps you could check 2nd hand cards, for example the GTX970 is now quite cheap but has twice the performance of your GTX680 ...

Well the emphasis would have to be on the cheap, because with 2 kids in college I don't exactly have much of a gaming budget. I do have a nephew who's saavy with the 2nd hand PC market (he also custom built my PC) and we've talked about him sussing out a good GPU. So maybe that will happen this year. I do have Definite plans to upgrade to 16 GB RAM before the new year, but I doubt that would help much with DCS performance.

The antialiasing on version 2.5 is the single most fps-killer of the 2.5 version. You dont say what specific hardware you use, on my rig the GPU is an nvidia and I got better results turning off the AA on DCS and enabling it on the nVidia control panel.

I went ahead and enabled AA from within Nvidia Inspector with the following settings: 2x1 Supersampling, Mode=Override any application setting, Gamma Correction=on, Transparency Multisampling=enabled, FXAA=on. It's indeed a big improvement over the MSAA setting in DCS. I'm usually close to, or at 60 fps now and was able to increase shadows one notch and Tree Visibility to 60%. I don't know if I'm running the best mode of AA, but I figure the results were good enough for me to experiment with going to a 4x mode. Anyhow definitely playable now, so that was a very good suggestion.

I tried increasing DCS's ANISO Filtering from 4x to 8x, but that brought back the occasional stutters when I pan with TrackIR. I'm considering overriding the DCS filtering from the Inspector and are curious if you've tried that as well and what your results were?

I'm curious of one thing, given that the other sims you play are quite old at least regarding the graphics engine, cant you live with dcs at minimum graphic level? At least for me, DCS at minimum level looks better than bms at maximum; not a critic, is normal given the gfx engine years of difference.

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1.5.8 if you want the best performance

I'm curious of one thing, given that the other sims you play are quite old at least regarding the graphics engine, cant you live with dcs at minimum graphic level? At least for me, DCS at minimum level looks better than bms at maximum; not a critic, is normal given the gfx engine years of difference.

Eye candy is trumped by good game play for me, so yes I can live with a number of settings on low. The bigger issue though, is that without decent ANISO and AA I find DCS suffers from a fair amount of shimmering. That I don't have in any of my other flight sims and I find it distracting and annoying.