Stuttering, solved for me.

I am not claiming to have a solution to all stuttering issues, but I sure solved my stuttering!

Here is just a sample of tweaks I tried first :

- Windows updating, game mode on/off, removing and disabling lots of stuff, virtual memory default/off/various sizes

- DCS clean reinstall, repair, delete shaders, options tinkering

- NVIDIA driver clean reinstall, updates, defaults, driver tinkering, DSR, overclocking, underclocking,

- BIOS overclocking, defaults, various optimisations, disabling stuff

- Process management, afinity in and out of DCS, Process Lasso

- Crying

- Tried various headtracking software

Out of all of these, a few tweaks really helped, so my top three would be: MSI Afterburner with the totally awesome automatic curve builder, Process Lasso for background process optimisation (no afinity tweaking anymore), and a decent BIOS configuration. Also of note is the Opentrack software that is very good compared to all other I've tried (did not try TrackIR though).

But still, when thing were getting hairy I was suffering of severe stuttering around densely populated area. So combat was a bit disappointing to say the least.

Problem was, above 60fps it was mooth as silk, at 58fps the stuttering was annoying, at 50fps it was totally putting me off, at 45fps it was utterly unbearable and unplayable.

When I was playing Falcon3 on a 386DX you would get between 15-25fps (mind you in 640x480@256 colors) but stuttering was not a factor. Nor was it a factor in DCS 1.5 I think, not even maybe in 2.2OB, it appeared around the 2.5 mark for me.

I was thinking, the performance degradation is a symptom, not the cause because the sim should still be totally playable at lower framerates, like 30fps should be sufficient. Maybe it has more to do with timing than performance.

So I tried this one weird trick, and put my two monitors at 50hz instead of 60hz, with vsync on.

And low and behold, the stuttering is gone :)

You should try running fraps to show your framerate instead of the built in frame rate counter. I have seen sims where if you enable vsync in game, it clashes with nVidia's vsync and you essentially half your framerate. The game would show 50 or 60 FPS, but in reality you where only getting 25 or 30 FPS.

The solution there is first double checking in nvidia control panel that you are not forcing vsync. If that doesnt help either disable it in game and force it in nvidia, or the other way around. Just make sure you dont have both the game and the driver trying to sync to your monitor.

Another potential explanation that I have also encountered while playing a flight sim on a 4K TV; in full screen mode, the game let me select a resolution, but didnt let me choose a refresh rate, and selected the lowest refresh rate my TV supported. On my TV that happened to be 24 or 25 Hz. So I got 25FPS. The solution there was not running in full screen mode (but what is called full screen emulation, it still fills the screen but uses windows desktop settings for resolution and refresh rate, same as disabling fullscreen in DCS). Since DCS doesnt have a refresh rate setting either, it may have the exact same problem.