This page contains contributions from my friend Lynx.

Technical Bulletins

Current known issues and workarounds

Broken 3 Weather Preset Artifacting

The “Broken 3” weather preset exhibits visual artifacting in VR.

Workaround: Use a different weather preset.

Recommended Specs

Storage

You MUST install DCS on an SSD (solid state) instead of an HDD (spinning disk). The base game is 160GB, a typical large install is around 700GB and a complete install is over 1TB. A dedicated 1TB or 2TB high performance SSD is recommended.

Tom’s Hardware: Best SSDs

An SSD is absolutely essential. When installed on a spinning disk, DCS can take over 20 minutes to load into a mission and may crash during loading or during gameplay.

CPU

The best CPUs for DCS World are AMD X3D series CPUs such as:

• AMD 9800X3D
• AMD 7800X3D
• AMD 7600X3D
• AMD 5800X3D
• AMD 5700X3D
• AMD 5600X3D

However, any fast gaming-oriented CPU with at least 4 cores is fine.

Gamer’s Nexus: Best CPUs of 2024

Ideally, use an upgraded CPU cooler. We’re fans of the Thermaltake’s series of budget-friendly air coolers and the Arctic Liquid Freezer III AIO liquid cooler.

Gamers Nexus: CPU Cooler Benchmarks

RAM

DCS World requires 16GB+ RAM minimum for small missions on the Caucases map. 32GB RAM is required for large multiplayer servers and the Syria map. 64-96GB RAM is recommended if you have the budget available.

You should ideally use two sticks of RAM and not four sticks. Most systems have lower performance with four sticks due to motherboard and CPU bandwidth limits. If you use overclocked RAM, you are more likely to have stability issues with 4 sticks than with 2.

When purchasing RAM, match the frequency and timings of the RAM to the CPU manufacturer’s recommendation. The recommendation may vary by specifc CPU and motherboard. AMD provides a table of their test results with overclocked memory here. On Intel systems, you are generally limited by the motherboard. Check with the manufacturer of the RAM, as some provide tables on their websites for selecting an appropriate kit. Do not buy a higher frequency of RAM than recommended for your configuration because it may be unstable in combination with your CPU.

In most cases the optimal speeds are:

New builds should have an absolute minimum of 32GB of RAM.

GPU

The best GPUs for DCS World are high-end Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Intel GPUs are acceptable for 1080p at lower settings.

Since DCS uses an older graphics engine, high amounts of VRAM is more important than ray tracing performance. 12GB is a bare minimum, and 16GB+ of VRAM is ideal.

Ideal GPUs for VR include:

† Tentative position, pending additional benchmarks and testing.

Tom’s Hardware: GPU Hierarchy

PSU

You should have a sufficient power supply for your CPU and GPU.

PSU wattage alone is not a good indicator of reliability under load. 80PLUS ratings are not useful for determining overall power delivery and efficiency across a range of scenarios. The 80PLUS rating only test efficiency at a few specific loads, and does not test for performance or reliability. Manufacturers can and do game these ratings!

You need to select a PSU based on results from bench testing by knowledgeable people with the appropriate equipment. Check any power supply you plan to purchase against the Cultist Tier List (see spreadsheet for newer data not yet on the website), as well as LTT Labs’ PSU testing testing. Only buy if it is Tier B on the Cultist list and/or recommended by LTT Labs.

USB

Some USB devices such as HOTASes may exhibit jitter or other issues when connected directly to a computer’s USB power. This is especially a problem with the Saitek/Logitech X52, X55 and X56. In many cases, this can be resolved using a powered USB hub. I’ve personally found powered USB hubs from SABRENT to be good quality for the price. Some of these hubs also have individual switches for each port, which is handy for quickly disconnecting your flight sim devices to play other games where those devices cause problems (looking at you, Elden Ring).

Your motherboard has a limited number of USB devices and limited amount of USB bandwidth it can support. Each USB controller chip can support 127 USB devices- but note that a single physical device often consumes multiple virtual device slots!

Flight simulator devices can push past these device and bandwidth limits, especially when using some of the more advanced head trackers/webcams, VR headsets, and USB displays. If you notice these devices having issues, you may need additional USB controller chips.

Some motherboards have a separate USB controller for the front and rear I/O, which may extend this limit. Other motherboards may have multiple controllers for the rear I/O. Consult your motherboard manual to determine which physical ports correspond to which controllers.

You can add a USB PCIe expansion card to your system and move some devices to the expansion card. We have tested a few of the cheaper and lower end PCIe cards and found them lacking. The very cheapest cards do not actually contain a dedicated controller chip and are simply internal hubs. With other cheap cards we encountered issues such as:

• Cards failing after a few weeks of driving a VR headset
• Driver incompatibilies
• System stability issues such as BSOD crashes and boot loops

In the worst case, a malfunctioning USB card can damage your motherboard through the PCIe port.

The only reliable brand we’ve found is StarTech. While they are expensive, they are the gold standard for commercial systems. We particularly recommend this 4 port card, which has 5Gbps of bandwidth per port rather than sharing a single channel across all ports. You can then attach a hub to each of the ports to share the bandwidth across physical devices as required.

Head Tracking

A head tracker is ideal for anyone who is not using VR. See the companion article on head trackers.

Virtual Reality

See our VR guide for our recommended VR headsets and general VR performance tweaks.

Windows Settings and Tweaks

General Tweaks

If you are running an Intel Alder Lake CPU or AMD Ryzen 7000 Series CPU or newer, upgrade to Windows 11 to use the new Thread Director. Alternatively, you may be able to disable your efficiency cores (E-Cores) in your motherboard settings, but this may impact performance and power consumption in other applications.

Install any available Windows updates.

If your system supports Resizable BAR and/or Smart Access Memory, enable it.

Close any unnecessary programs and browser tabs when playing DCS.

Uninstall all bloatware packaged by the manufacturer of your computer.

Disable any VPN software when playing DCS multiplayer.

Third party antivirus such as Kaspersky, BitDefender, McAfee, Norton, MalwareBytes, etc. is not recommended. These third party programs cause a lot of general system performance problems for gaming. We recommend using the default Microsoft Defender antivirus, and adding an exception for DCS.

Intel CPU Tweaks

Be sure to enable XMP in your motherboard settings as it’s often disabled by default.

AMD CPU Tweaks

If you have the 7900X3D/7950X3D, or a Ryzen X3D CPU with dual CCDs, install the Xbox Game Bar and run it while playing games. AMD’s software uses it to detect when a game is running and change CPU scheduling behavior to allow maximum performance.

Be sure to enable DOCP/EXPO in your motherboard settings as it’s often disabled by default. I measured a 13% CPU performance gain in 3DMark toggling it on and off on my AMD system.

Adjusting Precision Boost Overdrive 2 (PBO2) optimizes power consumption and thermals. Depending on your CPU cooling setup, this may also slightly improve performance.

Nvidia GPU Tweaks

Update your graphics drivers to the latest available version from nvidia.com/drivers or through GeForce Experience. If you are running an outdated driver version, some options like DLSS and SSS may be grayed out in the in-game options.

Disable Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling in Windows settings. It increases input latency and stutter, especially on mid to high end systems when using VR.

Disable ShadowPlay if you aren’t using it to record gameplay footage.

DLSS

DLSS (Dynamic Learning Super Sampling) is a feature on Nvidia GPUs that renders the game at a lower resolution and then uses an AI model to generate a higher resolution image. This can be faster than rendering at the full resolution, at the tradeoff of blurriness/visual artifacts.

The default settings for DLSS in DCS cause ghosting issues on fast-moving objects and blurs the HUD and MFDs in your cockpit. You can improve these issues by following these steps to use a better DLSS preset and exclude the HUD/MFDs from DLSS:

1. Navigate to your Saved Games folder
2. Create a Config/ folder if it doesn’t already exist
3. Create a text file named autoexec.cfg inside the Config/ folder, if it doesn’t already exist. Make sure it is autoexec.cfg, not autoexec.cfg.txt. You may need to enable “Show file name extensions” in Windows Explorer to correctly name the file
4. Edit autoexec.cfg with a text editor and ensure the following values are set - edit them if they’re already in there, or add them if they’re missing:

DLSS_Preset = 'K'
HUD_MFD_after_DLSS = true

Try both without and without DLSS. Some people prefer the softer look and higher framerate with DLSS, some prefer the higher clarity without DLSS.

AMD GPU Tweaks

In the AMD Software, navigate to Preferences, and next to AMD User Experience Program, click Learn More and then Leave. If left enabled, this setting runs a telemetry service on your computer. I found this service was consuming a lot of system resources and making my system generally sluggish on boot. Leaving the program made my computer substantially snappier and my applications started much faster.

Exclude DCS from Microsoft Defender Antivirus

Antivirus software has caused problems with DCS because it sees the Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy protection on files within the DCS game folder as suspicious and deletes these files from the game, causing problems and crashes. Additionally, real-time antivirus scans can reduce disk performance, causing performance problems as DCS streams terrain and texture data from the disk.

These issues can be avoided by adding exceptions for DCS to the antivirus software.

⚠️ If you use mods or play multiplayer, this tweak increases your risk. Use your best judgement about whether to use this tweak. I personally wouldn’t use this with any mod for which I haven’t read the source code. If you use an unsanitized mission.lua, such as with the 3D Editor for DCS Web Editor, DCS Liberation/Retribution, or certain other tools, this also increases your vulnerability to malicious scripts in mission files.

For the default Microsoft Defender antivirus:

1. Open the Windows Security application
2. Select Virus & Threat Protection in the sidebar
3. Under Virus & Threat Protection settings, click Manage Settings
4. Under Exclusions, click Add or Remove Exclusions
5. Add a Folder Exclusion for the DCS game folder, e.g. on my system it is D:\games\dcs\DCS World
6. Add a Folder Exclusion for the DCS Saved Games Folder, e.g on my system it is C:\Users\me\Saved Games\DCS

Set Page File Size

The page file is used by Windows for infrequently accessed data that would otherwise consume RAM. For most users, the default setting is fine. However, some users have found that manually setting the page file size improves performance. This is especially useful if your PC contains multiple types of storage with different speeds, such as both SSDs and HDDs. It’s also useful if you don’t have a lot of free space on your page file’s drive, to help Windows plan better with the limited space.

💡 Reboot your PC after changing page file settings.

Disable USB Selective Suspend

USB selective suspend is a feature intended to reduce electricity usage by powering down idle devices. This can cause problems for flight simulators, such as disconnecting your peripherals during a long cruise, or in some cases, causing devices like head trackers to stop working after a few minutes of use.

Disable this setting:

1. Press the ⊞ Win key to open the start menu, and type “edit power plan”. Click the result that leads to the Control Panel.
2. In the Edit Plan Settings page that appears, click “Change advanced power settings”
3. In the Power Options window that appears, navigate to “USB selective suspend setting” and choose “Disabled” from the dropdown

Game Tweaks

Enable the Frame Rate Counter

While playing the game, press RCtrl + Pause to open a frame rate counter widget. You can use this to check your current framerate and whether you are currently CPU bound or GPU bound. You can use this to measure the performance impact of settings and tweaks.

💡 There is a 180FPS limit by default.

💡 The CPU BOUND/GPU BOUND indicator is not accurate in all cases. To find out if you are CPU limited you must compare frame render time to framerate to determine if your GPU is rendering frames faster than the framerate.

💡 Frame times will be inaccurate in VR if Turbo Mode is enabled in Quad Views.

Recompile Shaders

Every time that DCS World is updated, your graphics driver is updated, or you change your graphics card, you should delete the following directories in your Saved Games folder:

<Saved Games folder>\fxo

<Saved Games folder>\metashaders2

These folders contain shaders, which need to be rebuilt whenever either the hardware, game or graphics card driver is changed. DCS does not seem to consistently automatically rebuild these, resulting in performance issues. Deleting the folders will force DCS to rebuild them; this may cause a one-time increase in load times or some stutter during gameplay, but these will only happen once for each shader and the game may run smoother afterwards.

Learn more about shader compilation and stutter in this blog post.

Disable Data Exports

If you use data exports such as TacView, Winwing’s SimAppPro, DCS-BIOS etc. You should disable these when playing large missions. These export a large amount of data from DCS on every frame, contributing to slowdown.

One way to disable data exports is to edit the Export.lua script within your Saved Games folder. Open <Saved Games folder>\Scripts\Export.lua in a text editor. Add two hyphens (--) in front of a line to disable that line. For example, my Export.lua contains lines for TacView, DCS-BIOS and SRS:

local Tacviewlfs=require('lfs');dofile(Tacviewlfs.writedir()..'Scripts/TacviewGameExport.lua')
dofile(lfs.writedir()..[[Scripts\DCS-BIOS\BIOS.lua]])

pcall(function() local dcsSr=require('lfs');dofile(dcsSr.writedir()..[[Mods\Services\DCS-SRS\Scripts\DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone.lua]]); end,nil)

I can disable TacView and DCS-BIOS as such:

--local Tacviewlfs=require('lfs');dofile(Tacviewlfs.writedir()..'Scripts/TacviewGameExport.lua')
--dofile(lfs.writedir()..[[Scripts\DCS-BIOS\BIOS.lua]])

pcall(function() local dcsSr=require('lfs');dofile(dcsSr.writedir()..[[Mods\Services\DCS-SRS\Scripts\DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone.lua]]); end,nil)

To reverse this change, remove the hyphens you added.

Reduce Disk Usage

Certain SSDs have reduced write performance when close to full because the size of dynamic SLC cache decreases on a full drive. Depending on the model of SSD, you should keep free space at around 25%. This number may change depending on if the SSD is overprovisioned or has DRAM cache.

Periodically Delete Tracks

Every so often, delete Track files from your Saved Games folder to free up disk space. You can find .trk files in <Saved Games folder>Tracks\Multiplayer.

If you use Tacview, also delete old .acmi files in %userprofile%\Documents\Tacview.

Compress Game Files

This tweak doesn’t improve in-game performance, but can save disk space and doesn’t hurt performance. Download Compactor and use it to compress the DCS World game directory and the Saved Games folder. The compression algorithm it uses is built into Windows and has virtually zero performance impact on CPUs made after 2010. On my computer, this shrunk DCS World’s disk usage by over 110GB with no in-game performance impact.

Shrink Kneeboard Pages

Very large kneeboard pages can cause a performance impact. Use image editing software to scale your kneeboard pages down to the resolution of your display. OpenKneeboard’s guide to sizing has useful tips for both VR and 2D.

VR Tweaks

VR Tweaks Not Specific to DCS

See our VR tweaks guide for general VR performance tweaks and settings.

Prefer Standalone Over Steam

Launching DCS through SteamVR runs the game use the older OpenVR API rather than directly using the OpenXR API. This causes a significant performance hit (though the exact amount may vary by system).

For the best performance, run the Standalone version of DCS directly with VR mode enabled in DCS settings.

If you must use Steam, launch the game normally through the desktop client with VR enabled in DCS settings, rather than through SteamVR.

To convert an existing Steam installation to Standalone:

1. Download and run the standalone installer
2. Untick “download” at the end of the setup wizard
3. Manually copy or move your files from the Steam installation to the Standalone installation
4. Delete <DCS standalone installation folder>\Config\retail.cfg
5. Run the “Repair DCS World” application in your Start Menu

Separate Profiles for 2D and VR

If you play in both 2D and VR, you can set up some tweaks to make switching between them easier.

Create two separate shortcuts for DCS, one for 2D and one for VR. For 2D:

"D:\games\dcs\DCS World\bin\DCS.exe" --force_disable_VR

For VR:

"D:\games\dcs\DCS World\bin\DCS.exe" --force_enable_VR

Additionally, you can save custom graphical settings into three different slots in the Options > System tab, using the presets buttons in the bottom right. You can use one for your 2D settings and another for your VR settings.

You can then manually switch between these presets, or use SkateZilla’s launcher to automatically launch using one or the other.

Suggested Game Settings

These settings are a good starting baseline; you may need to tweak and test further, especially for VR setups.

Audio

System

Gameplay

Misc

VR

Troubleshooting Crashes

Unable to start application (0xc0000142)

Download Visual C++ Redistributable 2017 from https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe, install it, and restart your computer.

Other Crashes

Logs

There is a log file located in the Saved Games folder at <Saved Games folder>\Logs\dcs.log. It can sometimes provide clues for why DCS has crashed, but can be difficult to interpret.

Sanity checks

These are some basic steps that have been known to fix crashes for some users in the past.

Recompile Shaders

Follow the steps in the Recompile Shaders section above to clear the shader cache.

Remove all mods

Mods in DCS can cause bizarre, seemingly unrelated issues. Reflected of Reflected Simulations has documented some of the utterly strange bugs that can be caused simply by having a mod installed.

As a troubleshooting step, remove all mods from your DCS installation. (Kneeboard pages are OK. Sound mods, modded aircraft and other assets should be removed. In some rare cases even liveries have caused crashes, such as if a module’s 3D model or textures were updated and an old livery was installed.)

Repair DCS

Follow the instructions on how to cleanup and repair DCS. This will reset your game folder to default.

Rename Saved Games Folder

Occasionally, something in the Saved Games folder triggers problems in DCS. I personally had this problem with F-15E Strike Eagle crashing when it came out, and this fixed the issue for me.

Rename the Saved Games folder to %userprofile%/Saved Games/DCS.backup, then launch DCS. It will reset all of your settings including graphics settings, controls, player profiles, etc. to default. If this fixes your crash, you can then copy the files from the backup back into the Saved Games folder a piece at a time (or reconfigure the game from scratch).

Stability Testing

A potential cause of random crashes is hardware stability issues. The two most common problems we’ve seen are:

1. Power supply not appropriate for the system. Wattage and 80PLUS ratings do not tell you if a power supply is reliable or correct for your system. Modern high-end graphics card are sensitive to voltage stability, and many power supplies - even expensive, high wattage ones from major brands - do not supply stable power under load, resulting in random crashes.
2. Unstable configuration of RAM. All of the following are risk factors for RAM instability:

• Using four sticks instead of two
• Enabling an overclocking profile (EXPO/XMP/DOCP/EOCP)
• AMD CPUs are generally more sensitive to RAM problems than Intel CPUs
• Having a large amount of RAM, especially over 32GB

You can detect these stability problems by running stress tests on your hardware.

Use OCCT to test your system under high graphics load.

Use Memtest86+ to test your system’s memory overnight.

Saved Games Folder

Some steps above reference the “Saved Games folder”, which is located in the following places:

• If you play on Steam, it is %userprofile%\Saved Games\DCS
• If you play on Standalone version, it is %userprofile%\Saved Games\DCS…
  • …unless you upgraded from an Open Beta version prior to patch 2.9.3.51704, in which case it is %userprofile%\Saved Games\DCS.Openbeta, even after the Open Beta and Stable versions were unified.

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