ShockNAwe

I've recently come back to my combat flight sims because I've just upgraded to the following specs (only the GPU remains from the older config; it's running all my games fine). New Specs: Gigabyte Z87-DS3H, CPU: Intel Core i5 4670K 3.40ghz, GPU: AMD HD 6850 1GB, RAM: 8Gb Corsair DDR3 1866mhz Vengeance, Sound: Audigy 4, O/S: Windows 7 64bit Home Premium, PSU: Corsair TX650v2 IL2-46, Rise of Flight and FSX are all running fine. The two giving me problems are Battle of Britain Wings of Victory and Strike Fighters 2 - they run with so much lag, they're unplayable. I've sorted out the problem with Battle of Britain: after trying everything else under the sun (including different drivers, and running both games on minimal settings) for some insane reason, it turned out that the joystick was causing the slowdown (Speedlink Black Widow). I discovered that running with mouse controls eliminated the slowdown; the difference with BoB and SF2 is with BoB, I was able to remap everything under mouse controls back to the joystick to get silky smooth gameplay. That solution isn't working with SF2. If I map the controls to the flightstick, I get unplayable lag. If I map them back to mouse or keyboard, I get no slowdown with all graphics set to unlimited. I have already tried reinstalling Windows - that doesn't help either. This is infuriating - can anyone here shed any light as to why this could be happening? Has anyone had this problem and solved it? Thanks in advance.

OK; the first driver caused the game to stop working altogether, but the second driver seems to work fine - vibration back as normal. One slight issue: regardless of which driver I chose, there's no proper Black Widow utility or settings in the control panel - no vibration options either. I like the vibration, but the default's a bit too high for my liking.

Yeah, the vibration's gone but I'd much rather have smooth gameplay than vibration. Still, thanks for the links - there's no reason why I can't have both. :) Just noticed that I'm already using the new v4, so that's no good. I'll give the other two a try though. - vibration isn't vital for me, but I'd still like the option to be there. Slightly off topic, but I noticed that you've had the Black Widow for a number of years; has it remained reliable - does the rudder rocker still work, the throttle etc?

I think I've sorted it: I uninstalled the joystick's driver and now there is no slowdown - hopefully that's the end of this annoyance with all games now! I didn't think removing the driver altogether would help, but seems it did! Thanks for your replies. Now I've just got to learn how to 'fly' a jet again...

No one at all? This is completely spoiling the game for me, especially when I can see how it should be running.

This looks absolutely beautiful, well done. I'm getting some slowdown, so I want to tweak the flight.ini (or flightengine.ini) file mentioned in the mod's read me - trouble is I can't find it anywhere. :) I definitely don't want to go back to the defaults after seeing this. Good that it's free as well, unlike Hi Tiles for Falcon 4.0 AF. ;)

Mate, even in 1998 the explosions were rubbish - the PC Gamer review said as much. Sure, the rest of the graphics were up there with the best, but not the explosions. Regarding Hi-tiles, how does that stack up against Strike Fighter 2's graphics?