You missed my point. I wasn't comparing two games. I only mentioned DCS because that is where I spend the majority of my gaming time now.
Sorry Traveler but you did mention DCS and that was going to start the whole AH is better DCS is Better Comparisons. They are apple to bananas comparison. This is why I didn't respond to any one person.
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Firstly, I'm not aware of any aircraft that takes 25 minutes to start up and to my knowledge, all of them have an auto-start feature. The F-5E's auto start is bugged so you'll have to start it manually but after 2 or 3 practice runs you should be able to do it. I can start the F-14 Tomcat while watching a video of a real one being started on the deck of a carrier and keep up. I practiced the start up procedure 8-10 times before I raced the YouTube video. I can't seem to find that particular video but here is one showing how to start it in 60 seconds.
Secondly, you don't need a $5,000 gaming rig to play. I used to play on a 3.4ghz quad core AMD, 16gb ram and a 1080Ti with 3g ram. I had some FR issues in multiplayer but it ran just fine in single player. Then I upgraded to an 8 core AMD, 32gb ram and a 3070 video card with 8gb ram. The second computer was an HP machine and when the DIMMs started going bad I had to rebuild.
I now run an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D 8 core cpu with liquid cooling, 128g ram, an ASUS ROG motherboard with an 1100 watt power supply. I moved both drives (4TB NvME and 6TB HDD) and the 3070 video card over from the old machine, and bought a new Winblows license for about $1800. The game runs flawlessly although I don't play in VR and might not ever try due to motion sickness issues. I sold one of my Hobie kayaks and paid off the credit card I used.
*Edit* As far as multi player goes, players host servers and I've seen some with as high as 200 players allowed.
First time players can easily spend hours learning just to properly start their aircraft. Even Veteran players can take a long time to learn their start up in a new plane. How long does it take a new AH player to find the "e" key? How long does it take them to commit it to memory. (Not all DCS servers allow auto start or hot start)
I had a 4c/8t Xeon CPU running at 3.6gb (I7 4770-4790 equivalent) 32gb DDR mem and a gtx 1080ti system. I could run AHIII on a Valve index with graphics maxed. DCS I had to turn the settings down about half way in 2d and almost to min in VR. You can run DCS with this old of a system but your probably not going to like it and VR is a slide show at best. DCS has had 2 major updates since I built this system 2.7 and 2.9
I upgraded to a AMD r9 5900x 12c/24t running at 4.4 ghz with 64gb DDR4 mem and a rtx 3080 I can max the game out at 1440 but I have to set details about half way to get 30-45 fps in VR.
My latest system is an AMD r9 9950x3d 96 GB ddr 5 and a 5080. I haven't really been able to use it due to an injury and the fact half the system is still in boxes.
Once you start down the DCS path forever will it dominate your destiny .... You're gonna be buying a lot of expensive computer and flight sim gear. Right now a $1500 PC goes for about $5000. As I said I purchased My Corsair 96gb (48x2) pc 6000 DDR5 Mem for $320, It topped out over $1500 and currently goes for $1254.
