FS broken once and forever?

[Skybird]

All of a sudden, both my FS2004 and FSX installtion are completely unable to finish any flight. It worked nice sinc emonths, no problems, and now this. I have meanwhile abandoned FS2004 and tried to fix FSX due to the 737NGX, but to no avail. I ran all the fixes recomemnded, the cfg-tweaks, the setting advises, the dll-replacements. I deinstalled and reinstalled without mods. The things continues to freeze at some time, and stay that forever until I taskmanager it down. Rarely gets even half of my RAM used (8 GB in total).

This seems to be the end of the dream, I have run out of advise, and motivation, and patience. No more flightsimming. Bye-bye wonderful PMDG-737NGX.

I do not dare to invest the massive price they demand for prepare3D if you do not want that watersign on the screen, always. It bases on FSX, and even when it gets constantly upgraded, who tells me they solved those issues that w7x64 users of FSX are so massively haunted by?

And x-Plane, well, nice and okay, but without a complex airliner a la PMDG, it just is a toy to kill some time. VFR on computer is not really a longterm motivation.

Very frustrated. 25 years to get from subLogic's FS2 to PMDG's 737NGX - and when things are there, no reliable, functional simulation platform available anymore. That's progress.

[Herr-Berbunch]

Can't be FSX's fault. Must be another reason - any updates around the time it first failed, to anything - graphics card, sound card, OS, other software...?

Is it just both FS or do you have problems with anything else?

[Skybird]

Oh, when you look aroundn the web, it can very well be FSX' fault - many vista and w7 users have major troubles with it, especially those using x64 versions. I had earlier ones, too, but found some remedies to not heal them but to reduce the frequency by which they struck me.

No other troubles here. No hardware changes. No driver changes recently.

I try to get solid information on whether Prepa3D by Lockheed - which is basing on FSX - has these things ironed out and meanwhile got optimised for modern multicores and x64 OS (FSX is both not). That thing costs real money when not wanting watersings, and I do not burn 200 dollars just for hopes and prayers - the sim must run reliable and stable and must be able to do the same for PMDG's dream, else I have no use for it.

[Skybird]

I could not let it rest, of course.

Reinstalled from zero on, just FSX and PMDG, nothing else, and no traffic whatever, easy on weather settings. I also cleaned the tower, ventilators, coolers. Finally I opened the tower and pout a big room ventilator to the side so that a flow of fresh air reaches the inside, no heavy stormwind, but a feelable breeze.

And Barcelona to Palermo wnt smooth in the PMDG737NGX! Core 1 had 61°C, core 2 58°C as maxim,um temps. GPU I don't know.

Installed airports sceneries, activated FSX's high quality 3D clouds again, but reduced weather density a bit. Munich to Amsterdam: fine! Even messing up the flightplan and doing the last quarter of the flight manually was tolerated (landing with 0.3 fuel reserves...) . Core 1 went to a max of 63°C, Core 2 58°C again.

I will skip on using GEX and UTEX, since I do high altitude IFR almost exclusively now, so why stressing the system with things I do not see anyway. But I have installed REX2 with 1024er clouds, just skysets and clouds, as replacement textures, and I will see tomorrow how it works on a flight from Zurich to Vienna.

If it breaks, then most likely it is REX. If it works, it most likely was a temperature problem. That heat could again become a problem with a new system that has not given me any performance problems and heat problems since one year (i5 2500 @ 3.3), did not come to my mind.

Running the tower closed for all purposes again, only for FSX I will now open it and have that ventilator ready. I am hesitent to buy a better CPU cooler since I do not know if the CPU heat or the GPU heat is the critical thing here.

[Skybird]

I have run more flights and tests now, and again must change the theory. REX2 meanwhile was reinstalled.

Temperature in my case has little to do with it, I run the tower closed again, and there are no changes in temperatures.

I then tested the ingame sliders, and here is where the dog is buried (German proverb... ). It is the traffic sliders. That the car traffic on world roads puts a lot of stress on the CPU, was known since long and I had completely deactivated it anyway. But what really makes the difference between freezing system and non-freezing system is the ordinary air traffic. I know that some people run these sliders at settings between 10 and 25% for the most, and have no problems with the PNG737. But for me, it does not work, even when my system compares to theirs. Putting all sliders to 0%, no traffic whatever, has given me a dozen flights by now with no freezes anymore. I have clouds maxed out, and maximum vieiwing range, all nice. I have special airports sceneries which come with their own APRON traffic schemes, all nice. I use REX2 with live updates, all nice. Add air traffic - and the flight freezes after some time.

Well, the world may be a bit lifeless now, but at FL270 it always is a bit lifeless anyway, so I can live with it.

My beloved 737NGX is back in regular service! Fantastic package.

The only thing that remains unexplained is why all of a sudden, with no installation changes, the AI traffic messed up the sim, and remains to do so even after reinstalling everything. That'S what I would like to know. There were no hardware changes on my rig since I bought it 16 months ago. Graphic driuvers occaisonaly were chnaged, but always going back to 275.33, since all later drivers up to the recent 301.xx were unstable.

[Red October1984]

I feel sorry for you man. FS2004 and 2002. I grew up playing those. Wonderful sims. I havent played FSX. When i heard it was coming out......i really got my hopes up, but sadly, have never played it.

Combat sims are a bit more fun anyway.

[longam]

Did it occur around the time of a windows update? Sometimes they can fix one thing only to break another.

But it sounds like you got er going.

[Sledgehammer427]

Hey sky, just out of curiosity, are you running DX9 or the DX 10 preview for graphics?

if you are running DX10, do you get the flickering taxiways issue?
it hurts my eyes after a while and it's a real immersion killer

[Skybird]

DX9.

Due to performance. And due to the fact that the sim is not optimised for DX10, and is not meant to be played in DX10. There are many graphical artifacts caused by it, I recall problems with the lights for example, as well as problems with the runway textures and addon scenery not being shown correctly.

Complex aircraft addons sometimes are recommended by the developer to be run in DX9, too.

So again, FSX is no DX10 title. Microsoft simply did not follow that road with the needed determination, and left it behind halfways, unfinished.

But sure looks nice, especially with bloom light. But I would recommend to switch off bloom as well. It is a frame killer, and on older systems can make flights at night over cities and airports unplayable.


Red October,

the combo FSX and PMDG737NGX works fine and leaves everything FS9-related behind in system depth, smoothness and complexity. I fly nothing else anymore than this. I had a great FS9 installation that was stable and rich in addons (environment, weather, texture, airport sceneries, mesh), but FS9 suffers from being developed for an OS that did not knew more memory than 3.5 GB. There is the famous out-of-memory (OOM) bug plaguing FS9 installations on modern OS, therefore. I delayed it a bit by pushing down options (! on better hardware than my old system with winXP!), but it worke donly for flights not longer than 20-30 minutes, then the sim had reached the limit of memory it could handle, and ctd'ed. on x32, that is 2 GB, and by a tweak you can increase it to 3.4 GB or so, but that is the end of the ladder then. If those 3.4 get hit, the sim exits, you can have as much RAM installed as you want: I have 8, for example, and still ran out of memory at 3.4 or so.

I have left out Ultimate Terrain X and Ground Environment X now, at FL230 you do not see that anyway, and I also left out FS Global 2010. I also need to switch of any air traffic - then the sim runs stable and smooth on my rig and w7x64. I have many airport sceneries around Europe, and REX2. This now is the best flight simulator experience I have ever had. Since the PMDG737 is so superior to the good airliner modules I had in FS9 (PMDG747, Level-D 767, Flight-1 ATR72), I do not miss the old ones. Great scenery looks at taxiing, starting, landing, docking, fantastically looking weather, fantastical system depth and fantastically realistic cockpit - I cannot wish for more from a civilian flight sim (which in case of dedicated emergency simulations leaves behind any combat flight sim regarding stress that I ever played, and easily so!) The printed versions of the documentations cost around 400 dollars and have three and a half thousand pages or so, much of that being original Boeing material. If I would have the money, I would at least get the pilot'S quick reference manual which mimics the looks and feels of the original ones they use in reality. Having this or the others as printed PDF's is not really that comfortable. (all documentations are included as pdfs in the installation as well).

http://www.precisionmanuals.com/prod...?idCategory=20

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by longam

Did it occur around the time of a windows update? Sometimes they can fix one thing only to break another.

But it sounds like you got er going.

Not that I am aware of. Updating Windows once a month, the regular scheme every second Tuesday of the month.