A Cautionary Tale

[macca22au]

Tested my new quadcore 6850 cpu at the shop on a single screen.  It ran breathtakingly well.  Brand new replacement nVidia 8800 GTX for the original that had developed an electrical fault with the latest drivers, just great.

Took it home, connected the system to the Matrox and the slow motion flickers like an on-off switch began.

Then I remembered way back the Vista hotfix.  Scrabbled through PT Taylor's weblog to get the reference (KB933590) and installed it, and voila everything perfect.

For some reason I had thought these long term problems to be fixed in SP1 and SP2, but it is a warning.  OS problems still have to be resolved through the Windows system.

[Flight Ace]

[quote]Tested my new quadcore 6850 cpu at the shop on a single screen.

[FlightHound]

If you're thinking about upgrading to Vista just to get DX10 for FS then save your money.  With SP2 we only got a DX10 preview that for a lot of people didn't do a damn thing, or slowed FPS down.  Do all the tweaks and system maintenance Nickn documents in this forum for XP and you'll be fine.  Maybe FS-11 will take advantage of DX10.

[Flight Ace]

[quote]If you're thinking about upgrading to Vista just to get DX10 for FS then save your money.

[macca22au]

My qx6850 is 3gigs and I would think yours is also.  I have four cores running at 3gigs and you two.

I upgraded to Vista because of the lure of DX10 - and installed an 8800GTX which is DX10 compliant.

However SP2 and Acceleration has only come up with a DX10 preview.

FSX and Vista run well together, but given that Vista is a heavy resource user as is FSX it has really taken me till I installed the quad core to get the sort of performance with FSX that I am prepared to accept.

I still can't get rid of the shimmering but FPS and smoothness are immeasurably improved.

Therefore my advice is to stick with XP at least until FS11.

All of the gurus on this forum will tell you the same.

I have always been an early adopter and most times it has paid off.  I blew it with Vista.