Virtual cockpit bug and performance improvement

[Cptn Adama]

Hey everyone,
I have a trouble with FSX since i updated to SP1.
When i start a flight (particularly in big cities), when i change view and that i come back to the vrtual cockpit, the game freezes and after 10 seconds i get a message from windows saying that "fsx has encountered an error, we are sorry....". When i played for the first time with SP1 it worked perfectly well and then 2 days later i get this...
So i searched google for answers and i found a very good tip which explains the "performance improvement" in the title of the topic.
The trick was to change the memory usage and set it to memory cache instead of programs. With that i now get 10/1 fps over big cities with everything maxed out in the scenery settings. It worked perfectly well for the first flight and again, as it did before, on the second day i start a new flight and boom the game crashes when i change view and come back to VC.
If anyone has an idea i would apreciate because for now, to fly i have to stay in VC all the time.

Thank you!

[Cptn Adama]

Ok i managed to avoird the game freeze by playing in windowed mode but it's not very comfortable. Still if anyone have any idea of what's going on

[Moach]

try updating your video drivers... i know, sounds like "what good could that do?!" but i have been many times impressed by the difference it can make

try updating all your drivers if still nothing ...


if still nothing yet, after updating drivers, reinstall FSX and then add SP1....

if still still nothing, then i don

[Cptn Adama]

AAAAARGHH

i allready tried everything you told me. I even downloaded the last Nvidia driver that has been released yesterday and no change. thank you anyway

However on a french forum i found a topic of my problem and only 1 of them has got rid of this bug. he has an ATI card and he tried to deactivate the CATALYST CONTROL CENTER. by doing this the game runs fine for him.
By deduction the problem seems to come from Nvidia driver. and i would say from this stupid Nvidia control panel that you are forced to use since the last 2 drivers if i remember.

[Daube]

Ok let me check if I understood your problem correctly:
- When you play in windowed mode, everything is fine
- When you play in fullscreen, you FSX crash everytime you try to get in the VC, right ?

At first I would have thought about a video driver issue, but you told that you have already upgraded them...

One possibility would be a sound issue. I know this shouds strange (mouarf, nice one  ;D ), but with the handling of the 3D sound, I've seen so many issues (from scratching sounds to full system crash) that I wouldn't be surprised your problem would be linked to your sound system.

Instead of trying to upgrade any drivers, try first to lower the hardware acceleration for the sound in the control panel:
- sound and multimedia part
- speaker settings
- advanced button
- adjust the hardware acceleration slider down to the left, then test FSX again. If it works, try moving back this slider one step right, then test again etc...

This costs nothing...

[Daube]

If the above procedure gives nothing good, then we'll try to have a look at your NVidia settings.
By the way, did you install the latest DirectX 9.0c update dating from May, or June or something ?

[Cptn Adama]

I tried to deactivate my sound card but id did nothing. i'm gonna try what you said.

I allready tried the directX thing. i have the latest version which is june.

[Cptn Adama]

Ok after following those steps i got rid of the problem:

1. I tried to adjust the slider of the sound card hardware acceleration has Daube said. i did it only one step back to the left to "standard". By doing this i could switch to cockpit view again but it worked only 3 times and each time it resulted in a drop of FPS (less than 3..).

2. In the settings of the game i changed the target FPS from unlimited to 100. And bingo i tried to change view a lot of times and it works perfectly now.

Thank you Daube for the tip.

Just one last thing. What is hardware acceleration for the sond card? What does it change when you lower it?

[Daube]

If I'm not mistaken, if you lower it you switch the processing of the sound more on your main CPU than on the sound hardware.
This helps a lot solving some compatibility issues that often arise, especially concerning the 3D origin of the sound (like 5.1 systems).

Finally, instead of setting your FPS limit to 100, I STRONGLY recommend you to lower this one to 20 only. The fact is that it will give more ressources back to your CPU for processing the scenery faster, avoinding a lot of blurries ont the ground for example, or making the autogen appear from a greater distance

FPS unlimited must be avoided at any cost.

[Cptn Adama]

Ok i was affraid that lowering the acceleration would affect the sound quality.

For the target fps, i originally put it to unlimited because it was a LOT smoother. i tried to set it to 20 but it is less smooth. it is actually on 50. (with 100 the freeze reapeared).

however i think i'v not found the balance for my settings.

[Daube]

Well, if your system is powerfull enough, why not ?
However, if in the future, when flying with a fast plane you see the ground textures a bit blurry (because you're too fast and the game don't have enough time to display them precisely), then you'll know that you have to decrease your FPS limit a little bit, let's say to 30 ou 25, to free some CPU ressources.

For example, my system is not powerfull enough and I'm limited to fly small and slow GA aircrafts, with groud texture resolution limited to 2m. If I fly too fast (more than 150 knots more or less), the ground textures become blurry around me. The stuation improved a lot when I limited my FPS from 25 down to 17. Now it look nice.

It was just for your information, in case it happens you know what to do