The actual card is an ASUS Radeon HD 6870. According to Tom's Hardware it's the equivalent of the NVidia GTX 560, but it'll run 3 monitors right out of the box.
A simple way to check the DirectX version is to type dxdiag into the search box
(if you're running Win 7).
As to the video drivers, I had the latest drivers before I started the install. Later on I'd read that some people had problems with the latest drivers
(although that was with some GTX cards).
So I went back 2 iteration on the Radeon drivers. All 3 drivers were downloaded to the desktop and unzipped to their respective folders. Later, after repeted failures of Prepar3d V2 to run, I even downloaded the latest beta driver.
My process on each version was to delete the current driver, restart the computer. Install the video driver, and restart the computer. Test to see if Prepar3d would run. Then do it all over again with the next driver.
An attempt to update DirectX 11 won't work. Once the MS installer sees that you already have DirectX 11, it stops the install. No repair option.
You can, with quite a bit of work, uninstall DirectX by doing several back flips with your eyes crossed and holding your nose
(in other words not very easily).
That didn't help either.
Another requirement is MSXML 6. I had that too. But I went to MS and reinstalled that also. Same problem.
"Normally, the blue screen you're seeing is a kind of "loading" screen."Originally, when I first ran Prepar3d V2, I would get a totally black window
(out of the 2 that I normally run). You can hear the engine(s) running, and in a few seconds the plane crashes into something.
After this happened a few times I learned to cut the engine and set the breaks.
I left that black screen running and went shopping. A little over an hour it was still there, I don't use screen savers as I find then annoying. The same for power saving on the monitors.
Once the plane was safe, I could select different planes. The screen STAYED black until I selected to show the cockpit.
At that point, EVERYTHING outside of the cockpit windows was black.
If I selected ANY outside view, the MS Windows screen showed only black.As you can see, only the scenery is black.
By using the "-" and "+" keys I can get some color, but that's like zooming in on a small patch of paint.
For what it's worth, I'm using an SSD too. The rest you can see in one of the DirectX screen shots.