Nick--FSX is freaking out! Have you seen this?

[stevehookem]

FSX has gone funky on me. It's showing building textures on the side of my planes, most airports don't have buildings anymore and it's taking 5 minutes to load at start-up.

What do I do? If I throw out the cfg file, do I have to reload all my add-on airports, scenery, etc? Isn't there a file that I can throw out that FSX will rebuild and possibly fix this? I don't want to go through adding everything.

This is unusable as-is. My clouds are British Airways planes! haha

Here's three screenshots:

[Mazza]

Man, That is screwed up

[stevehookem]

Man, That is screwed up

haha, you think?

I don't know what to do. I thought it was something software related but now I'm wondering if a hardware item is going bad---like my motherboard or video card. I sure hope Nick has seen this and has good news....

[raptorx]

That's where I would start.  It could also be corrupted video drivers.  You could try uninstalling the driver, reboot in safe mode and run Driver Sweeper, reboot and reinstall the driver again & see if it fixes it.

You can rebuild the cfg too.  If you delete your cfg file then next time you start FSX you just have to reset your settings in the menus like graphics, scenery, traffic, etc.  Then close FSX and open the new cfg and add the edits in from the FSX optimization sticky.  If you use MyTraffic X you will need to run that routine that edits the cfg file as well.  There could be others like that if you have them.  Then you need to revalidate your addon aircraft by allowing them as trusted sources.

No big deal really, I never screwed any install by deleting & rebuilding the cfg file.  In fact it's a good thing to do once in a while, especially after installing new video cards or drivers.

-Jim

[SubZer0]

I think your video card may be dying

[ozzy72]

The first one appears to be an aeroplane wrapped in newspaper
I'd try re-installing your drivers first, also check you texture folder to see if there is any corruption, you might need to re-install FSX if that is the case.

[Layne.]

i laughed when i saw gigantic halo lights textures on the globe lol.....

[Allard]

My first suspect would be bad video drivers, but after that I would try:
- If videocard is overclocked, try run at factory defaults
- run CPU + ram at default instead of overclocked
- rebuild the config file.
- reinstall FSX

It is always a good idea to check system temperatures, ram and file system for errors. Reinstalling FSX is quite an undertaking, especially if you have a lot of addons. I would do so as a last resort, but it might be the best thing. If you can, you could also use another harddrive for a quick reinstall of Windows and FSX to check if it is a software issue.

[NickN]

This is either video card failure, driver or FSX corruption

Most likely suspect is card is defective or overheating. Overheat can be from clock too high

I have also seen strange graphic issues with bufferpools set too high but typically that causes spikes, not what is seen above

Judging by the images its hardware and not FSX itself

Run 3DMark06 and see if it runs corrupt or bad.. if it does, no question its hardware or driver related but I cant see a driver all of a sudden doing this. If you just changed video drivers I can

[stevehookem]

I went back to the 182.50 drivers.
I rebuilt the cfg file.
Made sure that the video card was at factory clock (it's overclocked already)
All is well for the moment.....

I did notice that my bufferpools were set to the 490000000 for sound problems. I had some cracking sounds and tried that. I forgot that I had set it there. My bufferpool is back now to 100000000. I don't have any sound problems there. Also, my TBM was at 90. I don't remember setting it that high. It's at 70 now.

This weirdness started almost immediately. Even just sitting at the terminal. It wasn't overheating. I had checked that several times.

[stevehookem]

May have spoken too soon...

We can't even get through an entire flight without a crash that says "display driver has stopped working"

I wish I could get the entire message but the box pops in and goes away with the freeze up.

Any thoughts?

EDIT:

I noticed that when I installed the 185 drivers, I didn't have my Nvidia control panel anymore. I went to their site and installed it and now I have several other Nvidia items like Nvidia Performance, Nvidia PhysX, Nvidia System monitor and Nvidia System update. These may have been here before but I don't remember seeing that many programs when I went to remove the driver before.

I looked in the Nvidia control panel and "Enable PhysX GPU acceleration" is checked for my card. FSX is not a PhysX game, right? Should I disable this? Should I remove any of those items?

[Mazza]

May have spoken too soon...

We can't even get through an entire flight without a crash that says "display driver has stopped working"

I wish I could get the entire message but the box pops in and goes away with the freeze up.

Any thoughts?

EDIT:

I noticed that when I installed the 185 drivers, I didn't have my Nvidia control panel anymore. I went to their site and installed it and now I have several other Nvidia items like Nvidia Performance, Nvidia PhysX, Nvidia System monitor and Nvidia System update. These may have been here before but I don't remember seeing that many programs when I went to remove the driver before.

I looked in the Nvidia control panel and "Enable PhysX GPU acceleration" is checked for my card. FSX is not a PhysX game, right? Should I disable this? Should I remove any of those items?

Turn off PhysX... It's good, but eats up alot of GPU and or CPU stuffs...It's a good little thing, I somehow set one core to use it and the other 3 to play the game (MoH:A) Hehe... But killing them with a pistol sometimes causes them to fly 50M backwards doing flips

Oh and FSX does not use it!

[NickN]

If you do not use Physx for other games you can either disable the feature (it is disabled by default with newer NV drivers) or uninstall it from add and remove programs

If the video corruption shown above happens after returning the system to normal (no bufferpools) and running the 182.50 drivers and DirectX is in fact updated,..

[stevehookem]

I am downloading 3dMark06 now. I ran OCCT 10 passes last night and it found no errors.

Also, I just tried to install .net 3.5 and I get a "setup error" message when it finishes. Any ideas what that may be about?

[NickN]

OCCT is not to be used for video card testing, only CPU

The GPU test is BETA and should not be used

I do not know what may be causing Net 3.5 setup problems however you do not need Nhancer or Net to run 3DMark