Graphics Randomly GOne BAd for no reason! PLZ HELP

[paddy4189]

Hey,

Iv had fsx for about a year now and iv been playing it on the highest settings for that long. I have a nVidia 8800 GTX graphics card. But this week the graphics suddenly got worse. When im in the air the graphics are perfect over a small area in which im flying over. But further away from the plane the graphics are horrible. I downloaded an optional driver update from vista this week. Im wondering if this is the problem.
The update is:

nVidia-Video-NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GTX

Please Help me!!
thanx.

[markag]

Did you go into your settings and make sure they stayed the same?  I don't have an 8800GTX or even a nVidia card yet, so I can't offer much more than this.  The game may have seen the update as a hardware change, and then the next time you loaded FSX it reset the graphics to default.  

I don't know if FSX does that or not, but you might want to check just in case.

[paddy4189]

yea iv checked everything in the settings and all is my custom settings. When playing the game, the graphics draw themselves in as you get closer to it but the further away you get from an area the graphics get worse. I think its called drawing distance or something. Not to sure.
You know anything about this??

[garymbuska]

Question did you uninstall the old drivers first and reboot before installing the updated driver? If not that is your problem. You need to uninstall the old drivers first and some times you may need to run a little program called Clean Sweep which will remove all traces of the old driver. Then you need to reboot then and only then can you install the new drivers. If you did all of this and still have problems I suggest you go back to the old driver.
Something I allways do is to make a restore point before I update any video driver. It makes it easier to go back that way. 8-)

[paddy4189]

ok sorry but i have completely no idea of how to do this. cud u tel me?
thanks

[pepper_airborne]

Drivers are rather sensitive, when you install new ones over the old ones some files may be kept that should be there, so it go's all loco when it needs too start rendering.

First check you installed programs list, find the Nvidia display drivers, those need to be un-installed. I usualy make sure i got the new drivers already downloaded too my desktop, you can get them from nvidia.com.

Then you restart the computer, install the new drivers, restart again, and check if everything went well, i find it easy too have system restore working, so that if anything go's it will reset itself too a pre-newdriver situation.

[paddy4189]

hey thanx for the advice,

i uninstalled the old driver and installed the new driver from the nVidia website. However, i go on FSX and is the same as before. Im wondering if this optional update that i installed and mentioned before in vista is the problem??