FSX Hanging

[Michael Arter]

Hi there,
Have just purchased and loaded FSX Gold Edition which includes the Acceleration expansion pack and SP2.

I can start it fine and start flying but once I start cycling through the different views (ie. hitting 'S') it invariably hangs.  I'm trying to work out if this is a memory or video card issue and not sure how to tell what is causing the hanging.

My specs are:-

Pentium 4 3.4GHz
2GM RAM
GeForce 6200 with 256MB

Running Windows XP SP3

Any help would be appreciated.

Michael

[Daube]

Hello Michael and welcome

I believe it's your computer that may need some help, not you
Your computer is not powerfull enough to run FSX smoothly:
- my previous computer had the same CPU as you have, and even with efficient tweaking I could only fly very slow airplanes (less than 150 knots max speed), else all the scenery would get blurry
- your video card is definitely not up to the task. My 6800GT was already struggling with some of the textures
- at least you have enough RAM (2Gb is ok)

In the end, FSX was not a good choice for your computer. You should have bought the previous version instead, FS2004 (if you don't have it already), which would have brought you much more satisfaction on such hardware.

Of course, by lowering drastically the display settings and tweaking the FSX.cfg, you might get something "flyable" but not that enjoyable.

[Michael Arter]

Hey thanks for the info.  I'm being told by some 'learned' colleagues that a lower end processor would not cause FSX to hang but just run things very slowly so I'm kinda thinking it might be my video card or maybe a faulty memory card.  

I already had FS2004 and wanted to update to FSX as I am wanting to add some payware which looks really cool (FTX by ORBX).  The minimum specs given by Microsoft gave me the impression that I should be able to run it with my specs.

Again if anyone out there could advise if there is some way I could do some diagnostics to determine whether the problem is due to the video card or memory related that would be great.

Michael

[Daube]

Your hardware can run it, but at very slow speed.
And very quickly, the CPU and the video card will crawl under the amount of data to process. That's why it hangs, lack of memory, high temperatures, etc...
Try disabling the autogen, limit all the other settings to the same level as FS9 (ground texture 5m, water 1x, mesh 38m, no AI traffic but liners and general aviation).

[Michael Arter]

Hey thanks for that - have reduced some of the settings as per your suggestion and it seems to be coping.  Guess I will have to play around and see how far I can stretch the settings before it hangs again.

Not really prepared to lash out and get a new PC at the mo'.  I guess from what you're saying there is not much point upgrading the video card unless I also replace the CPU!!!

Thanks again!

[Daube]

Exactely. FSX requires a lot of CPU power to run smotthly.
The summary would be that the number of cores impacts the sharpness of the ground textures at high speed, while the core speed impacts the number of FPS. FSX start to get confortable with a Quad core running at more than 3 GHz.

Of course, a good CPU is nothing without a good video card, and vice-versa.

In your case, you might keep the autogen on if you tweak it to 300 buildings and 300 trees in the fsx.cfg.