FSX scenery issues

[cvenom]

Greetings
Haveing an odd drama with the entire scenery in FSX. It starts off ok with everything appearing as normal and after about 10 minutes into the flight everything other than the aircraft goes blurry and indistinct.
I have been running the same set up for month and have had zero problems until now. I havent changed or tampered with any settings or installed new soft/hardware.
FSX is installed on an external (1Tb) harddrive, I was about to uninstall it and reinstall it back on C drive. I would really like not having to do that.
My system is
Intel Pentium D 300Ghz
2 Gb ram
Nvidia 8800GTX card
140Gb HDD
All help advice etc gratefully accepted
Cheers
Steve

[DaveB]

Hi Steve

I'm no expert on FSX.. or anything else for that matter Does your problem manifest itself with all aircraft or just one.. a new one perhaps?

Can you let us know which OS you're running and at what state FSX is too (original.. SP2.. SP2/Accel) From experience, the problem is pointing to a memory issue. Too many draw calls from the model can cause either the model to disintegrate or the ground to turn to an indistinguisable goo depending on altitude and speed. Used to see this using FS9 models in FSX on my old XP3200 with 1.25gb ram and a 6800GT 256mb. That particular problem went by upping the system ram to 3gig (WinXP SP2).

ATB

DaveB

[cvenom]

G'day Dave
When this problem started the aircraft was fine but now I'm finding everything goes pear shaped quite quickly.
Now the aircraft remains resonably clear but lighting, effects etc dies. IU havent installed anything new or changed settings.
I'm running FSX with Acceleration/SP2 on 32 bit Vista. 2G Ram.
Cheers
Steve

[TSR2]

Hi Steve,

Unless your external drive is eSATA or SCSI, you shouldn't install applications on external drives. Its bad practice as Flight sim (FSX and FS9) are very intensive on disk reads and USB drives just cant deliver the data quickly enough. I'm guessing if its worked for a month or so the disk is gradually getting more fragmented and as a result its taking longer to get the data from the disk to the CPU / GPU. The best course of action would be to get a internal disk (£35 will get you at least 320GB hard disk) and install FSX on that. USB attached drives are really only good for backing up data or storing pictures or music, they should be used as a main disk drive

Let us know how you get on

[cvenom]

Hi
Reinstalled it on the internal hard drive and it has exactly the same problem, if anything it fails faster.
Cheers
Steve

[TSR2]

Only other suggestions I can think of is more memory, or ask which version of the Nvidia drivers you are using. Thats the same Graphics card I have, so if you can confirm the driver version I'll tellyou what my settings are and you can give them a try. Another thing that might be worth doing is excluding bdl and bmp files from virus scanning.

[cvenom]

Hello again
Its started to behave itself, no idea why but I think the computer got the message when I showed it a very large length of steel pipe
I'm thinking I have two problems, not enough memory (2Gb) which I can fix on pay day and I'm wary of my virus program. Its getting close to expiry and I always seem to have drama's around the same time.
Thanks for the assist gents.
Cheers
Steve

[DaveB]

I think the computer got the message when I showed it a very large length of steel pipe

Ah.. the old 'cold steel'. They don't like it up 'em!

TBH mate, you should be OK with 2gb of ram though Vista will eat whatever you have from what I've seen Unless you're flying online or with dynamic weather updating every 15mins.. you might try disabling your AV while flying. Like Vista (and Win7).. FSX will take whatever ram you have so the more progs you have running, the less is left for the sim and the OS it sits on. Odd that it's started to run ok again but we are talking pc's here and even the best will have a mind of it's own

Whatever.. it's good that you've moved FSX off the external drive (if it was a USB drive) and as long as it's not on the same drive as your OS.. there's little else you can do in that sense to improve performance

ATB

DaveB

[cvenom]

G'day again
I've managed to upgrade my RAM from 2 gig to 4. FSX is still a bit narky and I'm not seeing the additional RAM.
I remember reading somewhere Vista 32 has some odd memory thing that wont allow it to see more than 2 g.
Any advise would be much appreciated.
Cheers
Steve

[DaveB]

Hello Mate..

I'm pretty certain you need a 64-bit OS in order to utilize more than 3gb of ram.

ATB

DaveB