Hello everyone. It seems like there are some very knowledgeable people on these forums so I thought I would see if anyone has some ideas regarding my problem.I just put together a new system which is as follows. Asus A8V Socket 939 MotherboardAMD Athlon64 3500+Asus X800Pro 256 mb Video1gb OCZ PC3500 RAM1 Maxtor 120gb HD1 WD 80gb HDEnermax 420W PSU, Liteon 8x Dual Layer DVD BurnerThe system is blazingly fast. It 3dMarks at 11000 and plays the latest games like Doom and Far Cry with relative ease. When I load up FS2004, the initial performance is impressive. With dense scenery and 4x AA enabled I am getting Frame Rates in excess of 30. For some strange reason however, when textures are loading (most prevalent at big airports or with lots of AI traffic) the entire sim and audio pauses. These are split second pauses (almost sputters) that are extremely annoying. My old system (Athlon XP 2500+ / 9600XT) never had a problem with texture loading. I have tried many things to correct this behaviour including:- different video drivers- optimizing fs9.cfg settings- moving fs2004 to its own dedicated HDSo far no luck. If anyone has any ideas I would greatly appreciate it, as FS is the primary reason I bought this hardware.Thanks in Advance.

Curious... you're not the first person wuth this CPU/Motherboard combo I've seen with this problem. What type of sound are you using? Have you tried disabling the sound in Device Manager? Then test in the sim to see what happens.Greg

Not sure if this applies to your situation, but I had that the occasional "slideshow" graphics on my AMD FX-51 home-built portable heater/aka gaming PC until I figured out that (imagine that) the owner's manual for my motherboard was misleading and I placed my memory initially in the wrong slots for the dual memory channel to work (manufacturers please note: making COLORED references to memory slots on a diagram printed in BLACK AND WHITE isn't the best thing for clarity). On my MB, the slots are color coded by channel. The idea is to put one stick in each color for the dual channel to kick-in. My AMD didn't like not having dual channel memory for graphics as my performance when through the roof once dual kicked in.Get SiSandra to test your rig, and see if it reports the proper memory bandwidth/perf numbers for your system.Texture speed in FS is very much affected by this on my system.

what is your level of sound acceleration when you run dxdiag?Set it to one notch lower than max.Do you have Audigy-2 card?Michael J.WinXP-Home,AMD64 3500+,Abit AV8, Radeon X800 Pro,WD 36GB Raptor,1 GB PC3200 http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

Thanks for the reply. I find it interesting that you have heard of others with my motherboard or similar hardware with similar problems. Currently I am using the Realtek sound which is built into the motherboard. I was unable to find any posts with problems that matched my hardware / problem. Was there a solution in the posts that you read?Thanks again!

>Currently I am using the Realtek sound>which is built into the motherboard. I think this is where your problem lies. Realtek is no good to put it bluntly. You should get a seperate sound card.Michael J.WinXP-Home,AMD64 3500+,Abit AV8, Radeon X800 Pro,WD 36GB Raptor,1 GB PC3200 http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

"I was unable to find any posts with problems that matched my hardware / problem. Was there a solution in the posts that you read?"Nope. Have you disabled sound and tested? Be curious what you find.GregP.S. Michael's right on... your onboard sound is not great.

Ok thanks again for the replies guys. I have ran some further tests with no luck as of yet.The first thing I did, was move the Sound Hardware Acceleration slider to Basic Acceleration only. This did not solve the problem.Second I moved the Acceleration slider to No Acceleration and again this had no effect.Lastly, I disabled the onboard sound completely in the BIOS and started the sim. This was a little more difficult to test since one of the major symptoms of the stuttering problem is the sputtering audio coming from the speakers. After careful inspection however, I noticed that the pauses are in fact still occuring with the sound completely disabled. Although I am getting 44FPS, whenever the sim loads a texture onto a building or AI aircraft, etc., the entire sim comes to a halt for about half a second. This is happening so frequently that it is virtually unflyable in the airport enviroment.I guess this probably means that adding an Audigy2 won't solve my problem. Is anyone else out there successfully running with a similar setup to me?Thanks again and if anyone has any more ideas, please keep em coming!

I have a realtek on the mb, works fine. Of course, it's now disabled because I have a Creative card with a front panel that I need.You can always try it with no sound (ie, disable the onboard sound in the BIOS), see if it still dies.

>for about half a second. Is it really 1/2 sec? It would be in fact a very long time when simulation is concerned. Isn't it perhaps something like 1/10 or 1/20 sec? Michael J.WinXP-Home,AMD64 3500+,Abit AV8, Radeon X800 Pro,WD 36GB Raptor,1 GB PC3200 http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

MAYDAY... are you locking your framerate? If not try it at 25 and see what happens.Greg

>This is happening so frequently that it is virtually unflyable in the airport enviroment.This is not good. I definitely have some tiny pauses (micro-stutters)specially during turns in heavy airport environments but frequent 1/2 sec pauses - no way. I can (to a degree) cure this problem when I lock frame rates (good suggestion by Greg). My system is very similar to yours except for the motherboard but I never hit 11,000 in 3dmark03 - 10,300 at the most.Make sure you don't have Chris Arrington's Airport Endvironment package installed. It causes stutters (when loading) even on very powerful systems. I finally decided to give up on this package - after trying different versions.Michael J.WinXP-Home,AMD64 3500+,Abit AV8, Radeon X800 Pro,WD 36GB Raptor,1 GB PC3200 http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

Thanks again guys for all of the ideas. Since the beginning I have had my Frame Rate locked at 25 (just happens to be what I used on my previous system). There only seems to be a couple of things I can do to minimize this problem. 1) Drastically reduce AI Traffic (Ultimate Traffic)2) Reduce Global Texture SizeThe strange thing is, although it appears as though I will have to live with this problem, it was never an issue on the previous (slower) system. Maybe the upcoming patch will fix it.Thanks again for everyones help.

I don't know if this will help...but here goes.I have been struggling with this same problem for the last few weeks, and this is all I can suggest as it seemed to clear the problem for me.-Before starting FS, turn off or disconnect any mass-storage USB devices such as scanners, printers, mp3 players or external drives.-Be sure to unload any supporting software from the system tray as well.I discovered that by doing this, I was able to restore all of my texture settings to high (not max) with decent performance. Stutters are gone as far as I can tell.Good luck!RabbitCancer...

Hi there...try this (I too have an X800Pro)Install DirectX 9C...it seems optimized for the larger frame buffer of newer cards.and this...Windows NT NTFS volumes store a last access timestamp for every file and directory. The NTFS driver automatically updates this timestamp every time a file is accessed, whether for reading or writing. That means that every time you browse through a folder, view folder contents, NT is busy updating the file timestamps which might be better used for other purposes. After browsing directories with large number of files, the NTFS log file gets filed. NT becomes sluggish or nonresponsive until the file system flushes the log to the hard disk. To disable Windows NT / Windows 2000 / Windows XP NTFS last access timestamp : http://is-it-true.org/nt/registry/rtips71.shtmlCan't hurt, could help.Cheers,Braun Tacon