My old 128MB ATI 9800 Pro died yesterday and I replaced it today with a 512MB BFG GeForce 7600 GS OC. My copy of FSX Deluxe hasn't arrived yet but the FSX demo runs great with the new card... aircraft & water detail at max and it is stutter free.But... I do have a few problems trying to run FS04 with it. The 3D dipiction of the selected aircraft is black... I mean the entire window is black. When I get into a flight the interior 2D & 3D is great but from an exterior view the aircraft is grayed out. Also one of the many bridges in the area I was flying in was grayed too.I was flying over the AeroSoft (I think AeroSoft?) Manhattan scenery and man it never looked so good. That is the one scenery that has given me frame problems in FS04 and with the new card it was smooth and pretty.I have run the card with about 10 racing games and they all check out great... and the FSX demo too... just having the problem in FS04.I have a 2.8ghz P4 with 2GB of DDR RAM.Anybody have any ideas as to why this is happening?Thanks in advance...

Often problems when switching over from ATI to Nvidia are caused by traces of previous drivers still left in the system.Download Driver Cleaner Pro, use it to remove all traces of the previous ATI drivers, then reboot and install the latest drivers for your new card. If the latest drivers are the ones already installed, install them anyway. You will probably find the installed drivera are quite old as the 7600 card has been around for a while and there has been a rash of updates from Nvidia recently - current WHQL driver is 91.47 and betas of later versions are available if you want to install them.Allcott

The above is good advice and is what I do whenever I change cards or even install a new driver. You may also want to go into your fs9.cfg file and delete the section for your old card. Not sure if it will make any difference, but it couldn't hurt....jim

"Download Driver Cleaner Pro, use it to remove all traces of the previous ATI drivers, then reboot and install the latest drivers for your new card. If the latest drivers are the ones already installed, install them anyway."I had DL'd and installed latest drivers immediately after installing the card but I got the cleaner and ran that and rebooted and reinstalled the current drivers. And of course another reboot.Now the textures for the aircraft will show up during a flight after a 10 to 15 second delay but still black in the aircraft selection menu. I guess if I have to have one or the other that is the better way. ;)It is odd though... default aircraft textures should load much quicker than that. It is especially odd since the scenery textures are loading so fast I don't see them come in... look in a new direction and they are there already even in the very complex Manhatten scenery.Thank you for the excellent suggestions. :)The FSX demo and my driving sims continue to work great with the card. I have all the sliders full right now in the demo and it looks great. I only hope the full version will do as well. My guess is that I will have to make some compromises.

I did follow the other fellow's advise and that got me most of the way there... have aircraft textures in flight now but still black in the aircraft selection menu.I looked in the config file and saw nothing specific to the ATI card but I may not have known what to look for. I'll go back and try again.Thanks much for the input. :)

Yep, I have same problem. Black frame in the aircraft selection pane. It happened when I pushed the resolution up from 1600 x 1200 to 1920 x 1200 when changing from a standard to widescreen display. I could find no fix and I have the latest drivers and used driver cleaner when installing the drivers.Try lowering the resolution and see if the selection pane comes back. Problem does not occur with FSX at the same resolution.Cheers,Noel.

Tom,PCI-X or AGP card? If its AGP then go into the BIOS when you boot the system and change the AGP Setting to the widest (biggest) allowed by your system - usually 512meg. This seems to open up a small bottleneck in texture transfer rates with AGP cards, particualrly the faster ones like yours. If it's a PCI-X card then you have an I/O bottleneck somehere in your system, possibly to do with paging instructions to and from the paging file. Let Windows handle the paging file and if possible, place it on a separate hard drive to FSX, even if that means putting it BACK on the one that holds the OS.Some of the old `snake oil` (How we miss ol' Cap'n Slarty :)) advice regarding page files and AGP settings no longer holds good with FSX.Allcott

Thanks Noel,I haven't changed my resolution... I'm using a 19" LCD monitor and it is happier with it's native resolution of 1280 X 1024 so I stayed with that. I find that to provide a enough res for these old eyes.But since I have changed the vid card it might well amount to the same problem. I'll try dropping the res for a bit as see if that has any effect. And yeah... I have no problems in the FSX demo either... hope my copy of FSX gets here today. :)

Allcott,My card is AGP. I'm only having the problem with FS04. And I find it quite odd that the textures that are slow are only the aircraft ones. The scenery textures are wicked fast... so fast I see none of them loading... they are already there. And the aircraft I have tried so far with this card are all default ones the textures for which should be very fast to load.I will check the bios. That seems only logical since you brought it up. I have 2 250GB drives. XP, FS04, FSX demo, and paging files are all on my C: drive. I intend to put FSX on my secondary drive where it can have tons of space to grow. ;)Thanks for the help... I will report any success or failure.