New 9800GT 512mb, Nhancer, sim now unflyable because textures load so slowly

[Guest Nealoc187]

OK I installed my new 9800GT 512mb last night. My previous card was an old, old ATI X850 Pro. As per the instructions listed in a few threads on this forum I booted in safe mode, ran driver sweeper to purge all old video drivers from my system, then rebooted again, installed drivers for new card, restarted again, installed nhancer, rebooted again, ran the sim. What I'm running in to is this: at large airports like FSDreamteam's KORD, where there would be 100+ AI airliners milling around the airport, textures are being drawn so slowly as to make the plane (even the default cessna) unflyable. It's like a slide-show (literally, one frame every second or every 2 or 3 seconds sometimes). I'm noticing this with the textures on AI airliners, VC textures, buildings in the add on scenery, autogen building textures, and medium to far distance terrain tiles. Once the textures get drawn, everything is fine and I can then fly with usable frame rates again, but if I pan my view in the VC, or switch to spot plane view and either turn the plane or rotate the camera view, it goes back to slide-show 1FPS mode where it bogs down whilst drawing the textures, and then becomes flyable again after 3 or 5 or 10 seconds of slide-show, until I again change my view or the camera position, and the cycle repeats itself. It does this no matter what I have AA and AF set to in Nhancer, no matter if I have "Render to Texture" or "Transform and Lighting" checked in FS9, etc. Nothing I change seems to change the fact that the sim basically stops for seconds at a time as it loads textures. This never occurred with my previous, much older and much slower video card - don't get me wrong - frame rates are higher with this newer card once all the textures are loaded, but while loading textures the sim is unflyable whereas with my old card this never occurred - my monitor resolution is the same as it was before the video card change. I currently have installed Forceware 180.84 drivers. My first attempt installing the newest 181.20 drivers resulted in a blue screen of death when booting windows XP. so I uninstalled those, decided to just try a little older driver version, and that worked. As soon as I am done with this post I am going to uninstall these drivers and try another set of drivers, but really I'm just flailing in the dark here, trying random changes without any real plan of action because I don't understand the root cause of this problem. UPDATE: Just tried a newer set of drivers 181.00 - same issue. Appears to be no change. Also tried the latest 181.20 drivers again (tried the international version instead of the english version this time), still could not get the computer to load windows.Current setupE4400 Core2Duo @ 2.92 GHzASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA motherboardEVGA 9800GT 512mb - 180.84 drivers currently (about to try a different set of drivers to see if there is any difference)Windows XP Pro 32-bit SP2Flight Simulator 9.12GB A-data RAM22" LCD widescreen, 1680x1050 resolution.

[bobbyjack 61]

Make sure your new card is listed in your FSX cfg.And...FSX is a lot for a E4400 to handle.Bob

[Guest Nealoc187]

Make sure your new card is listed in your FSX cfg.And...FSX is a lot for a E4400 to handle.Bob

This is FS9 that I'm talking about.

[bobbyjack 61]

Drat!Do you have cfg tweaks that need to be readdressed? You know, the deleat and rebuild.Still need to be sure your new card is in the "FS9" cfg.Bob

[Guest Nealoc187]

Drat!Do you have cfg tweaks that need to be readdressed? You know, the deleat and rebuild.Still need to be sure your new card is in the "FS9" cfg.Bob

Yes actually I have done some changes to the FS9 CFG in the past, though it's been so long (haven't even simmed in like 3-4 months, and it was quite a while before that that I made the tweaks). Probably a good idea to backup the CFG, deleted it, ad let FS9 rebuild it. I will also check to see that the new card is in there where it should be right now.

[Guest Nealoc187]

Just tried renaming fs9.cfg so it had to build a new one, no change. still 1FPS or less until the polygons (buildings, planes, etc) get the textures painted on to them, then the performance is good until I rotate my view or move the camera or whatever and it has to load more textures. i'm also on yet another set of drivers.

[Plainplane 6]

I suggest you try removing the new card and try the old one again. Then I recommend trying to determine if you start having the issue with the older ATI card.If you are it may suggest another problem.

[Guest Nealoc187]

I suggest you try removing the new card and try the old one again. Then I recommend trying to determine if you start having the issue with the older ATI card.If you are it may suggest another problem.

Unfortunately I can't, that card's long gone. I did not have this problem with the other card though, and this computer has sat (with no video card) since september or october or whenever it was, and just got fired up again last night with this new card in it.

[Plainplane 6]

I was asking because it is possible this issue is caused by either:1. A problem is causing data to not become loaded from the hard drive at a normal speed2. A problem is causing data to not become processed by the graphics card at a normal speedSo it is harder to pinpoint it now since you don't have the older card anymore.

[Guest Nealoc187]

I was asking because it is possible this issue is caused by either:1. A problem is causing data to not become loaded from the hard drive at a normal speed2. A problem is causing data to not become processed by the graphics card at a normal speedSo it is harder to pinpoint it now since you don't have the older card anymore.

I agree. I am leaning towards option 2 though because the graphics card is the only thing that has changed since I had my ATI card and everything was working fine. I have a feeling its a setting of some sort, either in the sim or its CFG files. The card appears to perform normally in a couple other games that I've tried. I tried altering the size and settings of my windows page file and also tried removing my anti-virus, thinking that one of those could be interfering in some way, but there was no change.

[Plainplane 6]

I think that, if possible, that you buy another ATI card and see what happens with it. Then if the problem continues the issue is option 1.Otherwise it is option 2.

[Guest ppokit]

A long shot, but if I recall your previous card was AGP flavour? New card PCI-E?Is there a setting in the BIOS to tell the PC which video subsystem to use? Maybe still set up for AGP graphics?Also, you've overclocked your CPU - is the PCI-E bus tied to 100MHz? I recently had an ASROCK board that wouldn't OC the FSB unless the PCI-E bus was similarly clocked. If your PCI-E bus is overclocked too much, it won't do your 9800GT & SATA drives any favours.....Chris

[Guest Nealoc187]

A long shot, but if I recall your previous card was AGP flavour? New card PCI-E?Is there a setting in the BIOS to tell the PC which video subsystem to use? Maybe still set up for AGP graphics?Also, you've overclocked your CPU - is the PCI-E bus tied to 100MHz? I recently had an ASROCK board that wouldn't OC the FSB unless the PCI-E bus was similarly clocked. If your PCI-E bus is overclocked too much, it won't do your 9800GT & SATA drives any favours.....Chris

I did a little reading on this subject last night and was planning on looking in to it tonight when I get a chance. I will let you know what I find, thanks for the suggestion.

[Guest ppokit]

I did a little reading on this subject last night and was planning on looking in to it tonight when I get a chance. I will let you know what I find, thanks for the suggestion.

No probsYou may also want to edit the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT value found in the DISPLAY section of your FS9.cfg file (I think 40 is default, and 400 is the max valid value).

[Guest Nealoc187]

Well I went in to the bios and read a few threads about the ASRock boards, I made the changes and changed a few promising looking settings. For instance my primary graphics slot (or whatever it's called) was set to PCI, so I set it to PCI-express. I also chose to go asynchronous with my PCI-e bus speed and limit it to 100 as recommended (any higher than 100 overclocks the graphics card, making it run faster but perhaps making it unstable, mine was set to synch with my FSB speed which at 290, meant my PCI-e was running at 109mhz). Changed those settings (changed them one by one of course, to see if any individual setting had any positive effect) and didn't notice any improvement in the graphics behavior with any of the changes, but it DID make my system unstable. my nv4_disp.dll driver kept locking up and the system would lock up and then give me a blue screen of death, forcing a reboot. This happened both when running the sim and once even when I wasn't running the sim, just browsing the web. I tried changing to various sets of drivers and still got blue screen of death (and yes, I used the approved safe mode > driver sweeper > reboot > install new driver > reboot). I'm kindof at a loss here. When I saw that setting for Primary Graphics Interface or whatever (I forget the actual term used in the bios) I got excited because it was set to PCI, when I'm obviously using a PCI-express card and I thought "hey, this might be the problem! but it did not make any difference. bummed me out a little bit. btw ppokit I did try mesing with the texture_bandwidth_mult on the day I got the card, no change. :(