Well, just completed my 9h flight into KORD from EDDF. FSDreamteams scenery didn

Well, just completed my 9h flight into KORD from EDDF. FSDreamteams scenery didn

Hi Jay,it

Hi Jay,it

Realtek and SoundMax are two different makers of onboard sound chipsets, not just two different drivers you can swap between. You have to have the hardware to use the driver.So, is this correct then - no one has seen the issue using a Realtek sound chip? I have Realtek myself and it would definitely explain why I haven't seen it here if it's confined to the SoundMax and X-Fi stuff...

Hi Ryan,I

Hi Ryan,I

Tim - you hit the nail on the head. Sound card "tech" is utter BS for the most part... Back in the day there were some decently cool real advances when DSP chips became cheap and plentiful (3D positional audio using binaural headphones or speakers to trick the brain into hearing things spatially, reverb and occlusion effects stuff branded as "environmental audio" and so on... but anymore it is all marketing hype and attempts to justify the existence of expensive sound cards that no longer actually have a market. The onboard sound chipset on most motherboards is every bit as good as what's in the latest "Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme MP3 Ultra Gamer" or whatever stupid name they're using this month lol...My favorite is when consumer audio card companies like Creative Labs try to make it sound like audio professionals would use their cards for recording or something. My other "job" is that of professional musician and it's absolutely laughable that anyone would use these cards for audio engineering work - the Pro Tools setup I use for actual music recording STARTS at $1500 and can easily get upwards of $30 or 40k if you get the full blown HD Accel system haha.

Tim,thanks for your reply. About five years ago, when I started simming, I didn

I

Tim - you hit the nail on the head. Sound card "tech" is utter BS for the most part... Back in the day there were some decently cool real advances when DSP chips became cheap and plentiful (3D positional audio using binaural headphones or speakers to trick the brain into hearing things spatially, reverb and occlusion effects stuff branded as "environmental audio" and so on... but anymore it is all marketing hype and attempts to justify the existence of expensive sound cards that no longer actually have a market. The onboard sound chipset on most motherboards is every bit as good as what's in the latest "Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme MP3 Ultra Gamer" or whatever stupid name they're using this month lol...My favorite is when consumer audio card companies like Creative Labs try to make it sound like audio professionals would use their cards for recording or something. My other "job" is that of professional musician and it's absolutely laughable that anyone would use these cards for audio engineering work - the Pro Tools setup I use for actual music recording STARTS at $1500 and can easily get upwards of $30 or 40k if you get the full blown HD Accel system haha.

Yes, but the reason I, and many others, bought a 3rd-party soundcard back in the day was to offload every bit of the CPU cycles we could. It was commonly beleived that a soundcard such as this, with its own onboard processor would do just that, reduce the CPU workload. I have not seen any discussions to the contrary in the past few years. Has this changed? Not opinions, but hard facts?Thanks...

Yes, but the reason I, and many others, bought a 3rd-party soundcard back in the day was to offload every bit of the CPU cycles we could. It was commonly beleived that a soundcard such as this, with its own onboard processor would do just that, reduce the CPU workload. I have not seen any discussions to the contrary in the past few years. Has this changed? Not opinions, but hard facts?Thanks...

It's not easy for us consumers to find hard facts in this area. And I do not think this is accidental: lack of clarity these days is usually deliberate. But here are some pointers for you:The link posted by Kyle http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/bo...message.id=1694is a good starting point. See also this MS article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb...r_Windows_VistaQuote:"What changes were made to the DirectX runtime for Windows Vista?...DirectSound was updated to expose the capabilities of the new Windows Vista audio driver stack, which supports multi-channel software buffers. The Direct3D Retained Mode API was completely removed from Windows Vista. DirectPlay Voice was also removed, as well as DirectPlay's NAT Helper and DirectInput's action-mapper UI. Support for the DirectX 7 and DirectX 8 interfaces for Visual Basic 6.0 is not available on Windows Vista."Asus's documentation also strongly implies that DirectX on its own will prevent the soundcard from reducing the CPU's workload. Here, for example, is an extract from p50 of its PDF manual for a product called a "Xonar HDAV1.3 Deluxe":"Xonar HDAV 1.3 is introducing an innovative technology - DirectSound 3D Game Extensions v1.0 (DS3D GX 1.0) to restore DirectSound 3D Hardware acceleration mode and its subsidiary EAX effects on Windows Vista for 3D games. Unlike some proprietary API like ApelAL, DS3D GX doesn't require games to support OpenAL API. All existing games compatible with Microsoft DirectX and DirectSound 2D/3D will be supported with DS3D GX technology. Before you start EAX and DS3D HW games, enable DS3D GX on the Xonar HDAV Center, and disable the function after the games."If that sort of gobbledygook is to your liking you can download the full text here: http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=QY0U...&templete=2And try this for an overview:http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.htmlEDIT: And this from Creative's download page:http://support.creative.com/Products/Produ...-Fi+XtremeGamerI quote:"File Name : ALMY_PCVTAPP_LB_1_25_10.exe This download contains the Creative ALchemy application for Windows Vista

With some hesitation, I think we are nearing a solution to this.Now that I have - adventitiously - worked out what "Alchemy" does (it is supposed to bypass the loss of D3D audio hardware acceleration in Vista), tonight I installed it onto my PC. I have had to use the version which came with my MB and this only supports Vista. As I am now using Win7RC, I don't seem to be able to activate it with the serial number from Asus (something fishy about the activation website, according to IE8!) so I can only use it for 30 days. Anyway: with Alchemy installed, I was able to point the Alchemy software to my FSX folder. I don't seem to have to do anything else to get it working. Next, I turned my sound quality back to default settings. Then I ran my test flights.Hey presto: without Alchemy, I can 99% guarantee that I can trigger a crash within about 5 minutes. But with Alchemy installed, my test flights are fine (tonight, anyway).Too early to say whether this is it - but if you have the chance to investigate then perhaps you could post your results. Anyone with a modern Soundblaster soundboard should be able to try this (Jordan?). Equally, anyone with an Asus MB might find that there is some software bundled with the MB DVD (Jay and others?). In mine, it's situated in the "Drivers/SB-X-Fi" folder on the DVD .Tim

Hi guys,Very interesting thread. Just wanted to give some feedback which may help in narrowing down this problem.-I can confirm i had exactly the same issues when using my Nvidia 8800GT as well as when using my ATI HD4850x2, so this could rule out this is a graphic driver issue-I can confirm i also had this problem when flying other planes like the wilco airbus series(1 and 2) although i also have the PMDG 744 which was my first payware plane, so it was installed before all other planes-this issue seems to be related to the workload, the higher my settings (or the more complex plane/scenery), the faster i get the black screen / graphic corruption. Since i'm currently using pretty low settings and simple planes i now only get the black screen after exiting very long flights (6+ hours)Personally i dont think it is plane related, it is just that the PMDG bird takes up a lot more resources.I will now try lowering my sound settings as proposed and see if this solves it for me too!My setup: Antec Truepower 1000 - Asus P5k deluxe using onboard sound - Intel Q6600 2.4 @ 3.0 - 6Gb OCZ DDR2 - ATI HD4850X2 - WD raptor 150 GB - Vista 64BitsHope this helps.Remko

I get the black textures in the scenery and grey textures in vc when I have panelastexture=0 in my FSX.cfg under my DISPLAY.NVIDIAetc settings. If I remove this line, scenery and vc textures load properly, but framerates in 2d are much poorer.My 2d framerates are inversely proportional to the stretched size of the panel. Running at 2560*1600, the 2d panel is basically unuseable when panelastexture=1.Anyway, my suggestion: try removing the panelastexture=0 line in your fsx.cfg and see what happens.Bryn.