Those of us with sound blaster cards cannot lower the sound quality to telephone level though

Open offer by the way - if anyone in Arizona is seeing this issue, I will personally come see it myself and try to figure it out. Contact me if you can readily reproduce this and live here.

The problem does not "necessarily happen" - I have personally never seen it, nor have any of the other developer team members. If this was as widespread as you claim we'd have thousands of people here complaining - we don't. The issue is not simply the texture resolution, we think it's likely related to how much "stuff" you have in the sim. The sim seems to have finite internal resources in some way and when those get exhausted, this problem starts up. Scenery seems to be a major culprit here. I tested the other night and when you load the plane itself in the free flight window (which loads the textures), my card reports somewhere around 100-120MB of video RAM used. As soon as you load the plane up in a high detail scenery area in the sim though, it jumps to 500+MB and higher depending on the exact area you're in. With FTX PNW, UT2 traffic, and REX, at high slider settings I was able to get very close to my GTX260's 896MB limit.We can't fix a problem that isn't caused by us and that's something complicated inside the engine where no one cause can be pinpointed. People have seen and reported this issue in FS9 too, that isn't some kind of solution. People have reported it with the LDS 763 and Captain Sim 757. ACES is not around for us to ask them what causes this or how to fix it. Believe me, I wish we knew how to fix it. I don't know what we're supposed to do when people see it on BETTER systems than the ones we ourselves are running... That doesn't make sense if it's our problem as you claim.

Dear Ryan.I think my system had some graphics error yesterday.I was preparing my first real IFR flight in FSX using the Queen.When I went into spot view I saw that the plane was stripped to the bones, no aircraft skin just seats!Then it froze some time after that.I then restarted FSX with out rebooting my computer and continued the flight preparation with out any error occuring when in spot view.I then decided to continue my flight and took off succesfully from YMML at around midnight FS time.After a nice 4x speed increased flight over the western Pacific, it was time to land. At around 8000ft when I wanted to contact ATC, I pressed the 1 button and the whole sim just froze.I got this error:Faulting application name: fsx.exe, version: 10.0.61472.0, time stamp: 0x475e17d3Faulting module name: g3d.dll, version: 10.0.61472.0, time stamp: 0x475e180cException code: 0xc0000005Fault offset: 0x000b50dfFaulting process id: 0x43cFaulting application start time: 0x01cac5354030582fFaulting application path: D:\games\fsx.exeFaulting module path: D:\games\g3d.dllReport Id: 553592e6-314f-11df-89c2-6cf049505656the g3d.dll means that something went wrong with the graphics, correct?I have since changed my max texture load down to 1028 and reduced my bufferpool, but I have yet to test if it helps my FSX.Was I experiencing an exhausted graphics card? I know it might be a hard question to answer, but in theory?

I'm sympathetic Ryan, I think you're right, PMDG is not the cause, just the victim of some brokencode, probably in DirectX somewhere.I never used to see this problem, but when I think about it, I have been adding in all the "cool"enhancers: UTX, GEX, UT2, and REX, so I guess its just pushing the video memory over the top.Maybe we can force (hah, ya right) MS to look at this as a DirectX bug!I suppose I'd rather have my flights and aircraft stable than all the wonderful world enhancers,of course, I'd REALLY rather it all worked too :)Cheers,

Ryan,

Open offer by the way - if anyone in Arizona is seeing this issue, I will personally come see it myself and try to figure it out. Contact me if you can readily reproduce this and live here.

I've been following this thread with interest. I've had the corrupt scenery once with a the panel remaining unchanged, and the panel/scenery corrupt twice. All three have occured after I installed B747-8. That being said after the corrupt display I have gone back in and reset my sound to the lowest setting. So now after I fly it, I just go back in to my machine and reset the sound to minimum and no problems. I don't know if it is related the the B747-8 or not, but it fixes the problem. A small price to pay for the B747-8.My setup is a little different and about three years old. I run Vista 32, 4 GB memory, Intel E8600 (not overclocked) and a GTS8800 video card. I run FSX and FS9 on this computer and run VATSIM and ASX on another computer through Simconnect. I have the paid version of FSUIPC to keep the weather reasonable. I run AVG and Windows firewall. Before starting FSX my physical memory is 31% and CPU usage is at 1%. Running FSX, PMDG B747 and Fly Tampa VHHH I get about 18-20 fps with all scenery sliders set at normal or greater (NickNs setup). I've run 10-12 hour flights with PMDG B747 with no problems. Its not perfect, but for me it's pretty darn good. :).Bill Bridges

Well the only two things I know that have solved this problem is lowering the sound quality and flying with DX10 preview enabled. I for one have contacted Asus and VIA to see if I can get drivers to enable lower sound quality and no luck. I can fly long hauls but I dare not try to watch the replay as this is where my corruption occurs.

Ok everyone, time to shake things up:I just spent the last 3 hours (yes, seriously) reading through each and every post in this entire thread, reviewing the current state of these issues and what's happened up to now. At some point in the next few days, I'm going to close down this thread and start a fresh new one that will begin with a summary I'm going to write. This summary will contain the base of knowledge we have about these issues up to this point.I'm EXTREMELY intrigued by the work Daniel van Os (Daniel42) is doing in trying isolate exactly how the issues are occurring within the DirectX API calls. Daniel, I'm going to send you a PM in a second and I'd like to get in touch with you via email and IM/Skype if that's possible. If we can actually isolate how this occurs, then this *IS* something that we can take to our contacts at Microsoft. If it's something in the Vista/Win7 driver model or DirectX, the chance is much much higher that we might actually get a fix from them. If it's something within FS, it's going to be very hard (impossible would be my guess actually) to get a solution because the ACES studio no longer existsI do want to say that I am absolutely confident after reviewing this thread that this is not PMDG's issue as far as a "bug" or anything like that in our code. (which was also the conclusion made by several other programmers like Daniel in the course of the thread) I saw screenshots of the Level-D 767, the Captain Sim 757, and the Flight 1 Super 80 all exhibiting exactly the same issue in the course of reading through all of this - that VERY strongly points to some kind of issue in FS and/or Windows. Our code does not make Direct3D calls or anything like that - that's all coming from the FS engine. It might be true that our products trigger the issues faster or more frequently than others, but that would simply be because we do more with our systems modeling and push things further than anyone else does. That's what makes us who we are, and I can't imagine it changing, but if we can pinpoint a cause here it makes it much more likely that we can at least try to work around it in future products.Expect the new thread in the coming days - I need some time to write the summary post.

wow, thanks Tabs for your effort!looking forward to get this annoying issue solved....

Ryan,Let me add to my thread earlier on this page. One of the failures was with Coolsky MD-80, one with PMDG B747-400, and one with POSKY B777. I never had a failure with B747-8. I don't know where the problem is. I just make the sound changes as a precaution and it seems to help. :).The point I was trying to make is FSX and PMDG will run without any problems on Vista32, an older processor (E8600) and FSX.Bill Bridges

Ok everyone, time to shake things up:I just spent the last 3 hours (yes, seriously) reading through each and every post in this entire thread, reviewing the current state of these issues and what's happened up to now. At some point in the next few days, I'm going to close down this thread and start a fresh new one that will begin with a summary I'm going to write. This summary will contain the base of knowledge we have about these issues up to this point.I'm EXTREMELY intrigued by the work Daniel van Os (Daniel42) is doing in trying isolate exactly how the issues are occurring within the DirectX API calls. Daniel, I'm going to send you a PM in a second and I'd like to get in touch with you via email and IM/Skype if that's possible. If we can actually isolate how this occurs, then this *IS* something that we can take to our contacts at Microsoft. If it's something in the Vista/Win7 driver model or DirectX, the chance is much much higher that we might actually get a fix from them. If it's something within FS, it's going to be very hard (impossible would be my guess actually) to get a solution because the ACES studio no longer existsI do want to say that I am absolutely confident after reviewing this thread that this is not PMDG's issue as far as a "bug" or anything like that in our code. (which was also the conclusion made by several other programmers like Daniel in the course of the thread) I saw screenshots of the Level-D 767, the Captain Sim 757, and the Flight 1 Super 80 all exhibiting exactly the same issue in the course of reading through all of this - that VERY strongly points to some kind of issue in FS and/or Windows. Our code does not make Direct3D calls or anything like that - that's all coming from the FS engine. It might be true that our products trigger the issues faster or more frequently than others, but that would simply be because we do more with our systems modeling and push things further than anyone else does. That's what makes us who we are, and I can't imagine it changing, but if we can pinpoint a cause here it makes it much more likely that we can at least try to work around it in future products.Expect the new thread in the coming days - I need some time to write the summary post.

Ryan,Thank you for scouring back though the thread and for your renewed efforts on this subject.

I have had this issue as well but it does not always happen and not always with PMDG products. After receiving an error with the offending article being atc.dll I read that adding a line to the fsuipc4.ini under the general heading resolved some issues with CTD's.Under GENERAL add:RemoveATC=YesI have flown a few flights since adding this text and I am actually nearing 8 hours flying from Bangkok to Sydney in the MD-11 from daytime through dusk and into night without a CTD or freeze up, and I tried going back and forth between the FSX menu without a hitch. A couple of days ago my system froze only after 4 hours of flight.I hope that somehow a resolution is found, thanks for all the hard work out there.

If a solution is finally found for this it will be amazing. Thank you to all of you who are technically proficient enough to dwell deeper into this. I sure as don't know anything about the inner workings of software beyond opening its CFG file with notepad. :(If it is of any note and/or hasn't been mentioned this does NOT occur under DX10. Only seems to be a 9 problem.

If a solution is finally found for this it will be amazing. Thank you to all of you who are technically proficient enough to dwell deeper into this. I sure as don't know anything about the inner workings of software beyond opening its CFG file with notepad. :(If it is of any note and/or hasn't been mentioned this does NOT occur under DX10. Only seems to be a 9 problem.

It would be nice to know how things went for Tim using the shader tweak, I've been using it for more than a month with great success.. the only downside is that 'ported' FS2004 aircraft will not work, but I use 100% native FSX A/C

Bit of a delay on getting the new post up guys - does anyone here know how to contact Daniel who was running the D3D trace tests above? I've sent several PM's with no response.

Bit of a delay on getting the new post up guys - does anyone here know how to contact Daniel who was running the D3D trace tests above? I've sent several PM's with no response.

Hello Ryan, It sounded like there might be multiple (perhaps related) problems in this long thread. Would it be possible to provide a summary of the different failure modes and the particular hardware and add-ons combinations that formed the "common denominator" set in your new post? Do you have a ball park percentge figure that can give us an idea of how common this problem is?I have been away taking a long "nap" from FS (a few years) and recently have been slowly building an FSX rig now that the hardware is feasible to run FSX. I would very much lile to be able to run without this problem so any insight would be very valuable even if it means not adding the full gammit of add-ons/enhancements.Thank you for your top notch dedication and helpfulness over the years.