More and more often now I see this problem, and it always occurs at large airports. The 3D buildings flicker like crazy with these bizarre black shadow shapes. I tried to attach some screen shots but the attachment editor wasn't working for me. I'll try to get those posted.I always am sure to keep the ambient temperature cool when I play FSX to help keep the GPU cool. I don't believe it heats up past 60-70 degrees C.I have tried a few different forceware drivers and all show the same problem. Perhaps when I uninstalled one driver to install another, I didn't get the old completely uninstalled (didn't use drive cleaner or the like).Win XP x64 SP1FSX w/AccelerationCore i76 gB DDR3 ramnVidia 8800 GT

Sounds like a bad video card. You can try another driver first though.

They also flicker in certain areas for me. My 8800GT was from MSI and it was factory overclocked....I had major issues with artifacts and crashes in various games (although the heat was never too high, very weird)If it has a factory overclock on it, try scaling back to factory default for your card, you can use rivatuner to do that

My last video card started doing this really badly and it did turn out in the end that the video card went bad. So when I got this one, I was especially careful to make sure it could always stay adequately cool. Unfortunately it was only about 2 months or so after its purchase that this problem started happening again. This led me to suspect that it was a software/driver problem (as these things change a lot on my pc). Well, that was a year ago and so far nothing has changed for the better.I'm trying to upload some pics. Does anyone know why when I hit the green upload button it says it is uploading, but then the attachment editor comes back without having uploaded anything, and now with the browse button and upload button completely missing?

The standard specs for the 8800 GT are (from nVidia's website):graphics clock 600 Mhzprocessor clock 1500 Mhzmemory clock 900 MhzRiva Tuner says my card runs at:Core clock\ROP domain 600MhzCore clock\shader domain 1500Mhzmemory clock 500MhzSo my card has always been at the standard settings. Well, except for the memory apparently. Is it possible that it's been running all this time with a 400Mhz underclock? Or should I think double-data-rate and interpret 500Mhz to mean 1000Mhz? My card does have 1GB of video ram which is unusual for this card. Usually they have 512MB and maybe the manufacturer thought the surplus of ram mandated a cutback in clock frequency.

Memory is underclocked in "idle" mode. Put a load on your GPU by running a stress test such as furmark or ATI Tray Tools artifact tester and leave your clockspeed monitoring app open. You'll see the memory jump back up to 900MHz.

Thanks for reminding me about idle speeds. It turns out that under 3d performance stress, it clocks up to the following:Core clock/ROP domain 650MhzCore clock/shader domain 1620Mhzmemory clock 950Mhzwhich are of course a bit faster than the reference standards.Does anyone know what I'm talking about with the picture upload problem?

Does anyone know what I'm talking about with the picture upload problem?I do but can't figure it out. Same thing haappens to me.JimCYWG

Well, I'm glad someone else knows what I'm talking about (so I'm not crazy), just wish someone would post a solution.

I just installed a brand new video card and I see the same problem still. The 3D modeled buildings in the sim flicker various shaped dark shadows on their surfaces like mad. The appearance of the glitch does seem to make you thing the graphics hardware is dying but it looks to me now that that is not the case.

There are Z-buffering issues in FSX since SP2/Acceleration. When some textures are very close together, flickering occurs. This may be what you are seeing and there is nothing you can do about it.

I just installed a brand new video card and I see the same problem still. The 3D modeled buildings in the sim flicker various shaped dark shadows on their surfaces like mad. The appearance of the glitch does seem to make you thing the graphics hardware is dying but it looks to me now that that is not the case.

Not trying to be a wise guy but if Nvidia cards are giving you so much trouble why not try an ATI card? The ATI Radeon HD 4890 cards are pretty darn good, priced well, and you don't hear about the driver issues for FS that you do with Nvidia. I use an ATI HD 3870 card now and no flickering buildings for me.Just my two cents...

Turn off ground scenery casts shadows in the fsx settings