This is a hardly an FU III topic but since the hardware is a prerequisite for flightsimming I decided to share my experience and maybe get some advice.My PC came shipped with an Nvidia Geforce 8500 GT card. I have been thinking about upgrading to a more powerful card once the price came down. Now the time seemed right. However, I noticed that my power supply could be a limiting factor -- as far as I know it's 400 watts. I ended up with an Nvidia Gigabyte 9400 GT card. While not being cutting edge by today's standards it's quite good and quite inexpensive.I unplugged everything, opened the PC cabinet and switched cards. When I powered up again the PC wouldn't boot, not even in safe mode. I tried messing with the CMOS and ended up selecting "safe defaults". That made the computer start asking for a boot disk. I set hard disk boot as all three options but it still insisted on a boot disk. Then I noticed that one of my disks was unplugged. I guess I'd been trying to boot without it. I replugged everything and tried again. Finally I gave in and chose recovery. This was actually a misnomer since it didn't recover anything -- it wiped my C drive and installed factory defaults. So, I had last years Vista OS again and had to go through a lot of updates, reinstall antivirus and all of my favorite apps. Luckily, my flightsims were safe on drive E and my projects and most of my personal documents resided on drive D. I lost some documents though, those that were in the default "My Documents" and I lost registry entries for all of the applications on Drive D and E. The moral is, don't leave anything you can't afford to lose on Drive C! From now on I'll avoid the "My Documents" and rather store license keys, passwords, documents etc on other drives. Anyway the system is running again and everything's fine. I have gained some extra power and all sims run faster by 20 - 30 percent or so. It's particularly noticeable when there's a lot of scenery objects to be rendered. FU III weather can be cranked up now without reducing fps to a slideshow.Then I tried over-clocking. The card came with a console for over-clocking and I couldn't resist. I chose settings that were shown in a manual and clicked OK. Result, my screen was flickering and I couldn't make out anything. The desktop was there but there was "purple rain" all over the place. Since the mouse cursor was invisible I had to do a hard restart to get out. If anyone knows anything about (moderate) over-clocking I'll be happy to try again.There's another thing I haven't sorted out yet. My device manger comes up with an unknown device and no driver. A search for a driver results in a string of "unknowns" and finally fails. Since I have the right drivers for every piece of hardware that I'm aware of I can't figure out what is responsible for this entry. I can delete it but it keeps coming back as I reboot. Any ideas?

Hans,No disrespect, but the GeForce 9400GT is not a powerful graphics card. You shouldn't have been looking at anything less than a 9600GT.

Hans,No disrespect, but the GeForce 9400GT is not a powerful graphics card. You shouldn't have been looking at anything less than a 9600GT.

I know, but I was afraid that my power supply would be insufficient. It's obviously better than the GeForce 8500 GT that came shipped with this computer. Will the 9600 card run as intended with a 400 watt power supply? I may switch cards again later provided the power supply will support a more powerful card.It's also a question of price. The 9400 card cost me about

Here's another issue that may fit into this thread. I upgraded the video driver and got this. Actually, the Windows update dealt me a driver that made FU III look like this so I went to the source and got the latest Nvidia driver for my card. Both of the latest drivers scramble the cockpit views. This means that I'll have to roll back two generations to revert to the driver that worked. Is there another way? Why does the FU III panels get messed up with some drivers? Everything except the 2D panel looks fine and other sims are quite happy with these Nvidia drivers.

This is turning into a soliloquy by now :( I have some additional info and additional questions,Since the Nvidia driver comes with a console (Nvidia PhysX) FU III is already "enhanched" in the first place even without any nHancer profile being set up. Nvidia PhysX (don't we all love these fancy deliberate misspellings) sets up a profile for all 3D applications. If you add nHancer to the loop it will first read and implement the PhysX profile and use this as a baseline for any further program-specific choices. The reason I found out was that FU III looked pretty good in the first place even though I had uninstalled nHancer. I then found that Nvidia had a profile for FU3 in its driver application. This may imply that we can do all of the enhancing without a second application called nHancer but I'll certainly reinstall it if it can take this any further. Needless to say, I need to get the basic 3D view right before considering any cosmetic improvements.I tried to change a lot of settings and got a plethora of different anomalies. So, it works! However, I never got FU III back to a basic non-3D look as long as "primary di" is checked/ticked under "options". Further, even when I cut the Nvidia profile down to nothing (everything off) I still got anomalies of the kind illustrated above. So, I could certainly roll back the driver but this leaves me curious. What version of openGL does FU III use? What could Nvidia have done to mess up this older version of openGL? They claim that support for previous versions hasn't been dropped.

Hi Hans,Sounds like you have had a bit of a struggle getting this working.As far as I know (could be totally wrong) FU doesn't support OpenGL at all, only DirectX. It should run fine with the latest version.Regarding the purple rain, I had a similar experience with X-Plane after upgrading my system RAM. I was able to overclock the memory (it was specified to run at the overclocked speed), and all worked fine until I loaded X-Plane, when the graphics looked liked shards of glass flying at me at a zillion knots. Never was able to resolve it.I think there is a "relationship" between system (CPU/RAM etc) timings, and the graphics card timings. If one or the other is too fast then the other half of the relationship can't handle data transfer fast enough and so corruption occurs in the video processing.CheersBruce HPS I haven't forgotten your Seattle upgrade, just had a bit on my plate.

This is embarrassing, for some reason I've always thought of FU III as an openGL application. Anyway, this is the situation,I've got DirectX 10. Even when DirectX 10 compatibility is checked in the nHancer window I get a distorted 2D cockpit with antialiasing on. Any other kinds of filtering (anisotropic, trilinear) are fine but AA gives me a broken cockpit. AA works great, by the way, for anything but the 3D cockpit. The video driver I installed reports as 8.16.11.9107 or simply 191.07.For some reason this driver and FU III are incompatible when you set any level of AA. The reason it got distorted even without nHancer was due to PhysX giving FU III a basic level of AA as default. When this was forced off I got the cockpit back.Now, nHancer has some program-specific DirectX compatibility modes but it goes without saying that FU III is not listed. I tried another title by EA but it didn't effect anything. Would FU III by any chance use a 3D engine that might correlate with the custom settings for other more recent applications? Under DirectX 10 compatibility I find Dunia Engine, STALKER (Clear Sky), Lost Planet, Crysis and Bioshock.While the other filtering options provide some enhancement we really can't accept a lack of antialiasing support. Ground texture tiles look all right but I get "ants" and jaggies.

This is embarrassing, for some reason I've always thought of FU III as an openGL application. Anyway, this is the situation,I've got DirectX 10. Even when DirectX 10 compatibility is checked in the nHancer window I get a distorted 2D cockpit with antialiasing on. Any other kinds of filtering (anisotropic, trilinear) are fine but AA gives me a broken cockpit. AA works great, by the way, for anything but the 3D cockpit. The video driver I installed reports as 8.16.11.9107 or simply 191.07.For some reason this driver and FU III are incompatible when you set any level of AA. The reason it got distorted even without nHancer was due to PhysX giving FU III a basic level of AA as default. When this was forced off I got the cockpit back.Now, nHancer has some program-specific DirectX compatibility modes but it goes without saying that FU III is not listed. I tried another title by EA but it didn't effect anything. Would FU III by any chance use a 3D engine that might correlate with the custom settings for other more recent applications? Under DirectX 10 compatibility I find Dunia Engine, STALKER (Clear Sky), Lost Planet, Crysis and Bioshock.While the other filtering options provide some enhancement we really can't accept a lack of antialiasing support. Ground texture tiles look all right but I get "ants" and jaggies.

Hans;FU III is a 3D application.Not made for directX 10 .Try DirectX ver9C .If you have a couple of hard drives ,then suggest get a bigger power suply .At least 750 watts .I have a Nv9800GT 1gig card and it is almost too powerfull for FUIII. sky is streaked.PhysX OFF.AS for saving your stuff on drive C ,Get a disk image program and make an image of C drive and save it to another drive.,then you can put everything back as it was at the time of image.Find one that has a boot disk for retrival. AS some don;t.Some are free ,PAY ones,-- O&O diskimage ,---Norton Ghost.

As discussed in a previous thread I

I just checked back to report the following,I've downgraded driver version incrementally ending up with the 170-series driver that came with the video card. None of these give me a correctly rendered 2D cockpit AND beautifully antialiased terrain at the same time. All of them provide either a nice 3D terrain with a broken cockpit or a non-AA enhanced terrain with a proper cockpit. Whenever the antialiasing is enabled (to any extent) the 2D panel / cockpit elements are "eaten away" to leave open spots that show the outside 3D view. It seems that I've lost a "2D-always-on-top" command or something. I guess I didn't notice when I tested FU III with the new card since the AA must have been disabled. I must have thought it looked decent enough and figured I could add more AA later. Well, any amount of enabled AA kills the 2D view while anisotropic and trilinear work as intended. However, nothing but AA will really take away the jaggies of lines viewed at an angle.Those of you with Nvidia video cards, which drivers and settings are you using? Do you have Nvidia PhysX installed? PhysX pretty much does the job that nHancer does and I'm considering whether PhysX may be the culprit. Even with no nHancer installed / no nHancer profile for FU III I get a broken cockpit the moment I enable AA. I've used Driver Sweeper to clean out previous driver elements each time I switched to a different one, thus I doubt that I'm struggling with a mix of new files and left-over files.

Hans;FU III is a 3D application.Not made for directX 10 .Try DirectX ver9C .If you have a couple of hard drives ,then suggest get a bigger power suply .At least 750 watts .I have a Nv9800GT 1gig card and it is almost too powerfull for FUIII. sky is streaked.PhysX OFF.AS for saving your stuff on drive C ,Get a disk image program and make an image of C drive and save it to another drive.,then you can put everything back as it was at the time of image.Find one that has a boot disk for retrival. AS some don;t.Some are free ,PAY ones,-- O&O diskimage ,---Norton Ghost.

Regarding DirectX 10 it came with an automatic Vista update. I know it's possible to downgrade even though MS doesn't support downgrading of DirectX. However, unless something completely new has been implemented this time any DirectX version should be backwards compatible. When FU III was launched I guess we were at DirectX 6.0. Thus, even DirectX 9 is way above the required version yet there are no problems. But then, I've got no sims that require / use the full potential of DirectX 10 so I could certainly use the previous version. If so I'll have to ensure that automatic updates won't put v10 back.A ghost image sounds like a good idea. I do have backups of most things on a portable drive though.Stuart, I tried the planes that you said worked. Here any plane will get the "dissolved" panel view. The more I think of it, it seems that AA doesn't distinguish between 2D and 3D elements anymore. In FS9 it works -- antialiased terrain and intact 2D cockpits. Regardinging gauge cleaners it shouldn't really be required but most geeks think it's a good idea, especially for downgrading the drivers. When downgrading you may want an older file to replace a newer one of the same name and that's when Windows may choose to keep the newer one.

My FU3 works still with DirectX 9c and a NVIDIA 8600GT but do you tried ddfix ? http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?showtop...84&hl=ddfixsearch for it in this forum, good luckAndre

I'm at work now but I looked up ddfix. This looks very promising. The homepage lists "Thief" by Looking Glass as the main reason for creating ddfix. Reason, later Nvidia drivers corrupt the rendering...What driver version are you using Agtim? It may seem that Nvidia drivers more recent than the 160 or 170 series won't complement FU III too well.

Just an update on this issue.I down loaded ddfix1.3.11 and tried to install it, but I got the following message 'DDFIXGUI.EXE must be run from the same directory as Thief.exe, Thief2.exe,or Shock2.exe'.Maybe you computer whizz-kids can come up with a work-around for this one :( Stuart

Just an update on this issue.I down loaded ddfix1.3.11 and tried to install it, but I got the following message 'DDFIXGUI.EXE must be run from the same directory as Thief.exe, Thief2.exe,or Shock2.exe'.Maybe you computer whizz-kids can come up with a work-around for this one :( ---------------------I have tried the following tonight,1) Reverting to video drivers as low as this card will go (178.24 WinVista)2) Adding DirectX9 funtionalityhttp://www.techpowerup.com/?25528http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=enI've still got the anomaly shown in the image above. I've searched the Nvidia forums (http://forums.nvidia.com) and find a lot on driver problems but I haven't found this one yet.Yes, the fix for the application "Thief" may seem promising but it's specifically written for that game. If this addresses the same problem as we're experiencing it will have to be tailored to fit flight3.exe.However, we need to find out whether this is a DirectX issue, an Nvidia driver issue or a Vista issue. It would really help if all of you who run FU III on a PC with an Nvidia card list your OS, your card, your DirectX version and the video driver version. This will help us understand where to look for the solution.One reason why few users experience problems may be that most current FU III pilots run the sim on an old rig. That is, one with video drivers that still support older sims/games and/or an earlier version of DirectX. While we shouldn't expect any novel features for old applications we should expect backwards compatibility. That is, new versions should do the old stuff as well as they always did while adding new features for recent applications. We always hear that it's a good idea to pick up the latest drivers / latest versions of everything. This may not be a good idea unless you're always playing the latest games and tend to trash them as soon as the next generation becomes available.