lower your texture bandwidth multiplier to 40-60get rid of the buffer pool sectionreinstall your video drivers and then directxuninstall nhancer and set 3d settings through the nvidia control panelIf none of that works you have an overheating video card that should be shipped back, or possibly a power supply not powerful enough

I was just about to say that after some testing. Looks like the textures can still get invisible even with affinity mask. I'm removing bufferpools, deleting the texture bandwidth line to rebuild itself, removing fiber frame fraction and removing bufferpools, and removing the affinitymask just like how fsx was supposed to be

I have had the same problem with the default Caravan and the Quest Kodiak. It has only happened a couple times and I can't think of anything that was the same between the flights except teh following:I believe I was in heavy could cover both timesI think it happened after switching aircraft in midflightThe amount of time I was flying didn't seem to make a difference.

I have had the same problem with the default Caravan and the Quest Kodiak. It has only happened a couple times and I can't think of anything that was the same between the flights except teh following:I believe I was in heavy could cover both timesI think it happened after switching aircraft in midflightThe amount of time I was flying didn't seem to make a difference.

It definitely has something to do with load on the computer all together, and FSX autogen, clouds, and texture resolution. FSX is just a poorly coded mess, but its also a good piece of technology...

Agree with 413X3. If there are no other graphic anomalies then this is likely a power problem. Either the power supply is struggling to keep up with peak load demand, or else there is a feed problem to the graphic card. You can't load test a power supply in a computer so get an electrical shop to test it for you. My guess is that it will show early signs of breaking down as it passes 80% of peak mean output if the problem is with the PSU.However, it could equally well be a graphic card or driver glitch. Reinstall DirectX, using the latest update from the Microsoft site (there was a majot update made available last month), then reinstall graphic drivers, perhaps trying a different set. But do remember to remove the old drivers properly, not just overwrite old with new.Finally, one other simple thing that causes this effect is multiple Display entries for the graphic card in FSX.cfg. There should be only ever be a single entry under the headingDisplay.device. YOUR CARDand if you have for any reason installed, changed or reinstalled graphic drivers you MUST go into the FSX.cfg and REMOVE the previous entries. In fact just delete them all, then restart the sim and all you have to do when the menu comes up is set resolution, filtering and AA preferences. The setting in FSX.cfg has nothing to do with any overrides on any card or driver tools you may use.

Regards

It's actually real simple memory starvation or out of memory ;-)

..... of the video card.Turn down your graphics settings and try a flight.

Thanks for the ideas guys. One of you did mention that is was in heavy cloud cover and in the case of when it happened to me I was above very heavy cloud cover. I am thinking that it may have something to do with that. For example if I take a fairly complex airport like KDFW and load it with 100% AI and have fair weather or even somewhat cloudy weather and add the LDS 767, I can manage 18 to 25 FPS, which is more than fine for a smooth landing/takeoff. However take the same setup at select the weather theme from FSX called "Major Thunderstorm", then the FPS can range from 8 to 15, which isn't too good. What is funny though is that I can fly in a complete overcast or very cloudy sky in the same area and get good performance. Apparently "Major Thunderstorm" adds either too many layers of clouds or calls the 32bit clouds that FEX doesn't replace with DXT5 clouds. It's funny though that all the other FSX storm scenarios dont have any effect in performance.As far as running out of memory that could be an issue, however I never the the OOM message, CTD, or BSOD, so its hard to know for sure. I am sure I have enough power with my PC Power and Cooling 750 watt supply and I don't think heat is the problem since I have checked temps and they are inline.Someone else mentioned the sound. I can't locate a setting in my Soundmax control panel to switch from 24 to 16 bit, but I did try lowering the sound acceleration from full to medium and haven't noticed and diference for better or worse.One other thing that could make the clouds more taking is that I am running a high level of AA at 8xQ Multisampling. Perhaps that much AA in clouds is taking a toll? I don't know how much work AA is in clouds however.For Jim Skorna,Is there anyway I can make ASA call for the DXT5 cloud textures or have it render heavy weather using a visibility option rather than the default 32 bit clouds? Maybe that would make a difference in the load the card is trying to display.

... Someone else mentioned the sound. I can't locate a setting in my Soundmax control panel to switch from 24 to 16 bit, but I did try lowering the sound acceleration from full to medium and haven't noticed and diference for better or worse....

First off, please note that it is difficult to tell whether the symptoms in your screenshot are caused by the problem addressed by changing your sound settings, or something else. The fact that you are using XP, rather than Vista or Windows 7, suggests that your problem might be different (eg, RAM exhaustion?).Subject to that caveat:The "disappearing textures" problem classically occurs with complex add-ons in dense scenery, particularly after doing something that affects the graphics "mode" in some way - typically by accessing the menu system, switching views, swapping between windowed and full-screen mode, or minimising the application to the desktop. The received wisdom is that it has to do with an incompatibility between soundcard drivers and the new DirectX model in Vista and Windows 7 (which has done away with DX-based hardware acceleration for sound). But nobody really knows.The solution to this problem is: Control Panel > Sound > Playback tab > Speakers > Properties > Advanced tab > Default Format: 16 bit, 8000Hz (telephone quality). Do the same for all your sound devices (for example, headphones AND microphones).Some soundcards do not allow you to choose a setting as low as 16 bit, 8000Hz (telephone quality). If not, choose the lowest possible quality allowed by your system. The lower the quality you can choose, the better the likelihood of success. My experience is that unless you can choose at least as low as 11025Hz, you will not benefit. But some people have benefited from setting 16000Hz.BTW, this solution is not related to performance: it will not increase your fps.Tim

The solution to this problem is: Control Panel > Sound > Playback tab > Speakers > Properties > Advanced tab > Default Format: 16 bit, 8000Hz (telephone quality). Do the same for all your sound devices (for example, headphones AND microphones).Tim

Thanks for the reply Tim, but my XP setup doesn't have it, or it's not available in the same path.I have;Control Panel> Sounds and Audio Devices> Then the tabs: Volume, Sounds, Audio, Voice, HardwareIf I click on Audio tab I have Sound Playback, Sound recording MIDI music playback, of which sound playback has an advanced tab. If I go into advanced I have a Speakers and Performance tab. The Speakers tab only allows for choosing what type of speaker set up you have, like 4 speakers, 5.1, 7.1, etc. The Performance tab only has Audio Playback settings for hardware acceleration and sample rate conversion.I have combed thru every tab and every advanced tab, basically any tab I can open in the the Sounds and Audio Devices Properties Menu and there is no options to choose 24bit, 16bit, 8000hz.I am on XP SP3. Maybe the options I have are different than Vista. I check my other computer, which is a store bought Dell and it doesn't have those options either taking a path thru Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices

Thanks for the reply Tim, but my XP setup doesn't have it, or it's not available in the same path.I have;Control Panel> Sounds and Audio Devices> Then the tabs: Volume, Sounds, Audio, Voice, HardwareIf I click on Audio tab I have Sound Playback, Sound recording MIDI music playback, of which sound playback has an advanced tab. If I go into advanced I have a Speakers and Performance tab. The Speakers tab only allows for choosing what type of speaker set up you have, like 4 speakers, 5.1, 7.1, etc. The Performance tab only has Audio Playback settings for hardware acceleration and sample rate conversion.I have combed thru every tab and every advanced tab, basically any tab I can open in the the Sounds and Audio Devices Properties Menu and there is no options to choose 24bit, 16bit, 8000hz.I am on XP SP3. Maybe the options I have are different than Vista. I check my other computer, which is a store bought Dell and it doesn't have those options either taking a path thru Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices

Try Sound and Audio Devices > Audio > Sound Playback > Advanced > Performance > Sample rate conversion quality

ASA call for the DXT5 cloud textures or have it render heavy weather using a visibility option rather than the default 32 bit clouds? Maybe that would make a difference in the load the card is trying to display.

could be a solution:Sean just try and set the level of detail radius from large to medium under the same conditions...It's an easy and fast test if the problem disappears it's your graphics card which is out of memory. (different as your system memory) If this is the cause of your problems then this behavior is probably on systems where there is a lot of resistance on the bus due to over clocking.Had the same problem with my 8800gt but since my GTX260 with 896 mb I never saw it again :-)Cheers,Andr

To my question above,ASA has no textures within it so whatever textures you have in FSX those are being used by ASA.I just checked in X Graphics and DXT5 are the default FSX format textures. If you have XG you can submit a set of 128 X 128 textures and see if that helps.Thanks,

Just in case your are purchasing sound cards in future, my creative Xifi sound card control panel allows you to set whatever sound quality you want. That is where i found the option to set my card to 16bit from 24, i have never checked if vista allows me to do this.FSx behaves in very funny random ways when your system is at its limit, to eliminate this issue, turn most of your sliders down to minimum then take a flight with the most complex addon plane in your hanger.On my old dual core, i was having issues as soon as installed Fspax, turning sliders down fixed the issue. And i hope you not using rex2 for weather, Also if you on dual/ quad core, try getting ASA to run on a single core, by using a setaffinity tool that means its a permanent setting , so you dont have to set affiity again everytime you start PC.Most importantly all this problems could be to do with your sliders being too high.Also make sure that you not using up your ram, i got 6gig, when simming max ram used is about 4.5gig. You need to know this figures for your system.On my system after FSX, the other addon that consumes major ram is ASA, so you could be runnning out of memory. try a flight without ASA and all FSX sliders down, cause it may just be you need a PC upgrade or lower sliders. But Xp will never allow you above 3 gig ram though.

I doubt weather add-ons take a lot of resources, I'm not really sure but I guess they couldn't take over 100 MBs of RAM, or that would be too much. Anyway to manage your memory download Cleanmem, it will reduce the memory usage of inactive processes. This will increase performance, most likely prevent OOMs on system RAM, and will reduce memory usage significantly. Make sure to put these in your Cleanmem ignore list (Start > All Programs > Cleanmem > Cleanmem Ignore List):wininit.exeexplorer.exefsx.exesvchost.exeCleanmem Download Link: http://www.pcwintech.com/cleanmem

I'm running ASA on my other networked computer so I don't think that it's taking up resources on my FSX computer, aside from the weather it's loading into it. After reading all the suggestions, it's hard to nail it down to one thing, but in the end it's probably just 1 thing that is pushing the computer to the max and causing the problem.Like I mentioned in the beginning of this thread, this only happens once in a great while, so it's not to big of a deal. Could be a video card driver issue. For some reason the Asus Maximus mobo seems to have issues with the newer nVidia video card drivers that others have posted as well. For some of us, if we use the newer nVidia drivers past the 169's we get really bad sound problems, so we are stuck with older drivers. This could be part of the problem.Even though my system is fairly new and fast, I am considering maybe upgrading to a 64 bit OS w/6 gb of RAM, maybe a quad core CPU, and a video card with more memory after the new year. I hate to do it since for the most part my computer runs FSX like a champ, but its little things like this that just drive me mad.