Black vertical lines commonly referred to as autogen spikes are an indication that your system is being pushed to hard and is a normal indicator of memory exhaustion. If you are running Windows XP SP3 you are running a 32bit OS and as such you should apply the /3GB switch. If after applying the switch you still have issues with the autogen spikes, you need to turn your sliders down.

I wonder why I get it with my system. My settings within the game are less than what NickN suggests. System specs in my signature.

I know you guys will find this hard to believe, and so would I had it not happened to me but here it goes.Not to say this is the cause of anyones problem here or a cure, but in the sytem in my sig, you will see I am on WinXP 32 bit with 2 gb RAM. I had been experiencing the black autogen spikes once in a while, along with the exteriors of my planes turning into weird shapes with the wings going verticle thru the fuselage, and other graphic anomalies as well as the occasional sound problem with static and skipping ATC messages. I also had the system set up from ground up with the OS, FSX, drivers, etc by FS-GS, so I knew it wasn't anything to do with my settings or setup.Too make a long story short, there was a problem with my sound card that was causing or contributing to latency problems. If I was in a dense area with a complex a/c and lots of buildings or autogen I would get sound anomalies as well as the occasional autogen spikes. I changed out my sound card for a new one about a month ago and now I have no more problems with any of the above and I am still on a 32bit system with 2gigs of RAM.So it may not be a lack of RAM or VRAM, since my video card has 1gb and my sytem has 2 gb. I am still running FSX pretty much at maxed out settings except cloud draw I keep at around 90 miles and I dont use the default bloom or lense flare. Could be as simple as a hardware component causing the problem like it was in my case.

@ campbell, I would believe anything with FSX and computers.FYI, my sound card is a Soundblaster Audigy, a few months old. I only recently started to experience the autogen spikes, my autogen setting is dense. I may roll back the vid drivers to 182.50 and test. Thanks for the post.

@ campbell, I would believe anything with FSX and computers.FYI, my sound card is a Soundblaster Audigy, a few months old. I only recently started to experience the autogen spikes, my autogen setting is dense. I may roll back the vid drivers to 182.50 and test. Thanks for the post.

I'm using the 195.62's with my GTS250 and they seem to work well but YMMV.You know that is one thing I hate about flight simming and computers. I wish there was a standard PC that we could use that would guarantee all of us the same performacne. I guess thats one reason consoles are popular.Right now there are just too many variables that will effect your performance. So many choices of hardware, then drivers, and operating systems, 32 & 64 bit, etc. It's no wonder that FSX or any of this stuff works at all when you factor in all the possible combinations.

Cmpbellsjc thank you for your post. That is my exact problem. The wierd lines and wierd shapes of airplanes upon loading of an addon scenery or addon aircraft.As I said I have the NVIDIA 8800 GTX 768MB video card on a Dell Dimension 9200 with 4GB RAM, Core Duo. I have all the tweaks and use Nhancer and Nick N's tweak. i believe my system is equipped to handle FSX well, but those lines appear and frames drop suddenly to like "2" when loading an addon aircraft with addon scenery. Maybe I do need a new soundcard. Never thought about that, but it's worth a try. I'll also try the GB switch.Myron P.