Can you provide a definition of "artifact". Seems like it could cover many different things.scott s..

-------------------------------------Scott, an 'artifact' is ANYTHING that the program is not programmed to display on your monitor. Or for that matter, your O.S. Here are examples: You start getting 'snow'/white dots corrupting your screen. You can also get artifacts that look like bird's wings in different colors...usually the primary ones. In other words, anything that was NOT there via the program or O.S. running in the background. In most cases, you need to end the program if it has not already become so unstable that it crashes...and shut down/reboot your system to end the artifacts. I hope that the aforementioned helped to define what we are talking about with using the BP=0 settings on some user's systems.Mitch

I believe the artifacts bug is related to the driver settings. are you using nhancer? I am too and suddenly get artifacts right after the flight loads up. Maybe setting the 3d settings through the nvidia control panel rather than nhancer will fix it? I am so tired of tweaking I have given up for now

----------------------------------I do in fact use nHancer 2.5.7.Mitch

Hi John, what OS are you running, is it XP?, after switching to XP I have no graphic glitches whatsoever, it's literally a miracle.

I have Vista 64. I wasn't having any glitches prior to trying the shaders tweak. The issue with FSDS aircraft appeared after I tried the tweak. And it easily went away when I backed the tweak out.-John

I might have tentative good news. I have been flying for over two hours within PNW with the topic duo and have not had any ARTIFACTS or crashes of any kind.Perhaps artifacts are not just necessarily Vram exhaustion on a 1GB card, but is a hit and miss with the driver package you are running with.I loaded up this driver suite two days ago, and have not had any issues, but with clear and vivid scenery at 30 FPS.Give it a try and see if you can fly at least 2 hours over any terrain without the big 'A' showing up as well. The best I ever got with the driver set one below this, was about 1/2 hour to 3/4's of an hour before it was all over....Mitch IMPORTANT POST EDIT: I no sooner typed this post...then went back to flying, and severe ARTIFACTS shut me down. I simply cannot use BP=0. The closest I can get is BP=500000. I'll just stick with that.

Mitch I've merged the two BP=0 threads.Please don't open too many different threads about the same topic.Thx!

Guys, I might be onto something: it was actually simple, I have my test flight, my tutorial flight for JS4100, sitting on the airport, after 10-20min for sure artifacts, even in windowed. Now already 40min, without anything. Before it was 100%.I downclocked my CPU and set normal profile for RAM (not XMP), and no artifacts. Who knows if it has really something to do with hardware...I will memtest my RAM over night on XMP and OCed.

No errors in Memtest. Argh. This is like searching for the ghost.

Argh. This is like searching for the ghost.

LOL it sure is. Funny to see how everyone is trying to find the definitive fix in all possible places... :( Even though this means this topic is getting way out of hand and the weirdest solutions might show up... :( My last flight still was without any artifacts, so I hardly dare to change planes anymore: seems on my rig the Quest Kodiak is the best tweak, haha! Got get it! :( Seriously, I am totally focused on this BP=0 and artifact thing because with the new scenery BP=0 simply gives the best results. I wonder what happens if some of you changed planes: would it really make a difference...?I also noticed that if there is nothing to tweak, I am quickly bored with FSX... B) B)

Guys, I might be onto something: it was actually simple, I have my test flight, my tutorial flight for JS4100, sitting on the airport, after 10-20min for sure artifacts, even in windowed. Now already 40min, without anything. Before it was 100%.I downclocked my CPU and set normal profile for RAM (not XMP), and no artifacts. Who knows if it has really something to do with hardware...I will memtest my RAM over night on XMP and OCed.

--------------------------------Interesting Word Not Allowed. I also have overclocked my 1066 RAM to 1336 MHz. Hmmmmm.......Other than Bjote putting BP=0 out there, I have no other setups that give me the Art's of any kind. Only when in FSX and BP at 0. Just look at the pages of this Thread! Everybody and their brother knows that for whatever reason, BP=0 kicks butt, but how to tame the beast? That is the question..... I don't have the answer at present, lol!!!!MitchMitch

This morning I did some test flying.Keep in mind taht I use Full Screen mode.With BP=0 and TBM=40-60 I got some artifacts.After trying TBM=100 those artifact are gone.I am going to try several flights with TBM=120 later.Also I tried with BP=1000mb , but many artifacts.At 500mb they where gone, but sometimes there where microstutters when being between many HD clouds.I have to say that 500mb was slightly better than my former value of 100mb. With BP=1 those microsstutters where gone.Perhaps you guys could give this a try.Nb when switching between Full screen and Windowed mode sometimes texture corruptions appear. Switching again 2x solves this.

-------------------------------------Scott, an 'artifact' is ANYTHING that the program is not programmed to display on your monitor. Or for that matter, your O.S. Here are examples: You start getting 'snow'/white dots corrupting your screen. You can also get artifacts that look like bird's wings in different colors...usually the primary ones. In other words, anything that was NOT there via the program or O.S. running in the background. In most cases, you need to end the program if it has not already become so unstable that it crashes...and shut down/reboot your system to end the artifacts. I hope that the aforementioned helped to define what we are talking about with using the BP=0 settings on some user's systems.Mitch

Thanks. I've been wondering if different "artifacts" are due to different things, or all just examples of the same basic problem. What I've seen are:1. floating AI buildings2. objects drawn as vertical spikes (usually resolves but once it starts many other artifacts appear)3. Menu and ATC box text turns into blocks4. Aircraft model broken, strange pieces5. Permanent blurry textures on objects and vc6. Loss of AA/AF (for me this usually is the first indication of problems)7. Frozen display/process8. Black screen9. Slow texture rendering (aircraft prop is gray disk for quite a while for example).sorry this is kind of OT from BP, just trying to understand what you are fixing.FWIW, I can see maybe BP=0 might do something, but if nonzero I can't see any engineering reason for anything < 1,000,000 or >16,000,000 or so. One thing that hasn't been estimated in any post is just how much total space is typically used for geometry and index buffers, which would give some indication of how big/many BPs would be required to satisfy the storage.scott s..

Thanks. I've been wondering if different "artifacts" are due to different things, or all just examples of the same basic problem. What I've seen are:1. floating AI buildings2. objects drawn as vertical spikes (usually resolves but once it starts many other artifacts appear)3. Menu and ATC box text turns into blocks4. Aircraft model broken, strange pieces5. Permanent blurry textures on objects and vc6. Loss of AA/AF (for me this usually is the first indication of problems)7. Frozen display/process8. Black screen9. Slow texture rendering (aircraft prop is gray disk for quite a while for example).sorry this is kind of OT from BP, just trying to understand what you are fixing.FWIW, I can see maybe BP=0 might do something, but if nonzero I can't see any engineering reason for anything < 1,000,000 or >16,000,000 or so. One thing that hasn't been estimated in any post is just how much total space is typically used for geometry and index buffers, which would give some indication of how big/many BPs would be required to satisfy the storage.scott s..

Interesting summary Scott. In my case just doing the BP=0 tweak and nothing else, I saw no artifacts like those mentiond in your list. However I wonder how much my experience may have to do with my use of SP 1 instead of SP 2? -John

However I wonder how much my experience may have to do with my use of SP 1 instead of SP 2?

Well, I use SP2 and I don't see artifacts either, however I've always included:ForceFullScreenVSync=TrueForceVSync=Truein my fsx.cfg, even though my understanding is that they are 'True' by default. I did this because I remember reading somewhere that SP2 introduced some 'problems' with vsync, so, just to make sure I added the above lines, might be related? don't know for sure. I 'lock' my FPS @ 25 use AffinityMask=12 and FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.20 and my LOD radius is set to medium: LOD_RADIUS=3.500000Probably John and I have a setting in common that 'helps'? don't know for sure..

I know one thing *******, your shader fix sure works.Stephen

I know one thing *******, your shader fix sure works.

I'm glad, however John pointed out something that we need to be careful. I've tested it day and night doing all kind of flights, and a wide variety of sceneries, however I only use the Level-D... John said that ported versions of FS2004 aicrafts appear to be lacking some 'textures'. Enabling texture wrapping changes how DirectX perceives the shortest route between texture coordinates, this would apply to aircraft textures, animations and scenery objects, not just 'effects' as someone pointed out previously. If the texture coordinates specified for each vertex of a textured polygon are 'wrong' or off, TEXTURE CORRUPTION ocurrs, the shader fix prevents this from happening, but whats the 'impact'? well.. so far, what John reported. It dind't fix any 'artifacts' for me, because I have none, it just helps me run FSX in native mode without having to use the 'Vista Compatability mode' for improved stability. So far, looks good and the 'test scenario' I have (Manhattan X, FSDT KJFK, UTX, GEX, REX2, UT2 Full AI traffic, Dusk, Rain, heavy clouds, 1920x1080 16xAA, 16xAF) is perfectly stable now without having to use a compatiblity mode.

I 'lock' my FPS @ 25 use AffinityMask=12 and FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.20 and my LOD radius is set to medium: LOD_RADIUS=3.500000

0.20 and 3.500000... don't you have a lot of blurry scenery then...? I tried a lower than default FFTF but it resulted in textures being loaded way too late. And not having LOD at high doesn't help either! It could be that these low settings help avoid artifacts, but at the cost of quality, at least on my system.However, I don't know what I did or what happened, but just like last night I had a good flight this evening without lockups and BP=0...! I didn't change anything since I tested all possible settings last week, but somehow somewhere something made my computer accept BP=0 and now I have flown for two evenings in a row with EXCELLENT performance (and fps stayed at 25, my max with the limiter) and all that with Extremely dense autogen. I can hardly believe my eyes... :( I even don't have compatibility mode on!Just now I tried some other TBM settings (up to 120) to see if that would solve some late loading textures (it might help, but I didn't have the time to really test it). But I think that what I have now beats what I'd see with FFTF at 0.2 and LOD at medium. :( For now I will keep the system as it is and not change a single thing... No new drivers, so new nothing: I want to keep what I've got now! Still... I hope things will still be good tomorrow... Somehow I expect the artifacts to strike back again... :((P.S. And all this without the shader hack. Right now I ONLY set BP=0, just like I did before, but now it just works... Weird...)

Well, I use SP2 and I don't see artifacts either, however I've always included:ForceFullScreenVSync=TrueForceVSync=Truein my fsx.cfg, even though my understanding is that they are 'True' by default. I did this because I remember reading somewhere that SP2 introduced some 'problems' with vsync, so, just to make sure I added the above lines, might be related? don't know for sure. I 'lock' my FPS @ 25 use AffinityMask=12 and FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.20 and my LOD radius is set to medium: LOD_RADIUS=3.500000Probably John and I have a setting in common that 'helps'? don't know for sure..

Why AffinityMask=12? You have HT turned off? That gives you basically core 1 and 2 or am I missing something? If I do it, I get 2nd core working + it's HT. Lowering my FPS considerably...Besides, 3.5 might be causing less stress on the system, thus causing less artifacts, that's what I think. Also lots of blurries here...