In the past with my old computer, I didn't give a hoot about FSX since it basically became FS2004 in order to run it reasonable well. But all that has changed with my new computer (see specs below). I've been drilling down into tweaking FSX and have got some decent results with the help of the NickN guide and other bits posted here and there. But these problems listed below got me stumped, and I've yet to dredge up any posts from the past that offered fixes or explanations for them. 1. Ever so often there is a building roof, or a baseball diamond, whose texture can't decide if it's visable or not, so it flickers at a very high rate as I fly along and it never seems to stop flickering.2. Once in while a block of ground texture will go all white for a fraction of a second and then return to normal. This seems to happen more frequently at take off. It's not a constant problem; somedays it happens and others it doesn't even though I haven't changed any settings.3. Meshes/textures pop into place noticably as I get closer to a physical feature such as a mountainside. I have the fsgenesis mesh installed and flying around the Grand Canyon causes this problem in spades even though I have maxed most of the terrain/visability sliders (basically what NickN shows in his guide).Of course, I'm dealing with occasional stutters too but I consider that a fact of life with FSX. I'm just wondering if the above also fall into that catagory. I also use UTX-USA, REX 2 and acceleration, and exclusively run DX9 (DX10 'preview' was a major disappointed for me). Any thoughts or advice? Thanks for reading, TFM.

Try lowering the terrain and mesh sliders to more reasonable values - see what happens.Best regards.Luis

In the past with my old computer, I didn't give a hoot about FSX since it basically became FS2004 in order to run it reasonable well. But all that has changed with my new computer (see specs below). I've been drilling down into tweaking FSX and have got some decent results with the help of the NickN guide and other bits posted here and there. But these problems listed below got me stumped, and I've yet to dredge up any posts from the past that offered fixes or explanations for them. 1. Ever so often there is a building roof, or a baseball diamond, whose texture can't decide if it's visable or not, so it flickers at a very high rate as I fly along and it never seems to stop flickering.2. Once in while a block of ground texture will go all white for a fraction of a second and then return to normal. This seems to happen more frequently at take off. It's not a constant problem; somedays it happens and others it doesn't even though I haven't changed any settings.3. Meshes/textures pop into place noticably as I get closer to a physical feature such as a mountainside. I have the fsgenesis mesh installed and flying around the Grand Canyon causes this problem in spades even though I have maxed most of the terrain/visability sliders (basically what NickN shows in his guide).Of course, I'm dealing with occasional stutters too but I consider that a fact of life with FSX. I'm just wondering if the above also fall into that catagory. I also use UTX-USA, REX 2 and acceleration, and exclusively run DX9 (DX10 'preview' was a major disappointed for me). Any thoughts or advice? Thanks for reading, TFM.

My first advice is to NOT follow NickN's advice on many of the issues you raise. Nick provides guidance but you'll see a lot of areas where he says you should use "trial and error" to get the right settings, or it works with some systems but not with all. It's just a guide and it's excellent for those starting out with FSX. Shimmering can be reduced (not eliminated) by changing the Texture Filter - Negative LOD Bias from the default of Allow to Clamp. Do you use NHancer and the settings suggested by NickN in his guide? If not, you'll have to as not using it could be causing your anomalies (I don't use it). I personally disagree with Nick if he's recommending maxing out your terrain/visability sliders. You're asking for issues. Some can max them out, some can't and even those using the I7 975X Extreme CPU's have had to bring back some sliders when problems developed as they added more commercial addons. I get outstanding graphics with modest settings of the sliders for scenery. I usually max out all scenery settings except for the mesh resolution set at 38m, the texture resolution at 1m, water set at mid-2x's, land texture details, and no autogen. You have to tweak those a little if you're flying in photoscenery or just GEX, FEX, REX, or default textures. When you're putting more graphics resources on your CPU and graphics card, you're bound to start having some issues depending on the scenery you're flying into. Some of the things you describe I think everyone sees at times in their flight sim experiences. Your issue of seeing a block of ground texture going all white for a fraction of a second might be caused by having the Display Flying Tips in the Realism section checked. It should be unchecked as that is known to make the screen flash white on occasion. If not, it's a graphics issue with your card and your FSX settings. Even OC'ing your GTX285 could be causing all your problems. You'll have to do more tweaking to either eliminate it or reduce the issue. I personally have not seen it and I have a system lessor than yours. Hope this helps and good flying!Best regards,Jim

Thanks for the feedback. I was hoping that there might be easy fixes, but it looks it'll be the trial and error fine tuning approach of my FSX environment that will get the job done. Seems that I've already got rid of the white texture flashes by upping the texture resolution by in pushing its slider left. I just hope the other problems are not 'features' of FSX, in that no other post that I've found which brought up those issues ever got resolved. If I find those critical discoveries I'll post my solutions. Thanks again, TFM.P.S. If it wasn't that so much can be had from FSX visually, I'd gladly give up and go back to FS2004.

Once in a while the texture flickering can be caused by a missing alpha channel. A good example is KABQ. One of the main terminals flickers like crazy on the ground. One of the developers here a while pointed out that it was due to, if I recall right a missing alpha channel on a texture. They said it would be really hard to correct since you would have to comb thru hundreds of textures to find which one is causing it.Sometimes I will get one of those ground objects flickering as well, but I have gotten to the point that I try not to let every small thing like that bother me anymore. I used to get so hung up on little things like that since I wanted everything to be perfect, but once I realized that the sim will never be perfect I just accept it and enjoy it for what it is. There's not many other alternatives anyway, lol.