Whatever I try, I can't get FSX to work correctly lately. Either I have sound crackling, or I lose the ground or get a distorted plane.My system:Q9550 oced to 3.24GhzAsus P5Q motherboard with Realtek onboard soundNVidia GTX285 with 2GB RAMWindows 7 Ultimate 648GB RAMFSX Gold with lots of addons.The symptoms:If I DO NOT use bufferpools or I am using bufferpools below 210MB, I get sound crackling and video stuttering.If I use bufferpools above 210MB, I have no crackling, but either I am losing autogen, ground textures or my plane is distorted (flaps in the cockpit, no gear etc., invisible menu)This happens with the stock planes as well as with addon planes.I have rather conservative settings with autogen (very dense, dense, buildings reduced to 600 per cell), and while the situation is less prominent in stock regions, it is massive in regions like PNW by Orbx.Driver for the GTX is 182.5, sound driver is the latest one.Sound crackling is happening whether I play in a small window or full screen (3360x1050).I am begging for a cure. Could someone help me?

I have similar sound problem for months and still can't find any solution.One "temporary" solutions I found: Uninstall FSX and resintall, then install just SP1. I can't hear any crackling sound during flying.The problem is a lot of addon require SP2. So I installed SP2, the crackling sound came back.

My crackling is controlled by a very high bufferpool (500mb) and a low trees setting. Buildings don't affect mine at all. I can have buildings on 3000 and it has zero effect, but any tree setting higher than 350 or 400 starts the crackling instantly.

Whatever I try, I can't get FSX to work correctly lately. Either I have sound crackling, or I lose the ground or get a distorted plane.My system:Q9550 oced to 3.24GhzAsus P5Q motherboard with Realtek onboard soundNVidia GTX285 with 2GB RAMWindows 7 Ultimate 648GB RAMFSX Gold with lots of addons.The symptoms:If I DO NOT use bufferpools or I am using bufferpools below 210MB, I get sound crackling and video stuttering.If I use bufferpools above 210MB, I have no crackling, but either I am losing autogen, ground textures or my plane is distorted (flaps in the cockpit, no gear etc., invisible menu)This happens with the stock planes as well as with addon planes.I have rather conservative settings with autogen (very dense, dense, buildings reduced to 600 per cell), and while the situation is less prominent in stock regions, it is massive in regions like PNW by Orbx.Driver for the GTX is 182.5, sound driver is the latest one.Sound crackling is happening whether I play in a small window or full screen (3360x1050).I am begging for a cure. Could someone help me?

I have a very similar phenomenon and setting (Q9550 OC to 3.6GH on ASUS P5B mobo, Nvidia 1GB GTX250 with latest drivers). lately i've noticed that in highly denced autogen areas (especially PNW but not only) after 10-20 minuts of flight I sart to have video distortion like "floating trees" and distorted plan (flaps in kokpit, no engine cowling, etc.).My bufferpool is 10000000 per NickN recommendation. Maybe i was wrong here?thanks in advance for any tip.Shayt

I had the same problem a while back that plagued me for about a year. I would get crackling sound sometimes and the plane I was flying would lose it textures in the VC and the outside of the plane would become distorted with the wings sticking virtically thru the fuselage. I tried all type of thing including buffer pool tweaks, reducing autogen, backing sliders down, etc. Nothing worked.Turned out for me it was a faulty sound card that came with my Asus Maximus Formula mobo. It was a SoundMax card and I had heard of other people having issues running that card as well.On a whim and with nothing else to try, one weekend I went to my local computer store and bought a SoundBlaster Xtreme X-FI sound card. I installed it and the newest drivers I could find for it and that did the trick. Now I have great sound and no texture corruption. I also seemed to have gained a little performance after changing cards. I wish I had done it sooner and saved all the grief the SoundMax card gave me, but I had no idea that a faulty card could cause so many other problems.I'm not saying this will cure your problem, but it cured mine. Seems like there is something about the cards that come on Asus mobo that dont seem to agree well with FSX.One other thing I forgot to mention. When I was running the SoundMax card along with my nVidia video card, if I used any nVidia driver newer than the 169's the problems got worse. For whatever reason the 169's were the only ones that would work without giving me too much trouble, however I still had issues with the sound and graphics, but not as bad as I did with newer drivers.

Thanks for the replies so far. Glad to see that I am not alone with this problem, although I pity those who have it as well.Regarding sound card: The Realtek could well be part of the problem, but I tried to turn it off and let the sound play over a Motu 828mk, a high end Firewire sound card for professional studios. It didn't change a thing, really.Some kind of solution for me is a strange combination of high image quality and high pufferpools. The problem is gone 9 out of 10 times if I have bufferpools set to 590MB and AA through enhancer to 8xS combined. BOTH have to be this way, then it works (but it comes with the price of losing some fps - 2 to 3 on my system).But as I said, this cure isn't 100%...

I have a very similar phenomenon and setting (Q9550 OC to 3.6GH on ASUS P5B mobo, Nvidia 1GB GTX250 with latest drivers). lately i've noticed that in highly denced autogen areas (especially PNW but not only) after 10-20 minuts of flight I sart to have video distortion like "floating trees" and distorted plan (flaps in kokpit, no engine cowling, etc.).My bufferpool is 10000000 per NickN recommendation. Maybe i was wrong here?thanks in advance for any tip.Shayt

Just wanted to tell that after reading few posts about the BufferPools I started to play with it, increase it to 200,000,000 and then to 300,000,000 but no change. Then I tried "Poolsize=0" as some suggested and walla.... all texture and a/c corruption gone!! (so far)! I dont know why and what happened but just wanted to let you know from my personal experience.Shayt

In my case, the crackling sound happened because of the high lantecy when running at DX9. Simply run DPC Latency Checker along with FSX and I always have high latency and sound crackling. When running in DX10, the latency is very low and no sound problem at all. I don't think its my on board Realtek problem as this only happen when I run FSX in Win 7. I never have such sound crackling problem when running FSX in XP with the same system. Something just not running perfectly with my system+win7+FSX.

You may want to have a look at this thred - http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?showtopic=280688 specifically the points in Ryan's thred - Some of these are for the video issues; but I found by performing # 3 and 10 solved my crackling issue. for #10 I set soundquality=1; leaving it at zero for me did not solve the issue.Here

The problem is COMPLETELY solved, thanks to *******:http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?showtop...p;#entry1745142Follow his instructions - they sound odd, but they bring back the joy to FSX :-)

AffinityMask! AffinitiMask! How can I forgot this? I installed FSX in XP years ago, which ran perfectly. But recently when I installed FSX in Win7, the sound crackling and video corruption really annoy me. I then remember I inserted "AffinityMask" in the fsx.cfg when I play FSX in XP, but I forgot to do so when I installed FSX in Win7. By insert [JOBSCHEDULER] AffinityMask=7 in the fsx.cfg, FSX now run perfectly in Win7, no problem at all now. (My system is Q6600 oc3.2Mhz)

AffinityMask! AffinitiMask! How can I forgot this? I installed FSX in XP years ago, which ran perfectly. But recently when I installed FSX in Win7, the sound crackling and video corruption really annoy me. I then remember I inserted "AffinityMask" in the fsx.cfg when I play FSX in XP, but I forgot to do so when I installed FSX in Win7. By insert [JOBSCHEDULER] AffinityMask=7 in the fsx.cfg, FSX now run perfectly in Win7, no problem at all now. (My system is Q6600 oc3.2Mhz)

Try also:[JOBSCHEDULER] AffinityMask=14and compare to [JOBSCHEDULER] AffinityMask=7try to do the comparison in a CPU intensive situation.. also, remember something REALLY important:Assuming you Don't run Hyperthreading, you have:CORE0 CORE1 CORE2 CORE3When you set affinity mask to 14, only CORE1, 2 and 3 become 'usable' for FSX.. HOWEVER, CORE0 runs something called 'fibers' that are little procceses that communicate with CORE1 cooperatively. this 'fibers' are responsible for 'some' of the terrain loading and are affected by a setting called:FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.33 that goes in the [MAIN] section of the fsx.cfg config filethe 0.33 means that 33% of the time required to produce 'each frame' will be devoted to 'terrain loading'1 second = 1000 milliseconds1000 ms / 25 frames = 40 ms/frame (each frame)meaning, each frame takes 40 milliseconds to render... out of those 40 milliseconds, how many milliseconds are 'enough' to render terrain? I would say 10 millisenconds.. and 10ms, represents the 25% of 40ms. so, that means out of the '40ms' 10ms will be the 'ideal' time the fiber will run 'cooperate' with CORE1 to render each frame.. so, what value you use in FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION? 0.25 the HIGHER the fraction, the LONGER the fiber will take, but this can create stutters, because fibers are not threads, they need to 'cooperatively' multitask so its VERY important, when doing changes in FSX, to know what you are doing... I hope is not too confusing :) but.. its imporant to understand! besides, those 'fibers' are using CPU! they are STUCK in CPU0 (regardless of AffinityMask setting), so by using [JOBSCHEDULER] AffinityMask=14 you are making things much more efficient. balancing stuff between processors. and letting them ALL do something different! CORE0 does fibers, CORE1 does the main scheduler (main threads) CORE2 and CORE3 texture manager and object pre-batching.. now, you can read the original 'explanation' here:http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007...f-the-week.aspxI don't know if my explanation is clear... you can read Phil's and probably will be clearer.So, my recomendation is to use:[MAIN]FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.25[JOBSCHEDULER] AffinityMask=14Thats what I would call 'optimal' values for someone running an average of 25 frames per second. Just apply the formula and do your math if you want to determine a value based on your 'average' framerate and condider '10' miliseconds enough for the fiber to run

FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.25

you also need to adjust the [TERRAIN] SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT when you change the FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION, Phil said thiswas a Number between 1-60 'frames'I don't believe everything I read, and I reached a different conclusion on what SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT is, specially considering that we are talking about this it the context of 'fibers' which by the way happen to be 'swapped' and need timeouts, and the timeout that I came up with is the one that corresponds to the fraction of time the fiber runs to render the terrain if I run at 25 frames per second, that value is .25 x 40 so it should be SWAP_WAIT_TIMEOUT=10 if you are running at 25 FPS ANYTHING less than 10, I get black spots, 10 is my magic number.. coincidence? don't think so ;) maybe placebo...