I also use ENB Series but it does not change anything if i remove it. the strange thing is that before the black screen appears, the menu I was in is there two times, and you click on "ok" or "cancel" 2 times before it should close, but it does not....

Ok a few facts after some trying:-removing the Overclocking completely does not change anything.-removing ENB Series does not solve it, however, without ENB it takes longer vor the texture errors to appear.-playing around with bufferpool sizes did not cause any differences so far.Is there anyone out there to who this thing makes sense?

Ok a few facts after some trying:-removing the Overclocking completely does not change anything.-removing ENB Series does not solve it, however, without ENB it takes longer vor the texture errors to appear.-playing around with bufferpool sizes did not cause any differences so far.Is there anyone out there to who this thing makes sense?

I am afraid that you are being bottlenecked by the VRAM on your 5770. 1GB might not be enough to keep up with in-game high settings, AA and ENBseries. I have a 2GB 6970 and disabling ENB reduces the black screens up to 90% of the time over complex scenery.

I am afraid that you are being bottlenecked by the VRAM on your 5770. 1GB might not be enough to keep up with in-game high settings, AA and ENBseries. I have a 2GB 6970 and disabling ENB reduces the black screens up to 90% of the time over complex scenery.

Thats what I were afraid of :( because getting a 2 GB card is not only expensive, I might have to replace my 500W PSU then, too. Looks like I'm in for some fun. :(

Additionally, entering a FSX dialog after a long flight is almost certain to bring back the beloved d3d9.dll CTD to me. Is a modern 1GB card really that limited?I think I will just stick to playing minesweeper until 4GB cards get affordable.....

I have long had this kind of issues. I then managed to get rid of it by not ujsing WoAI. probably some repaint was corrupt, causing the black screens and subsequenbt FSX crash. Afterwards I didn't have any problems anymore. Now, several FSX reinstalls later (all for varying reasons), and I have them again. It's clealt some type of graphics corruption. The first stage would be that I get back to a semi-blackscreen. Water, sky, aircraft and buildings would disappear, but the ground would still be there and it would move when my aircraft moves. Next step would then be either a completely black screen, or the same as before, minus the ground moving. Finally it would be just black. The graphcis thus evidently become gradually more and more corrupt, without me having a real idea why. The SPu doesn't seem to work harder than before, and the RAM never gets fully used. Even if that was the case, I have seen many situations where the sim would run without problems even though only 10MB RAM would be free. What's alos different from the previous times I ahd this, is that FSX never crashes. I can simply press escape and choose "end simulation". I'll get back to FSX's UI, except that that no aircraft preview would be given - that'd also be a black box. It's as if that sim completely loses it's ability to display any graphics... I'm pretty sure the problem is with some scenery I installed. Didn't have the problems until I, like an idiot, reinstalled many sceneries anew. Now of course I have no idea what scenery gives the trouble. Might even be FSDT's addon manager. For one thing I'm quite sure this hasn't got to do with a bottle neck in hardware - I had been flying with the same scenery, the same hardware, and it did work. Nothing was changed with regard to drivers. Some new sceneries, were installed, however, that I didn't have before in any other installations. These are Oslo X, Keflavik X and FSDT's Zurich, but there might be more. So, it's that time when I get that slow sinking feeling of "why bother with this sim at all. it's not worth it". All I know is that I'm going to have that terribly annoying problem once again: ocne in the flight, I won't be able to look at charts again, for FSX will give me a black screen upon return to the sim itself. I was going to buy the PMDG 737NGX, but right now I just don't seem the point. It's not like I'll actually be really able to fly it normally.... Christ, you'll see I'll have to reinstall bloody FSX again -.- Yes, back to the disillusioned state of FSX problems and the constant tweaking and all that stuff. Because you know the saying: FSX is great once it works. Problem is, I never get to the second part. FYI, I have 64 bit Windows 7 with 4GB RAM and an ATI 5750 with 1GB VRAM. EDIT: Rebuilt de fsx.cfg file and re-entered the few tweaks I had in there. OBig difference with before is that I'm not running couatl, the addonmanager, the leonardoSH module and VimacoreX. Then did the defaukt flight; no problem. Then took the ultrlight to FSAddon's LLBG. No problems there also. Then swapped the plane for the LDS767, no problems. Then went to Aerosoft EHAM, also no problems. Did a rather nice takeoff, actually. Tomorrow, I will do more thorough testing with the current setup. It might turn out that the culprit is the Leonardo Maddog. Aside from the sceneries, I ahd also instealled the Leonardo Maddog. A plane that, sadly, has never quite agreed with FSX on my computer. More news coming tomorrow, hopefully.

Are you, by any chance, running ATITools in the bottom right-hand corner? The reason I ask is that a while ago ATITools could be configured to stop vsync tearing - which it did nicely - but the downside was that it caused these d****d black screens.. Maybe? Ben - as long as you setup a clean default flight and start the Maddog from the Load Manager, the Maddog will give no issues at all.

Does the sound continue when that happens?And what does the Windows event log note? I can imagine numerous causes there, so this might need a bit of testing.

Are you, by any chance, running ATITools in the bottom right-hand corner? The reason I ask is that a while ago ATITools could be configured to stop vsync tearing - which it did nicely - but the downside was that it caused these d****d black screens.. Maybe? Ben - as long as you setup a clean default flight and start the Maddog from the Load Manager, the Maddog will give no issues at all.

Nope, no ATITools. I'm keeping all options open on the Maddog. I'd rather not see it be the cause of the problems I'm having now, but we simply can't know right now if it is or is not the problem. By the way, I have thinking of phasing out the mad dog for some time now. However great I think it is, with its bad performance and the need to run FSX as admin all the time, I'm not sure I'll ever be flying it again. CoolP: The sim continues running normally, except for the graphics corruption. So, yes, sound is heard normally. The only problem is that the screen is black. I can even talk to ATC! If I move the thrust levers forward, I also hear the engines ramping up. It's not like the sim stopped working - it just doesn't give any picture. Because there is no crash, there is nothing in the event log either for as far as I can see, or might I be looking at the wrong spot? In all instances I simply do CTRL-C and quit the sim as per usual. The restart the sim, and everything is back to normal. I'm going to do some testing with some heavy aircraft I have in heavy sceneries, and see what happens. Then I'll be slowly reenabling the modules that I'm not letting to run right now, and see in what situation the black screens occur. In my experience (managed to get lots of it), if you can have a black screen, you can have it within five minutes if you put a heavy plane at a heavy airport. The LDS767 would already do nicely for this, but I'm going to use the PMDG MD-11 instead. It's also with the MD-11 that I got it yesterday at EHAM. FSDT's KJFK, which would normally be the place I'd use, is off limits right now due to the addonmanager and couatl scripting engine not being enabled - the sim always crahses at 80% loading. I should probably try to load it at any other FSDT airport though. See what it does there.

Since the FSX engine is able to still run the sounds and also reacts on the ATC and throttle inputs, I'd investigate towards some graphic based problem, maybe even hardware related.I don't think that you are seeing an out of memory error there, but knowing or logging the memory resources may still be a good idea. Can you try setting the driver to avoid any power save frequency changes? Also, when running on a single screen, try setting up a forced single screen operation.I expect you've tried different graphic drivers so far. If not, maybe do so. Next step would be to log all the hardware related values in the background so that you can spot some of them after this happened.Usually, the graphic drivers tend to operate the GPU at higher (but safe) temperatures to keep the noise from the cooler on low levels. You can alter the cooling settings to manual for testing, forcing a way better (and louder) cooling there to see if it has any impact. ATI 5750 with 1GB VRAMThat's a sufficient but not very hot or demanding (from the electric aspect) card, but maybe the GPU temps have some influence there. With the log program in the background, temperature and voltage changes are interesting. Set up a high update rate to spot peaks or drops. This all sounds like much work, but I think you want to get behind the cause of the trouble, avoiding future reinstallations.I don't think that a certain scenery error is able to generally cause such problems, looks more like a system based "weakness" or so. If a friend can help you with another graphic card, maybe test this too. If you run overclocked settings (on the whole system), maybe take them into account too since the only valid stability test for a FSX system is FSX itself, so the hardware trouble reveals itself when using the app while some test programs may be happy for hours.There's a whole bunch of e. g. memory and/or voltage related error sources which could lead to your experienced behaviour too, so please don't read my assumptions as ones which really pinpoint your problem, but as general ones.

the need to run FSX as admin all the time

Shouldn't be a problem. In fact, it actually avoids a ton in my eyes.

Thanks for the prompt replym, CoolP, but much of the things you suggest I'm probably not going to do. Here's why: I use an iMac, dual-booting into Windows 7 for FSX and other Windows games. A such, any hardware tweaking stuff is off limits (swapping card, changes in the EFI (No BIOS in Macs, I'm afraid), that stuff). Also, I have used this setup now for some time, and this is the first time I have been having these particular issues, so I can't see how hardware could be a problem. In all that time I have never changed hardware drivers also, so I also don't see how suddenly the driver would generate problems now. I will try the hardware logging you mentioned. Could you explain to me how to do that? In the meantime I saw some opportunity to do mroe testing. I sat with the PMDG MD-11 at EDDF. After some time, if I'd go out of the sm to whatever window, the graphics corruitpions would appear. However, fiddling around in several screens, actually got me several variations of the graphcis corruptions:- Went to the Map screen and returned, only to find the ground displayed and aircraft shadows. When looking up, the sky would also be blue, and the clouds were displayed.- Went again to Map mode and returned, but no aircraft shadows and the sky had disaapeared.- Because everything but the graphical side of the sim was still running normally, I decided it would be a ncie experiment to see what would happen if I'd save the flight and try to shut down the sim and then load that flight. Once I got out of the save dialog, the buildings, AI, sky, clouds and ground would all be back, but when looking at the exterior model of the plane, the actual exterior would be gone and the interior would show.- So, I went into the Map screen again, then returned to find pretty much all was normal, except that no windows (including the menubar and ATC dialog anbd any 2D panels) were displaying, and there were no aircraft shadows.- I could now fly normally, actually, so I did all I ahd to do and taxied to the runway. There I stupidly hit the wrong key combination and got FSX to reload the flight (hit CTRL - ;). Now only the ground was displaying, and it was completely white instead of the normal textures. While that was a stupid and unintended action of mine, it does show that merely having FSX reload the sim doesn't work. It can only be rectified by quitting FSX and restarting it. Concluding: The problem can't be related to any of the disabled modules, so that's a relief. It can't be related to FSX running in admin mode or not since I had the problem with and without admin mode. The graphcis corruptions do not cripple FSX and as such FSX never actually crashes. As I say: the sim keeps running, it's just that stuff isn't correctly displayed after a short time of use. Also, reloading scenery by resetting the flight, changing display settings and such doesn't work. FSX has to be restarted entirely for it to rectify these problems. I'm going to checkout the graphcis corruptions that were talked about in the PMDG forum. The exterior/interior model display thingy sounds awfully familiar to the stuff that was talked about in these forums. I'll see if that might help out, but if others have anything to add, please do so. Not using the map I cna get over, but if it means I can't save my flights, then I'm in trouble.

Have you tried my vsync fix in post # 10 above? It has helped others...

Oops, you are right, the Macs are limited in that easy hw aspect of course, depending on the case in use of course. The driver alone shouldn't be a problem to update though. Just look for the latest stable release, not betas or something.Hardware itself can fail after some time, even partially, so I wouldn't completely rule out some problems there. Dust isn't a friend of tiny cooler fans and fine cooling structures and some chips may lose their stable nature even with all cooling being fine, giving you plenty of fun looking for an error source.It's just that the symptoms mentioned seem to point to a "pure" graphic based problem there, hardware and/or software related. However, the highmemfix value in the fsx.cfg is highly recommended if you were talking about that one, which is stated in the PMDG forums. I can't remember any downside there, but tons of reports about enhanced stability. Also, that vsync fix which jordanal refers to is worth a try. Regarding your testing efforts, one can only applaud to the patience going into that. But make sure to be able to isolate possible sources, so e. g. find out which flight setup (scenery + plane) more or less definitely leads to the problem and then alter some surrounding stuff like the drivers, the cooling and so on. Don't add too many variables there, unless you want to test for months.

After some time, if I'd go out of the sm to whatever window, the graphics corruitpions would appear. However, fiddling around in several screens, actually got me several variations of the graphcis corruptions:

So you are running FSX windowed, right?Maybe the memory management of the graphic driver then plays tricks on you, which stresses the tip for updating it. Windows can run FSX with or without 'Aero' enabled, maybe one of those possibilities alters the current behaviour. I have both UI versions running stable, but liked Aero on some more. Concerning the logging tools I'd normally recommend the stuff which comes with most mainboards from the big names there, but with the Mac you could have the problem that more common tools fail on the sensor data.Maybe some other Mac user can recommend some free hardware logging stuff then. What does the task manager show as the fsx memory usage when you experience the problems? You've named some addon scenery and plane there, so they should be somehow higher than default but the actual range would be interesting.

This is a reproducable problem on my gaming laptop- Gateway P7811 FX- 4gig ram- NV 9800 GTS- Core DuoSetting antialiasing at 8 or above will cause the problem you describe. Black screen lockup with sound running in the background.

Like I said before, I traced this problem back to the ENB series plugin. I renamed the d3d9.dll inside my FSX directory and the black screens with sound only went away for good.