Due to the terrible performance I was getting with my nVidia 7950 GT, I bought and installed a new Pny Overclocked GTX 460. This has only improved visuals marginally (a 5-10 FPS increase in general). However, my sound has gone all to hell. There is a constant popping and crackling sound whenever the game engine is rendering in 3-D. By this I mean that if you're at the settings screen when the program loads, the music plays fine. But as soon as you click on the Free Flight screen, and a plane is rendered and spinning, the distortions begin. And once you're in the actual flight engine, they become much worse. I've tried all the recommended fixes, including: Bufferpools to 512 and various other choices; updating sound and video drivers; reloading older sound and video drivers; making various changes to visual settings; altering FSX config, etc. I have the whole Highmem/TextureSize/Bojote thing done, I've disabled the nVidia sound drivers for HD, and re-enabled them. Nothing has had any effect. If Autogen is high, or there are a lot of buildings around, it's worse. But it never goes away completely while anything is being rendered. And thus far, only FSX has the problem. No other game, not iTunes, etc. Nor have I been able to find anyone on line who has solved this. It seems related to latency in the bus, but I can find no command to increase sound buffer size in FSX. Without the new card, the frame rates on 737 just fall too low at times for enjoyment. With it, they are passable, and the other aircraft are quite nice, but the sound is intolerable. Does anyone have any suggestions that I haven't tried yet? Thanks! Joe Legander

Have you updated your sound card's drivers? Also, sometimes disabling hardware acceleration for your sound card can cure this symptom.

I have both updated and reverted my sound card drivers to no effect. I have been unable to find a way to disable hardware acceleration in Windows 7 64-bit as far as sound goes, although i can disable it for video. If anyone knows where I might find that option, it would be helpful. I've been all through the sound menus without result. Joe Legander

Hi Joe, 1) When you uninstalled the GFX card did you go into safe mode and remove the drivers using a utility? If not you need to try this. 2) Did you delete your fsx.cfg and rebuild another one ? This is also a good idea. Thanks,

I used the clean install feature, which completely stripped the old drivers out before installing the new ones. I did not do it in safe mode, however, as the installed claimed this procedure would clean out the old drivers. The computer rebooted into basic VGA, 640x480 during that process. I did indeed delete my fsx.cfg, and then rebuild it, and reapplied the various tweaks and settings one by one, to see if any or all would help. No luck, I'm afraid. Joe Legander

Do you have a dedicated sound card? I had crackling with my GTX460 on my old computer that had a dedicated sound card (Sound Blaster X-Fi). The same video card in my new computer using on-board audio has no problems.

I do indeed have a dedicated Soundblaster X-Fi sound card. My motherboard has Realtek audio built into it, but I've never used it. I suppose that's worth a try. I'm not even sure I installed the ports to that when I built the thing. I'll give it a shot. Joe Legander

Hey Joe, just out of interest, and since I am in the process of upgrading from a very similar bad card to a very similar newer card, what other HW you are running, esp what CPU and RAM?Ryan already made me aware of the fact I might not get that much of a performance gain (yet hope is the last to die), but TBH my old card is really making problems in terms of artefacts, crashes and the like, so an upgrade was due anyway. Regards

Joe,I had to remove my x-fi sound card as well, the driver support from creative is found to be wanting. I now use realtek onboard sound on my z68 mb, and all is good. Just make sure you install the drivers/software for the realtek, and configure speakers for optimum results. BTW Armen, if there was an award for the best sound in an addon aircraft, I would gladly award it to you. Truly outstanding.

It's a 3.2 GHz Pentium (D) Duo-Core with 4 GB of RAM, Soundblaster X-Fi, and a GTX 460 card. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit. My old card, which was slightly slower in frames but had no sound problems, was a nVidia 7950 GT. Obviously, the new card is giving me a fair amount of hassle. I'm only seeing a 5-10 FPS improvement in FSX overall at present, which is no big deal for what the card cost. If I can't resolve it, I'll swap the old one in, and lose the FPS for reasonable sound.

Thanks Julian!! :( Glad you are up and running!!!!

I'm afraid that nothing resolved this issue. I even swapped out the X-FI for an old Audigy 2 ZS. It reduced the crackling a bit on some planes. The performance gain from the GTX 460 just isn't worth the endless sound hassles, so I'll pull it and go back to my old system. Sadly, this means NGX performs like a dog in most circumstances. I can run MD-11 just fine, and J-41 (with a little adjustment) as well, so I'll have to make due flying those and A2A products, which don't produce nearly the frame rate hit 737NGX does. Thanks for the attempts at help all, and happy flying. Joe Legander

The 460gtx has sound on board. I disabled the sound on my motherboard, and used the hdmi port on the 460 to deliver sound and video. John

Our own Ryan upgraded a video card some time ago to something substantially better, and while he wasn't getting sound crackling, his performance was terrible. It wasn't until he decided to reinstall his system clean (partition/format/install windows) that he saw a significant boost in performance with his new card. Could be a solution for you...

Wow, I just installed Windows 7 64-bit clean before purchase, so I sure don't want to go through it again. Also, the performance boost isn't much. I don't know if it's that the GTX 460 isn't worlds better than the 7950 GT I began with, or (more likely) that FSX is so processor bound that beyond a certain point, the graphics card doesn't improve things much. So John Drago, I've never thought about this. How do I connect a set of computer speakers to the HDMI port you mention on the GTX 460? How do I direct the sound from FSX to said port? Joe Legander