Freeze on/after final (not what you're thinking)

[jes0811 1]

Ok, I guess I didn't realise that this was the symptom of "freezes", but I have also had this two times (no hotfix). Both times on final after turning off the AP the plane took a severe right turn and descended into the ground. It never lasted long enough for me to realize that all systems frose (I was too busy screaming "pull-up!"). It is a shame that we don't have a solution to the FSX 32bit memory limit. So many smart people that have developed around other limitations (antilag comes to mind). Something external that manages memory for FSX perhaps... probably impossible. Another small, possibly related issue. Again, always on short final when I don't need anything "unusual" to happen, my view sometimes automatically switches to external view all by itself. Always at the worst possible time when I need to monitor the approach instruments or turn off the A/T. Just flicks to external and then I need to hit F9 to jump back inside.

[Paul Deemer 13]

I am using a Q6600 Processor overclocked at 3.0 ghz with 8 Gig of System memory. I am having good results even with an old 8800GTX Video Card with 768 meg ram. I am also using 64-bit Vista. However I mostly fly in 2d-panel view when on or near the ground and Virtual Cockpit mode after I am airborne. Average Frame rates on the ground with Payware scenery is about 18 to 22 fps. Airborne without the FPS limited it goes up to around 40 and fluctuates between 40 and 50. Just because FSX is a 32-bit program, does not mean you won't benefit from going to 4 gigs to 8 gigs of system memory cause you will and I did a notice the system running more smoothly and fluidly. If as you say FSX is using 2.5 gig of your system memory there isn't much left for Windows. What about your other addons that are running in the background, they also need memory. And if your using 32-bit windows it gets even worse if you have one of those next generation video cards that has a gig or more of memory on the card. Why? Because of the 32-bit limitation Windows has to map the memory from your video card in the first 4 gig of memory. So if you have a fancy GTX580 with 1.5 gig of memory onboard you lost 1.5 gig of your available system memory and now only have 2.5 gig of memory availabe. On the 2 Video Card in SLI issue, FSX does NOT support SLI and if your running 2 cards in SLI mode your actually hurting your performance and 1 card will run better than 2. I used to do play a lot of 3D-Shooters like Quake, Doom, Crysis Warhead and Call of Duty 4 and with those games having 2 video cards in SLI will boost your perfomance dramatically. But FSX will not take advantage of it. So disable SLI mode when flying. You will get a lot of different answers from people, but read the reviews on the MD-11 and 747-400 and you will find that most all of the reviewers recommended at least 6 to 8 gig of system memory on 64-bit windows to get them to run smoothly. The 737-NGX is even more intense so you get the picture. A Fast CPU, Enough Memory, and a Decent video card are all important. Even the hard drive comes into play. Of course the most important is the clock speed of your processor. If you want FSX to run descently 3.0 ghz is a good starting point. When I run at stock 2.4 ghz with PMDG planes it is laggy and jerky as hell with payware scenery on the ground. At 3.0 ghz it runs way way better. FSX scales very well, the higher you go on your cpu clock the faster and smoother the sim will be. I run a lot of add-ons as well. ASE, GEX, REX, UTX, FS Global 2010 and Payware Sceneries from Aerosoft, FSDT, EIREsim, FlyTampa, and ORBX to name a few and they are all pretty intensive. To blame FSX and the NGX and say it won't matter what hardware or how much memory you use that it is still gonna freeze is just not true. I am able to fly 6.5 hour flights In the NGX and have done an 18.5 hour flight in the 747-400 and can enjoy my sim without any issues. I still get that minor little freeze but it only happens a couple times during a flight and lasts about 2 seconds. When it happens I just stop what im doing and let it resume. It never crashes or freezes solid. Finally for best performance you should customize your fsx.cfg using tweaks from Nick N and ******* A. The will provide a dramatic improvement, provided you already have a system capable of running FSX descently. FSX Water, Clouds and Autogen are big time FPS killers and will overload your system in a hurry. It is best to have a balance and not try to max the sliders out. Even the best systems out there will be brought to their knees if you max every slider out and try to take the 737-NGX into an ORBX airport like YBBN. Here are the basic settings I use. Graphics1680x1050x32 ResolutionFrame Rate UnlimitedGlobal Texture Resolution Very HighLens Flare and Advanced Animations Checked (No DX10 Preview or Light Bloom) AircraftHigh Resolution 3d cockpit Checked Aircraft landing-lights illuminate Ground Checked All Shadows unchecked as they take a HEAVY toll on FPS. Scenery Level of detail radius Large Mesh Complexity 100 Mesh Resolution 10 Texture Resolution 60 cm for most Airports (I use 7cm at ORBX Airports because if you don't, the runways and tarmac look blurry since it was desgined to be used with 7cm). Water Effects - Low 2x. (Unless your flying VFR and close to the ground, putting this to anything higher is just going to hurt your performance and is not necessary). Scenery Complexity - Extremely Dense Autogen - Normal Ground Scenery Shadows - Unchecked Special Effects Detail: High WeatherCloud Draw - 60 miles Thermal Visual - None Download Winds Aloft - Checked Disable Turbulence and thermal effects near Aircraft - Checked (Required or your PMDG planes will S-Turn). Rat at which weather changes over time - No change. (Your weather will still update and change - Setting recommended by Hi-Fi) Detailed Clouds - High TrafficNone After I am airborne I change the following settings around 10,000 feet.Target Frame rated - 30Autogen OFF, because your not gonna see it at Cruise anyway.Weather Settings - Ultra HighTraffic - I use Ultimate Traffic II that allows me to have VATSIM traffic and Ultimate Traffic combined so I have traffic around me during the flight. It doesn't cause a big performance hit in the air. However on the ground at a big airport it will bring my system down to around 10 fps which is unflyable. So before Approach I turn traffic off, unless it is a small airport.

[Paul Deemer 13]

Now I finally understand. I thought I was the only one having this problem. I thought everyone else was having classic CTD and I have not had THAT problem. With the original download when I disconnected the AP on short final the a/c would immediately roll right and hit the ground wing and nose first.

I had this problem happen to me twice at KMIA a long time ago in the 747-400X. Was during a VATSIM event both times and was really embarressing. Your VA Buddies all at the gate watching you fly in then all sudden they see your plane do a barrel roll and DOA! It is not the NGX that is doing it to you it is your controllers. At some point during the flight your controllers became uncalibrated. What is happening is your on Autopilot merrily on your way down the glide scope and suddenly you turn off the autopilot and your controller is off center and causes you to do a barrel roll or flip into the ground. To keep this from happening I calibrate my controllers at 2 different points during a flight. 1st at the gate before I pushback and then again at the top of my descent. I pause the sim, exit to the desktop, go to My computer, control panel, game controllers and calibrate from there. You can also do it from FSX Controls. I do it outside FSX because there is some issue with the X52 Pro causing a crash if it I do it from FSX Controls. Others have reported similar results with the X-52 Pro. So some controllers are fine and others cause a crash. Another example is when loading a saved FSUIPC flight. IF my X52-Pro is connected it will cause a crash regardless of what hotfix I am using. The only solution is to load the saved flight first with my x52 pro disconnected then reconnect it after the flight is loaded. Course I have to Calibrate again and go into FSUIPC and verify everything in there is still set.

[Jigsaw 8]

It is not the NGX that is doing it to you it is your controllers.

I think you are talking about a completely different issue altogether. What we talk about is the panel freeze with the following symptoms that all happen at once: - panels and their functions freeze. For example you stay stuck on the PLAN page without being able to switch back to the MAP mode. Or the moving map doesn't get updated anymore.- complete disconnect of all controls. The yoke, the rudders, the thrust lever, none of these will move anymore.- you can't shut down the engines, because the fuel lever in the VC doesn't do anything anymore- you can't change the route or in the FMC anymore and the FMC item has disappeared from the main page of the CDU (when you press the MENU key).- FSX keeps running normally and the aircraft continues to fly/taxi with its last attitude before the freeze. Most these things are not related to the controller calibration at all. I'm not even using FSUIPC that seems to be the cause of some calbibration problems. At least not the registered version. I only run the free version for a connection with some addons.

[Warchild 0]

Second successful test flight completed.. The advantage of having over three gigs of ram while running FSX is that the system, your other programs and all the background processes will run in the memory not being used by FSX. This frees up more ram for FSX to use, but its still limited to 3 gigs. Those of us with massively powerful graphics setups are going to end up with all that video ram re-mapped to main memory for fsx, because fsx doesnt use a whole lot of graphics processing. Its all CPU based. So I've got two GTX-260s in sli mode with 875 megs ram each. all that memory gets remapped into that itty bitty 3 gigs that fsx can access.. and therein lay the root of these freezes.If you dont believe me, then please ask microsoft.lowering your in game graphics overhead, will help eliminate the freezes..

[Paul Deemer 13]

So I've got two GTX-260s in sli mode with 875 megs ram each

Do a test and try an FSX card with only 1 card running. I bet your performance will increase. That is if your using 1920x1080 resolution or lower. If you are using a higher screen resolution you (and I say may) benefit by having the 2 video cards in SLI. But given that FSX doesnt support it I highly doubt it. But could be wrong. I see what your talking about with the total freeze. My point was that some people are able to fly without any issues at all. I am lucky just to have a 2 second freeze that never crashes and only happens maybe a half a dozen times on a 6 hour flight. It is something I can overlook easily enough until I can upgrade to a Sandy Bridge or the Ivy Bridge when it comes out. When you get to the point where it just Freezes solid like that, while it works fine for others and only freezes sometimes for me. Logic would say you probably need to upgrade some of your hardware. I did have one issue when upgrading from Hot Fix 1 to Hot Fix 2. I kept getting an APU Fail even though none of the failures were enabled. Tried for 2 hours to fix it but could not. So then I uninstalled the NGX and skipped Hot Fix 1 and went straight to 2. Worked fine then. So when Hot Fix 3 came out and PMDG said that the NGX installer was available with all 3 hot fixes installed already I went and Downloaded that. Uninstalled the NGX again and just installed the installer and and my liveries and it has never run better than it is now. So a suggestion would be if your having major freezes and lock ups just uninstall the NGX, go to the PMDG Page and Logon. Look up your order number and find the download link for the installer and do a clean install. What have you got to lose given that it doesnt work now? Will only take about 15 min to do.

[Warchild 0]

With the reduction of the textures from 4096x4096 to 2048x2048 I no longer have the freezes. And your right, using only one gpu does improve my performance, but i develop flight models for several companies and need the sli and multi core capabilities for crunching numbers. That meant finding a better solution than just tossing a 200 dollar video card out the window.. And I think PMDG is onto something there.. One small thing worked for me, it may just work for others as well..Pam

[Jigsaw 8]

And it happened again, after I reduced all the cockpit textures to 50%. The whole flight went fine without a hitch, I disengaged the autopilot and autothrottle and flew the final approach manually without a problem. The very second I touched down: controls frozen, panels frozen, FMC entry disappeared from the CDU... the usual. FSX keeps running like a charm. This is most definitely not a ressource problem but a software problem with the NGX, aka "bug".

[Jigsaw 8]

Thats because freeing up the memory allowed longer usage without running out of memory.

Please read the whole thread before contributing and spreading nonsense. This is a completely reproducable issue that happens exactly at the same stage of flight, namely the touchdown, regardless of wether the flight took 1 or 3 hours, and only when the autopilots were disenganged. Autolanding works fine. There is no way in hell that this is a ressource problem, especially not when all the graphics have been cranked down to a minimum and the cockpit texture have been reduced to 50%, so that the only thing left consuming memory is the NGX itself. p.s.: here is my tremendous flight plan: PARB BTT (WUPET) (WAGWU) (HUPVU) PFYU. The items in brackets are GPS fixes.

[Jigsaw 8]

I beg to differ!

That's your perogative. But I will only take an official word from PMDG on this issue, thank you.

[gweilo8888 1]

Just hit what would appear to be the same bug myself. In my case, all displays and instruments stopped updating, and the aircraft made an uncommanded hard right bank, although it was on autopilot at the commanded altitude, speed and heading right before the problem occurred. I could still pan around the 3D cockpit and switches moved just fine, but seemed to have no effect. For example, killing the autopilot didn't return control to my yoke and throttle. FSX itself is continuing to simulate the aircraft's flight, pop up ATC warnings, etc., though. I've seen mention of this being memory related, but that would seem strange to me. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit on a Core-i7 950 machine with 12GB of RAM, and FSX is only consuming 2.4GB of this. Fully 51% of my physical memory is untouched, according to task manager. Likewise my CPU utilization -- even running windowed with the window scaled to fill the screen, and task manager running on top so I can see CPU, never goes above 40% total, of which FSX is taking around 28-35%. (The remainder of memory and CPU utilization is other programs I hadn't bothered to shut down, as FSX usually runs smoothly regardless. Note that the problem first occurred running fullscreen, not windowed.) I wasn't aware until just now that there were any hotfixes available. I guess I'll look into installing these now -- is there any way to sign up to update automatically, or to receive email notifications when a hotfix is released? Unfortunately my day job doesn't leave time to monitor these forums on a daily basis to see if there are updates, but obviously I need some mechanism for knowing when to update... My flight, incidentally, was SBRJ to SBSP: a relatively short hop, although the longest continuous flight I've yet had time to try with the NGX. (Until now I'd done no more than touch-and-go practice to try things out.) Edit: Answered and removed my question about whether hotfixes needed to be installed in sequence.

[B777ER 2,486]

Just got this same situation again with the freeze right after landing. This is with a fresh install with HF3 applied.

[FrankG2625 9]

My flights since then have gone fine (up to number 8 now and 9 in progress as we speak -- I hope I haven't jinxed it ;-) ). I usually disconnect AP at the G/S intercept, and hand fly her down... No freezes. And I also doubt this is a RAM issue since I have 8GB of RAM (DDR3-1600, see timings in sig), and 1GB video card.

[Driftdown 1]

Same here. CTD on touchdown AND hard left banking with displays frozen and yoke/rudder/throttle/... inputs ignored.

[Jigsaw 8]

I spoke too soon. The panel freeze on touchdown also happens with the initial download of the NGX and with the updated NGX download with the latest hotfix included. I made a video of it, which was easy, because it happens all the time: http://www.mediafire...denjj96216d8mct