....were right! If you have a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium, or any version of the Titanium family, go to your version's driver download support page and then look for the tab called Beta. Pressing that tab will reveal a new driver that was posted on September 12th/11. I downloaded it for my card version, ran the install, rebooted as required, and have been flying with absolutely no graphics or sound issues whatsoever for days. FSX is running rock stable whether in DX9, or DX10. The Creative sound driver available since 2010 has been known by Creative to cause game/operation stutters in other games This is verified if you expand the BETA update notes and read that stutters are now fixed with this version in other games, but where they are not named. Obviously it seemed to cause operational problems in running FSX as well. I believe, that where other games showed 'stutters'......in FSX...the 'stutter' it caused would be a total lock-up of graphics, while the sound bytes still played. The fact that FSX did not crash...but showed that it was 'not responding' if you ran the Task Manager, bears out this opinion. That was the sound card driver conflicting with other FSX code at that very moment of the prolonged 'freeze/stutter'. Consider the 'seemingly locked and stalled graphics' as a 10 or 15 minute long protracted 'stutter', as regards FSX anyway. That is why if you left the machine alone and not ended it via the Task Manager,... eventually FSX would continue on much to your bafflement! To those that mused that the sound card driver could be behind all the FSX hangups....were right!!! So right! After installing the new September 12th BETA driver, there are absolutely no X.dll's crashing of any kind. No G3D, no BEX, no terrain dll's. Nothing is crashing FSX on my once plagued system. I have all the usual loaded after-market app's running the the background. the ONLY thing I did was to update the Creative Beta Driver for my version of the Titanium sound card. The fact that FSX now runs rock stable under ANY weather/landclass/custom scenery, etc...leads me to believe that with the sound driver causing a background issue with FSX...it also tripped other .dll's to create a fault, thereby CTD'ing. We all were running after red-herring's because the CTD's and or freezes seemed to manifest as a 'graphics' problem. No..it only showed as such, for behind it was an unstable and conflicting sound driver issue!!! Give this a try...and I'd bet money that all of the instability/Graphics/Crashes that plagued you (if you in fact did suffer through these...) will be corrected and gone permanently. I am flying trans-continental in Big Iron at all FL's, am going low and slow in G.A. mode, have gone through REX cloud bases and weather that have brought my system down to 8-12 FPS for an instant, and no crashes brought on by a fully loaded up graphics and CPU intensive scenario. Folks...if you are running with a Creative Sound card product...download the BETA driver of what card you have...update, reboot...and then go fly. Fly until your face plops down on the desktop. That will happen before your FSX goes down again. I am sure of it...LOL. Enjoy. Oh...and a grand thank you to those that felt it was a sound driver-FSX/DX9/ conflict. It sure was...but nobody could check it out as there was no new (even if at BETA) driver to replace the one you had in your FSX-crashing system. This explains why some had no crashing or stability issues. They either were/are running with the motherboard on board sound driver, and/or a Creative card/driver version that did not affect FSX as some 2 or three year old Titanium products and their older non-updated drivers obviously did. The mystery is solved (at least on my W7 Ultimate/GTX285/over-driven 4.2 Ghz i7-980x platform). It was not FSX's code..but Creative's official drivers that was creating a conflict on my mentioned system. The BETA being offered fixes/fixed this, once and for all! Cheers, Mitch

Mitch - Thanks for this post. After updating and doing a flight I find dramatically increased performance in FSX. Amazing.

Definitely an interesting find. I'll have to do some experimenting myself. Thanks for posting!

Mitch - Thanks for this post. After updating and doing a flight I find dramatically increased performance in FSX. Amazing.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are most welcome, Noah! Replacing my sound driver with the offered BETA, solved all instability issues with FSX. It runs for hours, I can access menus with no concern of a CTD, and have noticed about a 20 percent increase in FPS to boot. Since having installed the BETA sound driver around the 14th of September...there has not been one freeze--with sound playing in the background...and not one CTD brought on by any non-sound related .dll that used to show up before the BETA was installed. I believe that all these problems have nothing to do with the graphics side of things...but a very serious sound rendering issue (with using the present non-beta Creative sound driver) that undermined most of the DX9 .dll platform. That would result in any type of CTD problem...and not necessarily...a direct sound-identifiable reproduction issue. My (now) totally stable FSX experience bears that opinion full weight, at least to my needs, usage, and satisfaction. Cheers! Mitch

Definitely an interesting find. I'll have to do some experimenting myself. Thanks for posting!

--------------------------------------------------------------- If installing the BETA works out for you....that would bring on a smile or two :) It has made FSX as if brand new! Cheers, Mitch

This is something that I have suspected and have been checking for new drivers for a long long time. Creative drivers have a long history of causing slowdowns in games and it is a great thing that they resolved some issues in this set. Thanks for posting this. Cheersjja

There are PAX drivers, which are modifed ones. They seem to do a better job, I have being using them for a while.http://www.hardwareheaven.com/pax-dri

I have also thought that my sound drivers were causing issues for a while but I could never pinpoint anything. I installed these drivers and had a very smooth flight this evening from MWCR to CYQB. I have made some changes to my sim lately (back to 1024 REX clouds and add in the UT2 FPS minimum) so I cant say the change was the driver but I did have the smoothest flight I have had in a long time. Over the summer I installed a bunch of traffic bgl's (400+) that I run at 100% along with 100% UT2. I have often thought that ATC's communication with a large number of AI aircraft has contributed to a loss of FPS. The question has always been - is it the number of aircraft that appear, the coordination of these aircraft or the actual audible response by ATC to these aircraft that causes the FPS loss? The jury is still out but these BETA drivers were a nice find. Thanks for the HU. BTW, I thought that there was an option to only hear/see ATC communication for your own aircraft but I can't find the option now. Can someone please point me to it?

There are PAX drivers, which are modifed ones. They seem to do a better job, I have being using them for a while.http://www.hardwareheaven.com/pax-dri

Wow what a difference! Thanks for the link to these drivers, they greatly reduced, if not eliminated the amount of stutters I was getting, especially when ATC chimed in while I came to a waypoint turn, now it's smooth as can be!! I was disappointed when I saw the Creative drivers were only for the Titanium, (I have the X-Fi Extreme Audio card) so these are a good substitute.

I just through my SB Pci-e xtreme in the bin. Now using onboard Realtek, and soooo much better. SB cards downside has always been drivers, I have had different flavours of SB cards over the years, and there drivers have always been flaky, and yonks between updates. At least realtek update on a regular basis, and the quality is superb. It is HD audio on a Gigabyte Z68 board. Never have been a fan of onboard sound till now.

HelloBest thing I ever did was getting that X-Fi out of my machine, even with the PAX drivers it was still flakey.Switched to using a USB headset and Voice recognition is many times more accurate than when using the X-Fi with myBeyerdynamic analog headset.A $20 Microsoft Lifechat 3000 is beating out the X-Fi + $80 headset.

HelloBest thing I ever did was getting that X-Fi out of my machine, even with the PAX drivers it was still flakey.Switched to using a USB headset and Voice recognition is many times more accurate than when using the X-Fi with myBeyerdynamic analog headset.A $20 Microsoft Lifechat 3000 is beating out the X-Fi + $80 headset.

I tried hitting mine with a sledge hammer, but the bu$%%er would not break. It is now a door stop.

I have been using an original SoundBlaster Live! card with kX Project drivers for many years with absolutely no FSX problems. I needed the kX Project drivers anyway for the ASIO support for my Steinberg Cubase based DAW system, the low-latency of this setup is much better than the pathetic onboard Realtek.