Serious question about FSX and its stability.

[Jacoba 55]

Its hard to wade thru all the chaff for the wheat when asking for opinions about this flight sim or that.

 

Understanding that ones hardware plays a big if not bigger role in just how stable a particular FS may or may not be.

 

But, I'd like opinions about how stable FSX has been or hasn't been for you.

 

Please be truthful.

 

I'm curious about those who fly long haul trips, say PMDG 747 or MD11 on legs like NYC to London, or Paris to Tokyo.... those types of trips.

 

How stable is FS over long periods of time, while using an add on like PMDG and perhaps a WX program ilk AS2012.

 

I personally fly general aviation planes, using AS2012 and REX. Most of my trips are less than 2 hours and so far (knock on wood) I've not seen any sim issues.

 

Whats been your experience?

[SKEWR 364]

I fly PMDG planes the most. Followed by the Level D 767 and the ATR72 from Flight One. I recently purchased TrackIR along with the addons listed in my signature.

 

FSX has been unstable for me three times and I am happy that i was able to locate the issue all three times. 1) UIAutomation Core fix for when I have to access menus a bunch. 2) ENB Mod when switching views, makes the screen go black. I had to uninstall it. Curious how the "new" ENB mod works. 3) ATR72 will crash every single time when going to VNAV page 2 of 2 near departure or in flight.

 

I've done KSFO-PHNL, KEWR EGLL (and back) and several other flights from 1000 and less with no problems.

 

Short answer: only 1 issue with FSX out of the box is the UIAutoamtion core (And that might just be because I have Win7). FSX has been mostly rock solid for me.

[Jacoba 55]

So overall you're experience has been one of stability.

[MrBenevolent 0]

My core FSX + Accelerate installation is very stable.

 

Generally, that stability is inversely proportionate to the number of add-ons running at any one time though!

 

I have occasional issues with .net errors that seem to crop up in the various weather injectors I use and every now and then FSX CTDs on a reload or reposition - a crash that seems to be associated with EZCA running!

 

...none of these are persistant or catastrophic though and they don't diminish my enjoyment of the game, nor do they make it hard to progress and fly for hours at a time as they never seem to cause random crashes during flight - just on menu/add-on actions or loads.

[SKEWR 364]

Yes. Stable with several pay ware add ons. Hopefully you'll get a bigger sample size!

[MarkW 1,490]

I have over 100 flights in ConcordeX, quite a bit less with NGX, with payware scenery and have had maybe 1 or 2 CTD when on final approach. None since I added the UIAutomation Core fix. No better or worse than FS2004 stability in my opinion.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

Stable with a variety of airplanes, Reality XP gauges, and Orbx scenery.

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

Someone else started a topic similar to this yesterday and the points to my reply were the following.

 

1. Still on the same original install that I did back in April '08 after I had the rig built that I am using only for FSX. Never felt or had the need to wipe it clean and start again, mainly due to the fact that I dont install any addons that look like they might cause a problem and the fact that I back up my fsx.cfg, dll.xml, scenery.cfg, and exe.xml prior to installing every addon, just in case I install something with a rogue installer that accidentally messes up a setting in one of those files I can easily revert and/or trouble shoot.

 

2. For the first few years I primarily flew the LDS767 since it was the only real quality addon available for FSX, then in the middle years spent the majority of the time in the PMDG 747, and ever since the NGX came out have been flying it 99% of the time. With any of those a/c, in addition to the other ones I own, none have caused any problems, CTDs or OOMS's while using them.

 

3. Have a pretty good selection of addon sceneries that have been meticulously mulled over, textures mipped, AFCAD's modified and when used with the above a/c still no problems. However I did crash FSX once due to my own fault when I manually installed a new scenery and left a file in one of the folders that shouldn't be there and it crashed FSX on loading.

 

4. When flying in FSX, never use the same computer to browse the net, watch movies, check email or anything else. Just FSX only on this rig. Plus the rig is essentially FSX only, no other non-necessary FSX related stuff installed or running in the background, not ever virus or security protection since I dont go online except to activate a scenery.

 

5. Have done flights in the 747 that included stops all around the world back to my home base and no problems, and FSX was left running for 2 days to complete it.

 

6. Have left FSX running for as many a 5 days a few times with the NGX parked at gates after flights, AS2012 injecting weather via the networked computer that runs AS2012, and even with the sim running for that many days I was able to basically just pull up a seat start a new flight to the next destination and never once had it crash, CTD, or OOM.

 

7. Have used the ENB mod over that last 2 years or so, with and without custom palettes and never had crashes from it or any type of FPS degradation or image quality problems with it.

 

So yes, basically my FSX install, even with the good amount of stuff I have running on it has been nothing but rock solid for me over the past 4 years. Not bad for a rig that by todays standards is a dinosaur being on a 32bit OS and only 2gb of RAM. As such, I am always in utter disbelief how so many people with much better equipment and newer OS'es can complain about constant crashes and all kinds of other weird problems. The only thing I can chalk it up to in those cases is unstable overclocks, bad driver installs, overly or badly tweaked fsx.cfg files, trying to run to many apps on the same computer while flying in FSX. I can honestly say that if I encountered the troubles I have seen posted here numerous times I would probably have either quit FSX or tried FS9 or X-Plane.

 

That's my honest opinion on how FSX has treated me since '08. Enjoying it more and more since the day it was released.

[Kuckoo 2]

I'm with the overall sentiment of this thread so far. Very stable, even with multitudes of addons and background programs running. No CTD for me since last year.

[Chief Cargo 0]

My FSX install is pretty much at the limit of my 128GB SSD and is stable enough to run for days at a time. Except for occasional scenery conflicts (which are usually pretty easy to track down thankfully) causing problems it's been pretty smooth going.

 

However I cannot use any ENB mod, they cause crashes and for the life of me I can't track that down. As long as I don't have one installed everything is fine. One thing now, is that I have two computers running side by side, when FSX is running I use my 2nd PC to do everything. Both PCs are running off the same keyboard and mouse using input director.

[Jacoba 55]

My set up is a bit of an odd bird, I'm running Win 7 on an iMac via Bootcamp... I've not had any issues, but I am very curious about others, hopefully this thread will get enough responses to give us a broad look.

[Luis_KMIA 242]

I can do those types of flights keeping in mind two things, even with my decent specs:

- Never max out auto gen, or else I get random CTDs

- Enter "HIGHMEMFIX=1" in FSX.cfg, or else graphics begin to degrade

[Kosta 122]

Whats been your experience?

 

Stable. UK2000 EGLL -> FSDT KLAX, over photoscenery, partially ORBX, UTX, PMDG 747, AS2012, REX texturing. No crashes. No problems. Since the FSUIPC patch, this is it. No errors or anything.

[Nuno Pinto 1,394]

My last YSSY-KLAX on a Captain Sim Boeing 767-200 was free of problems. Actually, i get more crashes out of IvAP (IVAO online client) than FSX and even those are very rare.

[pocketwatch50 6]

With my old computer 2.6 Core Duo if I was careful with the sliders and add-ons it mostly ran OK but with occasional issues and that's with game Booster and config file tweaks. With my new computer a 4.2 and 16 gs memory and better video card the program is as smooth as glass though with everything running and in a detailed scenery area I can still get frame rates at about 10 on and off.