Not sure if this the best place to ask this question--I can think of several places but I guess I'll start here.

 

I'm finding that whenever I fly the Eaglesoft Citation X, on about a third of my flights, I get either a black screen, CTD, or an external model that is partially transparent. Many times, my screen looks like this;

 

 

I'm not sure what the catalyst is for this problem. It seems to happen sometimes when I switch views, or if I exit the sim to the desktop via ALT + TAB and then return to the sim.

Other times, it occurs for no reason at all--the sim just freezes. I thought it might be FSInn but its happened twice on me without any connection to VATSIM. I've thought it could be an overloading of the system perhaps; complex aircraft, scenery, etc. It could be an incompatabiility issue too maybe--I use REX for all my flights.

 

Its just strange that this is the only aircraft to do this out of all the other complex planes I have in my stable.

 

I have Windows 7, and an Nvidia GeForce GT 530 video card.

 

Anyone have any ideas about this?

Below are a couple of things that you can try.

 

What CPU do you have and what clock is it running at? What ram do you have and what clock is the ram running at?

 

Turn your scenry sliders down.

Turn off all vehicle traffic.

If both the above do not do anything then turn off all AI traffic along with the above two.

If any combination of the above work then you will just have to test different settings until you find the max that you can run at.

 

If turning all the above off does not work then try a different driver for your GPU.

If a new driver does not work then get a much better GPU (this will only help if your CPU/MB/ram will not bottleneck with a much better GPU).

Thanks for the great information.

 

My processsor is an Intel ® Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40 GHz and a 64 bit system with 8 GB of RAM. I'm guessing that's about average. I'm not sure how to determine the clock setting on these things...(

 

But the take away I get from your message is that AI and scenery are the primary causes for this problem. I will try and look at my processor load at the time and see if there are any clues to discover there.

If you have not overclocked your CPU then your CPU clock is 3.40GHz.

 

If you have a plain 2600 and not a 2600K then you can not overclock your CPU.

 

With that said your system should be able to handle a GTX580 and even a GTX680 without any problem.

 

I would really look into getting a better GPU

I've been experimenting with this plane for the last couple of days and generally speaking, I don't have any problems until later on in the flight if I attempt to go to the desktop and return to the sim. That's when the textures go haywire. This is true, even if I run the sim in Windowed format and try and access something other than the sim.

 

Also strangely, there doesn't seem to be any issue in the first part of a flight, only later on.

 

Do video cards get tired? Is there a way to re-boot them and get one's scenery/textures back without re-booting the entire sim?

You can try and reload your scenery after it happens.

 

When it happens go into your display settings to your scenery sliders tab and move one of your sliders up and then back down to its original position, hit okay and see if your scenery reloads. It is been a while since I did this and it do not remember if that is what I did or not.

 

If that does not reload your scenery then access your scenery library and just hit okay then see it that will reload it.

 

I am not at my PC with FSX on it so I am doing that all from memory, I may not have the exact procedure posted, but you should be able to get what I mean.

 

Just so you know, once the scenery starts to reload it may take awhile if you have a lot of addons. It takes FSX on average 8 minutes to load on my PC and if I reload the scenery while in flight it can take around 8 minutes to load.

 

It is not that the GPU gets tired, it just gets overloaded and can not catch up. On rare occasions while flying the PMDG MD11 or CS MD80 Pro or the ES CX750 my scenery gets blurry and will not clear up, the only way to get it to clear up is to reload the scenery. I have a 980X running @ 4.44GHz, a GTX 480 and 6GB of CAS6 ram running at 1644MHz, even then once in awhile my rig gets overloaded!

Do video cards get tired?

 

They get REAL tired if they get hot!

Idahosurge,

 

Those are certainly worthwhile suggestions--the only problem is my menu bar also goes away. If I hit ALT, it won't appear, which means I can't access any of those options. (

 

I've tried the shortcut for 'refresh scenery' which is the J key on my sim. That only take 30 seconds or so but it doesn't have any effect.

The more I think about this, the more I have a hard time accepting the video card overheating as the culprit. Not that I'm an expert by any means....

But I flew into a complicated scenery area with the X (CYBD Orbx scenery) and everything was just fine--no blurry textures, frames were okay, no real issue in switching between views...but then when I left the sim for the desktop (ALT + TAB), and then went back to the sim--viola! The screen was useless and there was nothing I could do to bring it back.

 

Now it seems to me that if the video card had become overheated....I could have left it in the desktop view for five minutes, it would have cooled down, and it's capabilities restored. Wouldn't that make sense?

Hi Catandra: Go here, and download Furmark. It will tell you whether or not you have a gpu issue. You can also continuously monitor it with GPU-Z from here.

 

Let us know how you make out.

 

All the Best.

Hi Paul,

 

Thanks for the link. I downloaded the utility but I'm not entirely sure how to use it. Do I open it up and the run FSX, checking the temps afterwards? And what would be considered an overly hot temperature?

No - nothing to do with FSX, Catandra - this just puts a visible 99% load on the GPU. Start GPU-Z, then start Furmark, by following the instructions exactly as on the download site. You are looking for 1). temperatures that don't "level off", artifacting, tearing, jaggies, spiking on the furry testing screen, and/or a fan that is not spooling up. If anything like that is present - the video card has a problem. Use GPU-Z as the monitoring agent.

 

Most answers here are suggeting that the GPU is probably the cause of your problem: you are saying you don't think it is - so you have to test this out to find out if you're right or wrong - OK? :wink:

 

Good luck!

i was having issues with Citation CJ 1+ with the video being lost during changes in and out of the program and it was suggested to me to check the familiar windows 7 issue with the automation dll file. I put that file into the FSX root directory and the issues went bye bye.