Greetings!

 

Yesterday morning I was flying in FTXGlobal over various parts of Kentucky and everything was fine: frame rate locked at 30, beautiful smoothness.

 

Took a break and started a new flight from the airport I had landed at earlier. Just sitting on the tarmac I knew something was wrong: cockpit views stuttered when I changed the viewpoint, and the locked spot camera stuttered badly when I rotated around the aircraft. Taking off was just painful: massive stuttering. Reboot changed nothing.

 

Task Manager says the CPU is loafing - lots of spare cycles. The NVIDIA Monitor on the other hand shows the GPU CPU as fully utilized - 100 percent busy just sitting on the tarmac, let alone flying. Frame rate counter often drops to single digits. 

 

Other pertinent NVIDIA settings are max memory usage 748MB, max temp 65C, max fan 47%. Clock and voltage normal, 772MHz and 1000mV.

 

Driver is 327.23, which may or may not be an issue. 

 

The main puzzlement is what happened to the video card between landing, taking an hour break, and taking off again. How can you tell that all of the cores in the GTX are running?

 

Thanks for any insight into this!

 

JKH

It sounds like your GPU most probably but:

 

Plug in a different monitor and see if it's the same.

 

Maybe a new cable too. 

Driver is 327.23, which may or may not be an issue. 

 

 

I had serious problems with that driver using a variety of apps, mostly unexplained crashes. One time, the system booted into Windows 8 in 256 color mode! That scared the heck out of me because I thought that my GTX 680 was fried. I figured it was a bad driver install, so I uninstalled and  went back to an earlier driver. Problem fixed.

 

Try going back to a previous nVidia driver. If the problem clears up, you can always re-install 327.23. I seem to remember reading another thread on AVSim regarding problems with 327.23, but I searched for it and couldn't find it.

 

When video cards fail, they tend to fail catastrophically (video card fan death is the most common) and exhibit artifacts etc.. They usually don't exhibit symptoms like stuttering and poor FPS.

When my 470 failed there was this burning smell and the system wouldn't even POST. Over the weeks prior the system would do reboots when ever I ran FSX.  Taking off the case cover and using an external fan stopped the reboots for a while then the disaster.  Replaced the 470 with a 9800GT I had spare and and the system is back in business except that the 9800GT is a poor replacement for the 470 and FSX is now pretty unusable.  Time for an upgrade!

 

PS the problem with the 470 was that one of the fans wasn't working due to a wire protruding from the body of the card.  Should have taken the card out and had a good look when I started having the reboots might have been able to save the card.

 

Bruceb

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

 

I figured there has to be a way to determine if the basic card is operating correctly, and there is: the 3DMARK11 benchmark. A ton of results out there for the GTX580, a lot of them from the over-clockers, but a "normally aspirated" GTX580 falls into the 5-6000 range. Mine clocked in @ 6500, indicating it is healthy.

 

Got to be something else somewhere... Will keep on digging, time permitting. Rolling back the firmware is a good idea, simple enough to do. 

 

By the by, I am running P3D.

 

Thanks again!

@Howellerman:

 

My problems with 327.23 were with P3d. FSX worked fine and that's a contradiction to the general behavior of the two apps. I assume that you meant "driver" and not "firmware". Messing with the video card BIOS is only a last resort when the manufacturer directs you to do so.

 

@brucewtb:

 

That's what I meant by "video card fan death". The most common cause of GPU deaths is when the fan gets clogged with dust and stops. Sometimes, one can get lucky and the card will throttle back its performance due to overheating. But usually, the fan stops and the card just burns up. I think that the problem with dust build up has become more acute, because high end machines are big towers that often sit on the floor. One of the best PC tools is a spray can of air which one can use to clean the computer's innards every few months.

@Howellerman:

 

My problems with 327.23 were with P3d. FSX worked fine and that's a contradiction to the general behavior of the two apps. I assume that you meant "driver" and not "firmware". Messing with the video card BIOS is only a last resort when the manufacturer directs you to do so.

 

@brucewtb:

 

That's what I meant by "video card fan death". The most common cause of GPU deaths is when the fan gets clogged with dust and stops. Sometimes, one can get lucky and the card will throttle back its performance due to overheating. But usually, the fan stops and the card just burns up. I think that the problem with dust build up has become more acute, because high end machines are big towers that often sit on the floor. One of the best PC tools is a spray can of air which one can use to clean the computer's innards every few months.

 

Hi Jabloom, 

 

   Yes, I meant driver. Interesting that you had an error as well. I will try reverting a revision this evening. 

 

   Thanks!

 

JKH

:lol:

 

As we speak, nVidia just pushed a beta driver out there, 331.40.

:lol:

 

As we speak, nVidia just pushed a beta driver out there, 331.40.

That is never good when they push a new version that fast - shades of 314 which was a disaster!