Hello everyone,

 

I wanted to share a method with you that has helped me reduce the few freezes/CTD that I had in FSX with some add-on airplanes in the past. For example, flying the JustFlight BAe 146 resulted in spontaneous freezes during midflight, where the engine sound was still running, but the sim didn't react, and the only way to quit FSX was via Task Manager. On another occasion, loading up my Level-D 767 resulted in an immediate "Stack Hash" crash quite often after loadup. Few times I had other crashes that many of you are familiar with. Not many, though - that's maybe because I haven't overloaded my FSX with complex airport add-ons. I stress that the crashed with the above airplanes didn't occur always, but relatively frequently.

 

Anyway, the method is as follows: Upon starting the FSX welcome window (before loading the flight), go to the display settings menu and reduce all graphics sliders to zero!  That includes everything (scenery, traffic, etc.), except the resolution that you can leave at your previous value. I would set the FPS limit slider to unlimited. Next, load your flight. As you can expect, you won't see much going on at the airport. It is now that you go back to the display menu and set all the sliders at your desired position. Or you can load a previously saved settings profile. This is something you must do if you want to set the LOD level beyond 4.5 and/or increase the texture size to higher than 1024.

 

With this method, I haven't had the aforementioned freezes or crashed in FSX. If it indeed does something processing-wise, then I can imagine that it changes the way fsx manages the threads and scenery in a different, less crash-prone manner.

 

Those who suffer from freezes and crashed, I want you to apply this method and see if it helps you or if it was coincidence that I didn't get CTDs or freezes on my PC after application.

Not sure if I understood you correctly... but from what I understood....

 

If you change your graphics settings, don't you revert back to Texture Size of 1024?

 

If that's what is happening, it would explain your results. The other way of looking at that would be that you may be that higher than 1024 does not work well on one's system or there is a errant texture that it causes problems with, and going back to 1024 prevents it.

 

Just throwing this out there.

Dave, if you change graphics settings in FSX, you indeed revert the LOD radius and texture size back to their default values. If one doesn't bother with setting them higher than default, then there is nothing to worry about. However, if you want to apply settings higher than default, you need to load a previously saved settings cfg file (saved in "My Documents") that has manually been edited to reflect the higher-than-default LOD and texture size. This is why I mentioned the loading of the profile. I hope to have clarified it a little.

This is explained in the AVSIM CTD Guide. Lowering your FSX settings will surely reduce the chances of any crashes. Of course, everyone must have the eye-candy or the perception of eye-candy with settings set to the max or near the max.

 

Thanks for your input.

 

Best regards,

OK, I realize that what I wrote might be misunderstood, so let me add something in response to firehawk44.

 

I did not mean that you should lower your settings permanently or during the entire flight. In that case, you will indeed run a lower risk of getting any crashes. Instead, I referred to setting the sliders to absolute minimum before you click on the "Fly Now" button. Right after the flight is loaded (at an more or less empty terrain), then you go back to the display menu and set the sliders wherever you want. Even if it means cranking them up to near maximum! This is what I meant when I stated "Next, load your flight. As you can expect, you won't see much going on at the airport. It is now that you go back to the display menu and set all the sliders at your desired position."

 

To give you one example: Suppose that I prefer to set most settings at maximum or near maximum for my flight to enjoy eye candy. In my case, it does matter to the stability whether I set the sliders at that level before I start the flight, or in the way that I described above. I have had two computer systems - one with a weak AMD CPU and the other with a modern Intel i5 4690K CPU - and on both computers, I noticed that applying the above method gave me more stability than having the sliders set before clicking on "Fly Now".

 

I hope that this has clarified my statement a bit.