Yesterday, I installed the latest Nvidia driver 361.43 (WHQL). When I start FSX (classic boxed, SP2), the preview window on the Free Flight screen is black and the entire PC freezes (no mouse movement, no keyboard response, time frozen). A forced reboot is needed.

 

I started to narrow down the cause by disabling my Nvidia Inspector profile completely (changed behavior flag to 'treat override as application controlled'). This disabled the AA (I had 16xS before) and the problem was solved: FSX started as normal without freezing and black preview. Then I enabled the profile, but without an AA setting and FSX still worked. 

 

Next step was to figure out if all AA modes were affected: I enabled a basic AA mode (standard 4x multisampling) and FSX worked again as it should. I then switched to 4xS, one of the well-known and recommended 'combined multisampling & supersampling' modes, which made the issue present itself again. 

 

So, TL:DR: 

Latest Nvidia drivers (361.43) breaks the combined AA modes in Nvidia Inspector and causes your FSX & PC to freeze up when displaying the 'preview' window on the 'Free Flight' page. 

 

Edit: Rolling back to 359.06 solves the issue and the combined modes are working fine again. Something got seriously broken in the latest drivers...

 

Edit 2: Somebody else also reported this on the Geforce forums:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/906001/geforce-700-600-series/driver-version-361-43-and-flight-simulator-x/

Edited December 28, 201510 yr by 737freak

Thank you for the advice.  

Yes! Thanks very much for the update.

I'm using the 361.43 drivers with 8xS Antialiasing and all is working fine.

Thanks, I am in the process of installing a 980ti

I'm using the 861.43 drivers with 8xS Antialiasing and all is working fine.

 

Huh? 861.43

Sorry for the typo. It should be 361.43.  I edited my original post.

Exactly same behaviour in FSX-SE with this NV361.41 driver. Everything was frozen with black preview window by selecting the free flight starting box.

 

After selecting the DX10 preview box, FSX-SE started as normal but the Nvidia Inspector setting did not work anymore.The new driver probably dont accept dx9 components ?

 

(Intel i/ 4790K/ GeForce GTX970/ windows 7pro 64)

I confirm the problem with the last nVidia driver (361.43).
http://www.avsim.com/topic/480800-fsx-freezes-in-free-flight-menu/#entry3348033

This would appear to be an individual system problem rather than a problem with the new drivers or everyone would be having issues, which is clearly not the case. I have the 361.43 drivers installed with Windows 7 64bit and I'm successfully running FSX in DX10 mode with 4x sparse grid supersampling and 16x anisotropic filtering set in NVIDIA Inspector. However, as I mentioned in another post, having had problems in the past with installing a new driver over an old one, I never update to a new driver without first fully uninstalling the previous one. I use Display Driver Uninstaller to completely clear out the old drivers - http://www.guru3d.co...r-download.html. I also avoid installing GeForce Experience which seems to cause more problems than it solves and does nothing for FSX anyway. If you're still having problems, try a complete uninstall and reboot before reinstalling the latest drivers.