Chasing stutters... caught 'em.

[Jimmy RFR 406]

So the other night, I decided on a whim (a silly, silly whim) to upgrade my video drivers. I tend not to mess with these, since I run FSX and that can be rather 'particular' about drivers. As such, I had been running the same set that I installed when I first got my 980ti, last spring.

 

Well.... After uninstalling and cleaning up any traces of the old drivers, I installed the new set. Which went smooth, until last night when I went to fly in X-Plane. I quickly discovered a brand new, major 'clockwork' stutter. Every 28.4 seconds (estimated based on using the lap function on my iPhone timer) there would be a hard pause for about half a second.

 

I spent all of last night and a good portion of today trying to solve this. In doing so, I:

 

- Rolled back to slightly older drivers three times in succession. My old set I had previously installed would no longer now install for some reason.

- Ensured 'Threaded Optimization' was turned off

- Turned off & removed all custom scenery.

- Removed all plugins.

- Removed all custom aircraft.

- Turned all settings to absolute minimum.

 

Nothing was working. No other programs or flight sims were displaying the behavior. It didn't matter what I did - I could make XP look like 1990, and it till had the same stutter, every 28.4 seconds.

 

Anyhow, the rather simple (as in, I wish I'd of done this first, simple) fix turned out to be to delete my Preferences folder within X-Plane. Worked a charm. Stutters gone, and I can now fly XP once again.

 

 

 

[ADamiani 470]

Hi, I followed your advice by renaming the preferences folder (we are talking of that inside the Output folder right?).

 

Then I tried to run X-Plane (10.50b6), but after 40 minutes it is still loading resources .....

 

Andrea

[ryanbatc 13,011]

What does deleting the preferences do though?

[Swe_Richard 1,175]

I've heard of this "magical" trick for a long time and even stories about people benefitting from deleting the preferences. I am yet to try this trick myself though, as I've been quite skeptical as to how good it could actually be. It sounds like a good enough trick, I'll have to admit that. What happens with the preferences-folder that can explain all those mysterious issues people sometimes have and people sometimes solve by deleting? 

[Jimmy RFR 406]

 

 

What does deleting the preferences do though?

 

It forces XP to rebuild all of your settings. You have to start from scratch - all of your rendering settings, all of your saved preferences in regards to AI, anything regards number of flight models per second, etc, they are all wiped out. Upon restart, X-Plane repopulates that folder with default settings. In essence, it's much like deleting not only your fsx.cfg file, but also all of the other .cfg files: controls, etc.

 

 

 

Hi, I followed your advice by renaming the preferences folder (we are talking of that inside the Output folder right?).
Then I tried to run X-Plane (10.50b6), but after 40 minutes it is still loading resources .....
Andrea

 

I should of specified two things: First, I am running 10.45 (no beta). Second, I should of clarified that I didn't delete the folder, I deleted the contents of the folder. I think that may be an important distinction.

 

 

 

"magical" trick

 

No magic here - I had repeatable, timed hard stutters before, and zero stutters afterward. Also, where I learned this was from trying to troubleshoot a problem I encountered a few weeks back - I had a situation arise where every loaded flight would first start to load my proper aircraft, then it would switch and load the X-15 in the drop situation. In researching that one, I read that a suggested fix was to delete the contents of the preferences folder. I dug into it a bit further, and realized that it looked like the command to load that situation somehow got into my controller assignment file (XAssign bug perhaps?). At the time, I didn't want to do something so drastic as losing all my preferences, so I simply deleted a few that looked like they had something to do with controller assignments.

 

I could of done the same thing (new preference folder contents) by reinstalling. Reinstallation was going to be my next step, so the way I figured, I wasn't about to lose anything from trying. :smile: