Ever since I switched to a two monitor setup (one screen looking forward, the other out the pilot’s window), X-Plane 12 flashes the screen every few seconds to black and then reappears after each event.  The primary and secondary displays do this in alternating phase, essentially taking turns.  It does this right from program launch in the main screen, before the flight has even commenced and then continues indefinitely, rendering XP unusable without a fix.

From searching various forums I learned that if you go into XP12 settings and switch the monitor to *anything* other than ‘default’, the problem goes away, even if the resolution and refresh rate are explicitly set the same as the system default.  The key is the menu cannot say ‘default settings’.  Now, this would be an easy workaround, but every time XP12 launches you have to repeat the process of changing the graphics settings to something other than ‘system default’.  It does not save the previous settings.    Some have found that changing the screen resolution by one pixel does the trick (e.g., 3840x2159 instead of 3840x2160), but I haven’t yet succeeded with that.

I find it strange that the discussions where this workaround was discussed were many years old, going back to early versions of XP11.  Yet the problem still persists in version 12.

I have an AMD 5950X CPU and an NVidea 3080Ti graphics card.   The monitors are 4K and I have the system default set to 4K 60 Hz for each screen.  I’ve run GPU-Z while in flight and although he GPU is heavily taxed with two 4K monitors, the fact is it runs fine with the workaround.  The problem does not appear to be a result of the GPU not being able to keep up.  After all, the problem appears as I mentioned as soon as XP12 starts up sitting at the main screen when the GPU load is nearly zero.

I would love to hear if others have the same problem and if a root cause of the issue has been determined, as well as a permanent fix that doesn’t require twiddling with settings each time the program is launched.

 

Keith

1 hour ago, kholt said:

X-Plane 12 flashes the screen every few seconds to black and then reappears after each event

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/292174-1206b4-is-available/&do=findComment&comment=2588140

LR's very aware of that one but no fix yet. If you've found a repeatable way of triggering it, I'm sure they'd love to know. Further down in that thread Sidney mentions that a Renderdoc capture would be very helpful. It's very much in the weeds as far as gfx debugging goes but if you're adventurous in google searching to learn how to do it, I'm sure they'd appreciate it if you got lucky with a capture.

Edited August 7, 20232 yr by blingthinger

Oh its repeatable alright, as in it always happens, never stops, and I don’t have to do anything at all to trigger it.  The program just starts up that way and never stops flashing.

The effect is quite similar if not identical to changing graphics modes in Windows system settings.  When the system settings  are altered there is usually a brief flash to black until the monitor comes back alive with the new settings.  It seems as if XP is constantly trying to change the graphics settings when on ‘default’, but stops doing that if the resolution and refresh rate are specified explicitly.

I’ll look into your suggestion tomorrow.

 

 

Same here, as posted last week... It's there for me since 12.06b3, and b4 didn't fix it 😕

Very annoying at times....