My experience with FSX Acceleration

[Guest The Wizard of Oz]

(Be prepared for a long dairy

[klemay 0]

Woz,Thanks for the post, you are not alone when it comes to the new Acceleration and the CTDs in Full Screen Mode. If you do a few searches here and in the Hardware support area, you'll see that most of us folks with the NVidia based graphics cards, and more specific 79XX cards, are having these issues.I am having NO LUCK at all in using Acceleration due to trying to access the menu in Full Screen Mode; either by mouse or key strokes. I can't even get to Windowed mode by Alt-Enter...since the Alt key runs the menu....CTD every time!I've tried numerous Drivers; no luck what so ever; except for the 169.XX betas that are out there.My only thing to do now is un-install Acceleration, and wait for SP2 to go public to see what, if anything that changes.Good luck to us all.....hmm, ATI cards are looking more and more attractive....

[slashed2 53]

Good, solid, honest post. Hopefully, this is a a problem with the driver that Acceleration SP2 or DX10 updates happened to uncover, if not, I'm starting to lean towards Aces maybe shooting out a hotfix or something. I don't happen to have this issue personally on my nvidia card but when I read an honest evaluation like this I hope there's a solution soon.For the F-18, I think someone recently released a fix that eliminates that problem.

[Illegitimi non carborundum 4]

Hi Guys On the other side of the coin.I installed Acceleration/SP2 (first removed FS9 planes ported into FSX using Addit Pro.) I defragged the dedicated FSX drive before running the upgraded install for the first time. I have had no issues, no real increase in fps but no decrease either. I use a GeForce 7950GT 512Mb Ram using the DNA-Force_3.6.9424 modified drivers. Smoke and Mirrors? Maybe- but no issues either!!Peter Hayes

[Reset XPDR 1,271]

I know that ACES have said that there are no further FSX updates beyond SP2, but surely this menu CTD bug is severe and widespread enough for them to have a serious rethink of this stance. Heck, if they don't want to call the fix SP2a, at the very least make it an MS hotfix.Gary

[victorwest2 0]

>(Be prepared for a long dairy

[rgerdes 4]

Hi, FWIW I'm running an XFX 7950 GX2 using the Tweakforce XG163.71 XP Final WHQL drivers and so far no problems at all after installing Acceleration .I'm running an AMD FX-55 on a DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI-DR motherboard with 2g of corsair duel channel memory.Cheers, Bob

[Guest JimC1702]

My copy of Acceleration is still sitting here unopened. I'm afraid of messing up a running FSX. I uninstalled and re-installed FSX and all my add-ons for SP1, I really don't want to do it again.Jim

[tohughes76 0]

Mine sat on the desk for about a week before installing it, just daring me to try. I did just what you did for SP1...a clean wipe then reinstall everything. Defrag at each step, driver cleaning, and registry checking. Checked all the latest posts for tips that promised success. First run looked very promising in DX9 mode. Everything ran really well, less microstutters than I had previously experienced. Flying around Seattle with fairly high settings stayed around 15fps, and much better everywhere else. The thing I noticed most is that even at 15fps, without stutters it is quite flyable. So much so that I now run locked at 20 instead of 30 as it provides a much more consistent experience. I also noticed that the tiles around the aircraft loaded much more efficiently. Even the UTX roads which seemed to never sharpen up in SP1 were working well. Looks like the TBM and SWTO tweaks in combination with the new nhancer controlling the AA and AF were doing the trick in SP2. I could hardly wait to check that DX10 box and finally see what the 8800GTX was capable of...Ugh. When I first restarted FSX in DX10 mode it was awful. Jaggies, blurries and rotten frame rates. Exactly what I had read about on the forums that kept me from installing Accleration right away. How could the DX9 be so much better and DX10 be such a disappointment? So I went back and enjoyed the success of DX9 for a day or two before coming back to try my hand at DX10 again. I decided to try undoing the settings in nhancer that provided the great performance in DX9 and Voila! I set AA and AF for application controlled, then enabled them in the settings in FSX...DX10 was now running strong. 20 fps solid around Seattle so long as I kept the AI traffic at reasonable settings. Textures are razor sharp. Water is now up to mid 2x and bloom is on. The bloom is much different than in DX9, much less star like in appearance and more of a glow or glare. All in all a lot of improvement over SP1...it was worth all of the effort of a clean install in my case.Of course, there are problems that are well documented here. The cockpit shadows are jagged and the taxiway and runway textures tend to flash. I think that these are definitely fixable issues with a little cooperation between ACES and nvidia on the next round of drivers. I am keeping my fingers crossed that as the drivers mature the performance can get even better. Moral of the story is if you have the software in your hands and avoided the install, it is worth a try. Just be prepared to do some tweaking. The hardest part is that the tweaks that work can only be discovered on your own system by you.

[n4gix 4,947]

>I know that ACES have said that there are no further FSX>updates beyond SP2, but surely this menu CTD bug is severe and>widespread enough for them to have a serious rethink of this>stance. Heck, if they don't want to call the fix SP2a, at the>very least make it an MS hotfix.All of the evidence to date points to a problem with nVidia's driver. Why would ACES be responsible for fixing nVidia's problem(s)? :-eek

[tfm 169]

My experience of the Accel Pack has been (1) an improvement for DX9 but (2) a real mess under DX10. My experience seems to be pretty typical.I do not agree that MS has no responsibility for the problems reported on this and other forums:1) Phil Taylor, with characteristic good grace, has listed on his blog a number of known errors in the Accel Pack - including the astonishing admission that parts of it, when compiled, mistakenly borrowed data from the pre-SP1 version of FSX, thus ruining VFR flight over London. 2) In my own experience, there are other problems with DX10 which have nothing to do with Nvidia's drivers. In particular, DX10 stopped my 2nd monitor working just by making un-wanted (and so far as I can see, unnecessary) changes to the graphics card sections in the CFG file. These problems persisted even after a complete re-install under a fresh Vista installation on a clean partition. It took ages to track the problem down to the CFG file; I only knew to look there at all because, unlike many customers, I have haunted the forums; and eventually I gave up trying to find a long-term solution because of all the other problems, including problems which might well be the fault of Nvidia's drivers such as the flashing runways and the failure to deliver increased framerates.3) In any event - and I am sorry to say this - if there are problems with Nvidia's drivers, MS must have known about them prior to releasing Accel Pack. Yet, prior to release, MS did not even hint that the DX10 "preview" will not work properly on Nvidia cards - presumably, the largest part of the DX10 market - unless and until Nvidia gets round to releasing fresh drivers. I do not like the "bashing" that goes on in these forums and I am certainly not "bashing" MS. I do not doubt that releasing products of this complexity is beset with difficulties at every turn; and, up to a point, I suppose we sign up for this when we use complex software. But it seems to me that Accel Pack is not merely disappointing and tricky to use. It is bedevilled by enough mistakes on the part of MS - even if not all of them are entirely of its own making - to amount to a CLEAR CASE for a further patch. Hopefully this can be done by something as simple as tweaking the forthcoming SP2. Tim

[Guest The Wizard of Oz]

Been away so have not had a chance to respond.The CTD error signature if I say try for example to access the Options -> Settings -> Display is:AppName:fx.exe AppVer: 10.0.61637.0 AppStamp: 46fadb14ModName: d3d9.dll ModVer: 5.3.2600.2180 Modstamp;41109693FDebug:0 Offset: 000a59b2Exception InformationCode: 0xc0000005 Flags: 0x00000000Record: 0x0(16 of them) Address: 0x000000004fe759b2Re WOZ

[Guest deadly]

> All of the evidence to date points to a problem with nVidia's driver..What "evidence" are you talking about?I don't see any "evidence".I do see other games running perfectly using this same driver. So how is it causing crashes in FSX?I see a cop out as the only reason here and the real reason being it is either too difficult and or too time consuming to fix.In true train simulator style, the FSX project has really gone off the rails and crashed in the dam.All the promises about DX10 and it running better and faster were just smoke screens. And you were one spreading these assertions!

[Mace 1,902]

There is no point in you being so confrontational in all of these threads.I don't see the point?? What's it accomplish?RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

[Guest The Wizard of Oz]

Yes I agree, But Mr Lemmings style and choice of emotion icons certainly encourages this sort of reply sometimes. Bill, with your apparent ecclesiastical background perhaps a more forgiving and temperance approach might be better?. I agree its unfair to put all the blame onto Nvidia when clearly FS9, FSX, FSX SP1 and other graphical software works fine. I think both ACES and Nvidia, in the words of Gene Kranz, should be "working the problem" and that appears to be happening I hope at present.Re WOZ