crn

Hi, I set up and saved a short flight from Vancouver to Portland using the settings recommended by PMDG. I've flown this flight quite a few times using as many different settings as I can think of. Trackir and Active Sky were also loaded. The flight plan uses SEA as one of the way-points so I expected low frame rates in that area. Sure enough, FSX would have a problem and stop working most of the time approaching Seattle. If it didn't it failed approaching Portland. I tried disabling all Orbx scenery but North America - didn't make any difference. To cut a long story short, I finally left all the settings on high and turned "auto-gen" to zero. After that every flight has been perfect. Of course you don't miss "auto-gen" at 30000ft - the only downside is that you don't see so many houses in the last few minutes of the flight. CN

Hi Ethan,Unfortunately returning it won't solve the problem. They are all the same. There are lots of posts about it in the forums. I discovered this when my friend bought one. He finds it very difficult to control precisely in the pitch mode because it sticks. I did see a post by a German engineer that might be helpful. He said he pulled it apart and that there is a collar that the shaft goes through that binds and causes the problem. He split the collar so that the shaft moves freely. Of course, if you tried that mod and it went wrong you would be worse off than before.Clive Norman

Sorry what I wrote seems to have disappeared into the ether. :-)After installing Vashon Island I found that Seattle airport was corrupted - roads going under the runway and trenches here and there.It was caused by me not installing the latest library files immediately after installing Vashon.OK there was no computer crash but maybe there is some remote connection.I had to restore an image taken before the Vashon install to fix it.CheersClive Norman

I had the same problem and contacted Microsoft. I watched what they did over a remote connection. They edited the registry and I noticed a brief reference to "demo". Maybe that was the FSX demo I downloaded years ago and maybe that was stopping Acceleration from activating. Anyway they fixed it in no time and after all you are entitled to their help. I was quite impressed since I live in New Zealand and the guy that fixed it was in Malaysia.Clive N

I position the ASA screen on a second CRT monitor. It was correctly centred at first but then it started loading with the top part off screen. Eventually I discovered that the monitor had reverted to a refresh rate of 60Hz. After resetting the refresh rate to 75Hz the ASA screen was became properly positioned.I just mention this in case anyone else has experienced the same problem.CRN

I had this problem after installing the latest Nvidia driver (91.31)I discovered that is something to do with application profiles and Flightsim 2004 in particular.If I entered any antialiasing in the fs9 profile then I had the black screen. On the other hand if I entered AA x8S in the global settings and set the profile to global then the black preview problem disappeared.Since I don't use any other profile but fs9 setting everything up as global and the fs9 profile to global has cured the problem for me.Clive

Chuck,Thanks for the very detailed advice. I'm using the new Nvidia control panel. Some of the settings you are using worked on my set up and some didn't. I guess Gamma AA and Transparency AA are not supported on the 6600 GT.If I set AA x4 in the Flight sim 2004 profile the black preview pane appears but if AA x4 is set in global and global AA is set in the fs9 profile then no black pane.I think tweaking these settings for me should be more accurately called fiddling because honestly I haven't a clue what most of them do. :-)Conformant Texture Clamp: I bet that one would stump most flight simmers. :-)But having said that fs9 is running pretty well now - just a bit of shimmering confined to small areas. Frame rates are good and the scenery looks great.Thanks again for all your help.Clive

RhettYes that was my understanding too that AA should be set in the driver but with the latest driver (91.31) it's not possible. Any setting other than "application controlled" produces the black preview pane. Maybe I will set it in the driver anyway and trade-off the convenience of the preview window for better AA.My card is a Geforce 6600 GT. I've had a look at the Nvidia Forceware forum and there are endless problems with Nvidia drivers. Some much worse than the problem I had so I guess I must count myself lucky.Thanks for your replyClive

Chuck thank you very much!You were dead right. I had installed a new driver before the AMD utility.I can only get the preview pane to show when AA is set to application controlled.Without your help I would never have guessed that that was the problem.Thanks again,Clive

Uninstalling the AMD utility doesn't cure the problem. I can select and change any of the aircraft in FS9 in the usual way but none of them are displayed in the bottom pane.They load and you can fly them but you can't see them as you select them.

I've just installed the recently released "AMD dual core optimiser". Task Manager indicates that sometimes the two cores are under load while fs9 is running. Fs9 runs fine and I can't say I've noticed any change in performance one way or another.The problem I have is that the window that displays the aircraft you choose to fly doesn't! It remains black all the time.I'm picking this one will be hard to fix apart from uninstalling the optimiser.Anyone have any ideas?Thanks