vyper883

That's exactly what I did. As an update to what I said earlier, I've overclocked my 2700K to 4.9GHz. I can take it to 5GHz, but it hangs in prime 95, and the temps climb really fast. But @ 4.9 I can run prime 95 with temps just peaking at 71 Celsius. Basically have not dropped any of my add-ons in yet, (three tweaks in the cfg and ENB series only) I'm just going through the FSX missions to put the 680 through it's paces. The heavy hitters are usually "Tokyo Executive Run" "Monsoon approach" and "Oil Rig Transport". Guess what? I don't see ANY perf issues with those missions. As far as vanilla FSX goes, you can't ask for anything more.

Hi guys:) Sorry for taking so long to actually get back to reporting on the 480 vs the 680 in my i7 920 rig. I was busy building a new i7 2700K system, along with win 7 tuning/tweaking/fresh FSX install. I am REALLY Pleased with the performance of the Sandy bridge, and I have not even overclocked yet! However I will leave that aside for now. Well, as I said I was not expecting a quantum leap in performance regarding 480 vs 680 EVGA superclocked in my now about-to-retire from FSX i7 920 system OC'ed @ 4.4Ghz. in a nutshell, I am happy with the 680. It does outperform the 480 slightly in heavy autogen/weather conditions. Even though I use the term "slightly", in the grand scheme of things, there is a very fine line between microstutters and smoothness. So "slightly" translated to what you are seeing on the screen is more like a rather "significant" increase in smoothness. As far as I'm concerned the 680 has the extra bit of smoothness and hosepower under load. As I tend to run unlimited FPS (and that WORKS for me) I experienced just a slight drop against the 480, in FPS maybe by 4-5 frames during scenarios where autogen and weather are not taxing the system. I have some baseline FSX FLT files that I use for consistency in the KSEA area. As far as I'm concerned, if you are in the market for a new card, or building a new system anyway, I see no reason NOT to get it. I can't speak for the 580, and Word Not Allowed has already covered it earlier in the thread. If 680 and 580 perform pretty much identical, then you could save a few bucks and go for the 580. I must have swapped the cards back and forth about four times, just to assure myself that I wasn't experiencing a placebo effect. The latest 301.24 beta drivers are unified, so technically there is no driver swap needed. However, if a given system has never seen a 680, the drivers must be re installed, when the new card is introduced into the system for the first time. After that, you can swap cards back and forth all day long. This makes for a fair apples to apples comparison, as the overall system, and drivers remain untouched. As always, your mileage may vary, as no two systems are ever alike. Now: I will briefly touch on the experience that I've had with my new Sandy Bridge system. All I can say is wow! This is a clean virgin OS/FSX Acceleration install. OS is on a WD Caviar Black 1.5Tb, FSX is on a WD Velociraptor 600Gb. I have only implemented three tweaks to the CFG. AM-14, HIGHMEMFIX, and UsePools=0. That's it. OS and FSX drives have been tuned/defragged as per NickN's guides as per usual. FSX settings are as per NickN as well but with more aggressive weather settings. For the first time ever in the five FSX rigs that I've built, I can run at a maximum cloud distance without a significant performance hit. On a side note, when you can complete the "Tokyo Executive Transport" mission, without being distracted by stutters and poor performance, then I say mission accomplished. <----------Did you see what I did there? So far I'm impressed, and as I said I have not even overclocked yet. Anyway, I will leave it at that, as I don't want to derail the thread. If anyone wants more details, feel free drop me a PM. Cheers.

I am well aware of that. I don't run SLI with FSX.

Short Answer: You are going to get better performance out of a TH2GO. I've been using one for three years. Read the comparison in the link below, and keep in mind that I have not experienced the TH2GO issues that he talks about. If you have one, make sure you update the firmware, as it fixes quite a few issues. http://www.wsgf.org/...reen-vs-blue-v2

I will report back late this evening for sure.

Much too early to be making assumptions about this card. If I recall correctly, when the Fermi 480 was released. Early adopters as myself were having issues with it. My 285 was outperforming it in FSX. Poor performance and crashes in both XP 64 AND Win 7 64. It took over three months for a decent driver release to run FSX without a hitch. You can thank Nick N for that as he "unofficially" worked closely with people he knows at Nvidia to smooth out the issues encountered with FSX and Fermi. As a reminder, the 580 is ALSO Fermi, and as such no serious problems were encountered with FSX during it's release, given that drivers had already matured for the Fermi architecture. So it's too early to come to a conclusion regarding Kepler without giving time for drivers to mature. Although, I don't see a huge revelation in FSX performance, there is no reason for Kepler not to at least be on par with a 580 pending device driver maturity. Some people who have compared the two, have already reported as such, and some have found degraded performance. I say wait for drivers..... We know that FSX is CPU hungry. Not to get off topic, but after three years of running a 920 @ 4ghz, I finally got around to tweaking the bios, and hit a wall at 4.4. I saw a VERY noticeable difference in performance/smoothness. Even though, I am now in the process of building a new FSX rig, flying the PMDG 737 NGX with my older i7 920/GTX/TH2GO@5040X1050/GTX 480, is finally a joy. Just some very few microstutters in the PMDG 737's VC. All the default jets are smooth as silk with a barely noticeable VC microstutter in heavy clouds and weather. My FSX settings are as per Nick N's recommendations- I'm sure most of you know them from the simforums NickN guides. I know a lot of us have dedicated FSX rigs, and if that's the only thing you are using it for, then stick with the 480/580 if that's what you have. Occasionally, I DO run other graphically intensive apps from time to time, so I don't want to be limited by older tech. I have a 680 superclocked, bought just yesterday, sitting in the box for my new S/B build. I may just throw it into my 920 rig tonight to see for myself what's what.

Kyle Bennett Couldn't have said it better in the article that JohnFromCO posted a link to here: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/04/23/intel_ivy_bridge_processor_ipc_overclocking_review/1 Specifically, this: " When it comes to overclocking Ivy Bridge, we are actually seeing results (at least so far) that are lagging behind current Sandy Bridge overclocks. It is not uncommon to have Sandy Bridge processors (2600K and 2500K SKUs) that hit 5GHz+ with rock solid stability. From my very narrow experience so far, I would suggest that 4.7GHz and 4.8GHz top end overclocks are going to be realistic for most users with top end sealed water cooling systems using Ivy Bridge. Getting to the magical 4.9GHz mark took us a lot of voltage and a lot of cooling. So just for a hypothetical look at this, if I can take my new Ivy Bridge up to 4.7GHz easily with good temps, and comparatively I can take my Sandy Bridge up to 4.9GHz with good temps, I have basically just negated my Ivy Bridge IPC gains."

You need to go back and read my post again. Particularly the first paragraph. I never said I was sure about anything regarding Nvidia's surround. I don't have a 680 yet, so I won't know how surround mode would handle FSX in fullscreen with a fourth monitor. It seems pretty logical that in windowed mode you should be able to undock windows and drag them to the fourth monitor.

Short answer yes, you will see a slight to moderate drop in performance, as an added device will draw CPU/ IRQ resources. EDIT: Additionally, as you are not running more than 2Gb of ram, and your OS is not 64bit, you are likely to run into OOM errors, with another videocard added to the mix.

In the case of the 680, when you are in surround mode (3+1 monitors) I don't think you can drag anything to the forth monitor, as it is not included in surround gaming mode. It might be possible if FSX is in windowed mode, but I don't know that for sure. From what I understand nvidia's surround mode will not allow a forth monitor into the mix, and it is only dedicated to desktop and other apps (email, browsing ect). In that regard a triplehead2go setup is far more flexible, and will allow another monitor on a second output of the videocard. FSX will see it and you can use it to drag instrumentation onto it. As far as the videocard is concerned, the TH2GO is just a single ultra wide monitor, and the" fourth" monitor is seen as a second monitor to the videocard and windows. For example, I run a 480 with a Matrox TH2GO digital. This allows me to use a fourth 3M touchscreen monitor, on the vid card's second output, where I drag my PMDG 737 NGX FMC, MFD, and ND DU's. And this is done in fullscreen FSX- not windowed. Now if you use Nvidia surround on your primary 680, and introduce a fourth monitor, with say a second video card be it MB/CPU based, or a dedicated card, then yes. You can use a fourth monitor on it for your instruments, in both fullscreen or windowed mode, I would think. I'm in the market for a 680 myself, and I'm really curious to see how surround performs compared to my TH2GO, with trying different monitor configurations. As far as the MB detecting the card, that may be the case as you said, but some M/B's have to be "told" which is the primary output, via the BIOS.

Every time a driver is updated, it will reset the AA Behavior flags. In NV Inspector at the FSX/P3D profile look under the AA section. Look at the line that says "Antialiasing-Behaviour Flags". Make sure it is set to "None".

I suppose if you wanted to, you could. Although performance would be mismatched. But it depends what you intend to do with the set up. If for instance you were planning on dragging gauges onto the second monitor via MOBO integrated GPU within CPU, It would work. Make sure you run FSX off the dedicated video card. Also, check the BIOS to make sure that the Video card is the primary video source.

The new architecture Intel CPU's now have built-in graphics. They are far better, than any motherboard integrated graphics solutions of the past, and can even perform satisfactory for some casual gaming at low/medium graphics settings of today's games. It is mostly for budget reasons, and to offer a consumer a reasonable performing machine on a budget. From a pure performance standpoint they won't do much good, for hard core gaming, or simming for that matter. The short answer, I would never consider it for FSX, or any flight sim. You are far better off, with a dedicated GPU solution. I don't know how long you've been out of the "scene" so-to-speak, but even with today's hardware, FSX can still lead to the quest for better performance. Albeit, things have gotten much better than they were 5 years ago. There is literally a wealth of info out there, and in this forum, for optimizing your OS, hardware, and FSX itself. What you will hear the most, is that FSX is heavily CPU bound. During FSX's development about 7 years ago, multi-core processors were not really anticipated, and as such FSX is not optimized properly in the concept of parallel processing, or hyperthreading. Developers were leaning on the premise that single-core processors would still be in the mainstream with their speeds increasing every year. That did not really happen, so the Aces Team released SP1 and subsequently SP2 to try to help FSX make better use of multiple cores. That is almost impossible, without FSX RTM being rewritten, as it has already been hardcoded into the software to NOT be multi-core optimized. There are some tweaks that can "kinda sorta" coax FSX to make better use of a multi-core environment, and for the most part FSX is totally acceptable within today's hardware offerings. I for one am quite happy running a Core i7 920 @ 4.00Ghz with an Nvidia GTX 480 which is now a system of over two years ago. On a personal note, never forget that FSX, like any sim, is trying to reproduce a big chunk of the globe on your screen at any given time. There is a lot going on. Autogen, other AI traffic, aircraft systems, special animations, ATC which is vectoring not only YOUR aircraft, but all the other AI aircraft in the vicinity in real time..... The list goes on and on. It's a wonder that FSX runs at all. MS's new offering Microsoft Flight, runs very well, but even it, can induce performance issues with all graphics settings to the MAX. And so far, FLIGHT has only Hawaii to render. Another example, is Laminar research' latest offering X-Plane 10. In a nutshell, it as well cannot be run with everything to the max. That's what happens when you are trying to faithfully to reproduce a living breathing world, with thousands of miles of detail radius around you. No other software game is required to do that. Using a FPS title as an example, the environment created "ends" somewhere close, but you can't see it. There is small map, but beyond that there is nothingness, but you are given an illusion of being in a vast area. Also, other than the map, the only calculations that are taking place are your playable character, and the AI enemies, and possibly any online opponents. literally nothing compared the the world that a simulation is trying reproduce. Sadly, the ACES team was dispatched over a year ago. There will be no SP3, or any further support, even though the game is still available for purchase. Even at it's age, it is still THE most complete flight simulation offering out there IMO. I know I took off on a long story here, but I hope you find some insight within it Robbie. Cheers.

Did you set the total resolution within the graphics section of FSX? If you didn't, then FSX will only use one monitor. If each of your monitor's native resolution is 1920 X1080, then you have to "tell" fsx to run at 5760 X1080. In the Graphics section of FSX' user interface menu, you should see a pulldown tab. Click on it and it should give you a list of available resolutions. Look for "5760 x1080 32". If it's not available, then you have not set up your display options properly within your card's control panel. EDIT: Sorry I didn't notice that you are using MS Flight. Pretty much the same applies, although MS Flight automatically detects the max resolution. What are you using for a video card/s? Are they matched?

Word Not Allowed, Just out of curiosity. Not to go off topic, but why do you have two instances of SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED in your .cfg? "SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED_10=1693458432" "SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED=1693458432"

IBTL....? Maybe? lolI expressed my constructive MS critisism, in an earlier thread. It was promptly locked. I AM a hardcore simmer. And yet I think FLIGHT is really fun. As such it would be nice to be able to play it without having to start all over every time I fire up the game. Hardly any answers from ms, and I've tried deleting the entire application data flight folder which pretains to FLIGHT as suggested by an official mod at the FLIGHT official site. Surely enough, the game recreated the folders and playerdata ect.I flew the first missions again, quit the game, waited, restarted, and there it was again....... "failed to read PlayerData/Career/Career1.bin.Few things:1) I do not believe it has anything to do with a previous install of the Beta. I was never part of the Beta testing community, and as such my PC has never seen a Beta FLIGHT install. And I HAVE the aformetioned career1.bin issue. Now there is a possibility that others MAY have the issue due to have been running the beta, but I digress.2) The Game IS officially supported on Win XP, even though some have said that XP is not supported. Anyone can verify this with a simple visit to the official FLIGHT website. I'm running XP 64bit, as this PC is my dedicated flightsim rig. FSX FS9 X-plane 9, and now Flight. Each Sim is it's own dedicated folder on an HDD that does not contain the OS. Others have reported the issue while running win 7 as well.3) There is one thing I have not tried yet. Uninstalling the game itself, and starting from scratch. I DON'T want to do that, as the game truly runs superb with everything almost maxed out! The chances of having a botched install IMHO are slim to none, but I WILL try regardless, and post back. I don't know when that will be, I may just hold out and see if a solution to the issue is found, either by MS or someone else perhaps. I'll wait another week to see.4) I am NOT here to bash FLIGHT in ANY way shape or form. Even as a harcore simmer, who IS at the early stages of building an A320 sim cockpit, I think FLIGHT is fun, inspiring and truly allows you to enjoy pure flight. I've purchased all the extra content, and waiting for Alaska. My critisism lies with a VERY poor support model that MS has implemented IMHO. No disrespect to anyone here- certainly not the Mods, but I feel as if I'm walking on eggshells at Avsim at times. Mods you could benefit from not holding such a tight grip on the reigns- Flight has grown on most of us, and the count is rising.And Finally, If I DO stumble across a solution, or workaround, I will be more than happy to report back, so others may benefit as well. Cheers. :)

That is ridiculous. Typical MS response. There are people who are running WIN7 with the same issue!I installed FLIGHT on a win xp 64bit OS, and the game runs superb. But I also have the issue with the failure to read PlayerDataXXXXXXXXXXXXXcareer1.bin and also career7.bin. I run FSX on this PC as well with a finely tuned core i7 920 D0 OC'd to 4ghz, and an optimized win XP 64bit OS.There is no way in hell that I'm going to believe that this can't be patched to address the issue. And as I said there are folks who are running win 7 with the SAME issue, who have posted on the xbox forums about it. It's not win XP specific. So, MS's solution is to install win 7 to play a game that already plays superbly on win XP? Really MS?

Email Sent!

Alan :) I love Win 7. I really do. But when it comes to FSX, XP 64 just Works. That's why I have a dual OS. I can keep with the times, and fly FSX problem-free. When they release SP1 for win 7 I'll give it a go again. Don't worry about changing drivers in the future. With this method it will ALWAYS work, on every driver. I think the key is in the deviceInfo.ini file, meaning that any subsequent driver will allow the 5040X1050, just by using the Matrox powerdesk wizard. And if for some reason it doesn't, use the same method and it will work every time. You only have to change the DeviceInfo.ini file ONCE, and you never have to do it again. In case you were wondering about the custom settings (front porch pixels, sync width pixels, total pixels ect) they are the EXACT settings that the Powerdesk would use, so it IS a true resolution. The only thing that the Powerdesk CANNOT do is account for the refresh rate,(only chooses 57Hz or 60Hz) on certain Nvidia drivers, and that's why we use the custom res alternative, in the Nvidia control panel with a refresh rate of 59.xxxHz. So if you want to change drivers Go for it Alan.

As far as the aircraft thumbnail glitch, it has to do with AA. If you disabe AA in either the Nvidia control panel, OR Nhanser this goes away. But who wants to run FSX TH2GO without AA? It's horrible! But that's what you get when you combine WIN 7 64, TH2GO, AND FSX. Are you getting the black screens as well? I went back to XP 64 and those problem dissappeared, HOWEVER, The fermi Nvidia driver causes a system exception error when you try to run FSX in XP. This is becoming a widespread problem, that does NOT occur in WIN 7. I removed my 480 for the time being, and running my 285 until the issue is resolved.TRIPLEHEAD:Scroll to the bottom where it says "5040x1050 ISSUES AND THE WORKAROUND" and follow my instructions. He failed to add some extra info. Follow my extra tips and it will work right off the bat:http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=31531

PingPongThere is NOTHING wrong with your 480, and it has nothing to do with your TH2GO. If you are running WIN XP 64bit, and your BSOD is a SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION, wait for another driver revision. After experiencing this myself, I have talked to 6 other people with the same issue with FSX in XP. The nvidia driver 197.41 for XP 64 seems to be borked. The Memory Dump, as well as the BSOD are hinting at the NV4 disp.dll. Use your 285 for now, with the 197.45 driver.As far as I know, and have tested, this is not an issue with win 7 64, however before you go off doing a win 7 install, you will run into other problems with win 7, FSX and a triplehead2go. My Sincere Apologies To Spiritflyer if I seem to be off Topic- Great Post BTW!

We're talking windows xp 64bit here. Not Win7 or Vista. There is no compatability mode in XP that you would want to try FSX with, since FSX was based and built on the XP kernel.

Thanks Sargesi, and Bob. I guess we'll have to hold out until nvidia refines their win XP 64 drivers. At least we know that the card itself is not likely at fault. Cheers! :)

Confirmed! XP 64 clean install TWICE! System service exception with FSX and 480! and yes it has no issues in win 7. Xp has been set up as per Nicks guides to the letter, and I'm by no means new at it. I've probably set up 8 maybe 9 systems in the last two years for FSX. So yes it's looking like a driver issue- my memory dump is hinting to the NV4 disp.dll. I had to revert to my trusty GTX 285 for the time being, and I was VERY close to returning the 480- seems like I'll be patient, and wait for a driver, since reports are starting to trickle in.There is also a thread in the nvidia forums regarding this issue HERE:http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=166258I posted a reply ther as well, so we can get the ball rolling on a decent driver revision for XP Pro 64bit. Yes win 7 has no such issue, but I prefer XP for FSX, as I use a multi monitor setup with a th2go. Win 7 has issues with FSX with three monitors, (black screens-spikes) which don't reveal themselves on a single monitor. C'mon chime in fellas. anyone else?