Warchild

I know I'm necro-ing and I apologize,but i felt theres a few things that were left unsaid. 1. no matter how you slice it, the LES Saab 340A is an absolute joy to fly. Its become my favorite plane of all time, even topping my own aircraft which i worked on. I generally fly dead reckoning by the seat of my pants with only the garmin to give me a clue as to where i am.. Its a fantastic aircraft.. 2. The MU-2 is another incredible little plane. It had a rough beginning in life because the horizontal stabilizer was designed upside down, and a lot of pilots were killed because of that. The FAA now requires special training and certification for this plane, and those same qualities are modeled into the xp version. It takes a bit of mastering, but once you do, its fantastic and fun, having the handling characteristics of a WWII fighter ( a real one, not an fsx one ).. Pam

It might.. i dont ever set those values.. Communication being my weakest point, i guess i messed up. I assign fsx 3 gigs in my head. theres 8 on the machine so video, system and whatever are all running somewhere in that extra five gigs that fsx doesnt have assigned in my head. But if fsx is only using 1.7 gig then theres still 1.3 gig left for it to access, whioe everything else is still up in that untouched 5 gig somewhere.. this last flight, fsx used upwards of 2.43 gigs. The beauty of SLI and 520 extra processing cores and cuda.Now my problem is, I cant make the plane fail when i need it too.. I've been trying to collect data for Ryan and the team here to use, but if i cant make it fail, theres no data.. I'm useless..

they also make use of Simconnect, And therein lay the one suspect that keeps me from saying its a memory problem. But yeah. i completely spaced that you could just turn off auto load on the dlls. All of my test flights are done between ksfo and klax. Both are default scenery on my machine so i can eliminate anything that isnt the airplane or the files pertaining to the airplane.. Even if it were a memory problem, its not me running out of memory. I have 8 gigs which i monitor very closely during testing. The most memory that fsx has ever accessed is 1.75 gigs, and yes, that was with the ngx, but that still leaves 1.25 gigabytes free for fsx to use. Thats why I'm looking at other things. Bad memory management conflicting dll's.. the whole spectrum. Perhaps one of those other dlls leaves a piece of itself behind in memory when its unloaded and when the ngx goes to write to that memory address, theres a collision. The only way to test that is to start fsx with nothing being loaded except the ngx and then try to reproduce the problem. My guess is that it wont. i very highly suspect poorly written dlls that dont get cleared from memory when they are no longer needed or simconnect misbehaving which it is notorious for doing.. Of course, thats a guess..

That was my initial summation as well, till i flew the 900 with normal textures and simply by removing a dll file from dll.xml was able to circumvent the freezing. Besides, in FSX its not so much a matter of the size of the image or the number of poly's it has to cover, but rather the number of textures used to cover any given set of items.

I used photoshop. Is it reversible?? not really. but at 2048 x 2048 you wont really notice a difference in high definition. Still the bottom line truth is, you can always take pixels away from a picture, but you can never put them back.. Its best to experiment on a texture thats unimportant to you or that you can easily replace such as i did..

I tend to agree with you, however if i may be obtuse, there HAS to be some commonality between all of us experiencing the freezes. if there werent, we wouldnt have them. its just a matter of ferreting out what that commonality is.. However, i dont believe its hardware related.because i'm a developer myself, i've got the SDK and all its DLLs installed, I also have other addons such as LeonardoSH's Mad Dog and LVLD's 767 installed. i remove LeonardoSH's dll and the PMDG flies fine, the LVLD doesnt seem to effect anything.. Still i know others dont have the mad dog installed. But there has to be a commonality there somewhere..

In one test, i was able to cure the freezes by reducing the size of the textures, and in a second test i got rid of it by removing a dll from another addon from dll.xml.. there is some precedent that theres more of a connection than memory being involved there, but i dont truly have a real clue. If it continues for you, simply remove a DLL from DLL.xml and try again..Pam

Thank you :) Thats really kind of you to say. I use photoshop and simply choose the font and the font color I want to use for the tail number. The TWA insignia's ( globe, Name, Tail logo ) I have as seperate files that i simply copy and paste from in order to maintain continuity across our fleet.Yes, I know. TWA never flew 737's.. I dont care though. As much as I honor TWA's history, they closed their doors in 2001. We at TWVA still fly all those routes, but we are also moving towards the future, adapting new routes, new planes, new attitudes :).. Slowly :;.. @Dskaviator. Thank you.. I'm just waiting on the paintkit to finish it up., but i'll promise you, one Vet to another, when its finished, you'll have a copy.. @moderators.. No disrespect meant, but dont you think thats kind of a silly rule.. Now you have an entire thread that doesnt make any sense at all...

I've always had problems with configuring ENB series, and have had terrible experiences with it.. Sadly, I have to take ownership of screwing it up.. i'm just not very good at those things..

Hers a few I've taken over the last couple days of flight testing.. Not as pretty as the ones above, but i'm still happy with them..

With the reduction of the textures from 4096x4096 to 2048x2048 I no longer have the freezes. And your right, using only one gpu does improve my performance, but i develop flight models for several companies and need the sli and multi core capabilities for crunching numbers. That meant finding a better solution than just tossing a 200 dollar video card out the window.. And I think PMDG is onto something there.. One small thing worked for me, it may just work for others as well..Pam

ok, i've gotten a second successful test flight in after lowering the size of the texture files. I even went so far as to change my approach profile, my instrument package and more while i was in flight. The plane auto-landed perfectly on LAX 25r. I'm flying another test from lisbon to paris in part to change the location ( and therefore demands on the system ) and caztch up with what i owe my Pilots at TWVA.. I suspect however that there will be no problems..

Second successful test flight completed.. The advantage of having over three gigs of ram while running FSX is that the system, your other programs and all the background processes will run in the memory not being used by FSX. This frees up more ram for FSX to use, but its still limited to 3 gigs. Those of us with massively powerful graphics setups are going to end up with all that video ram re-mapped to main memory for fsx, because fsx doesnt use a whole lot of graphics processing. Its all CPU based. So I've got two GTX-260s in sli mode with 875 megs ram each. all that memory gets remapped into that itty bitty 3 gigs that fsx can access.. and therein lay the root of these freezes.If you dont believe me, then please ask microsoft.lowering your in game graphics overhead, will help eliminate the freezes..

I'm saying that PMDG has built an aircraft that runs fine in a 32 bit environment where there isnt a lot of graphics overhead that needs to be remapped to main memory.. Thats what PMDG themselves are saying.. I also agree that one success out of 32 tests is not conclusive by any stretch of the imagination. However, it does validate the continuance of testing instead of just chalking the plane up to a 70 dollar waste of money. However, I am very optimistic about the success of further tests, and optimism isnt my normal gig.

I'm running FSX on a quad core q6600 with 8 gigs of ram, twin video cards in sli mode, and a load of other niceties.. It freezes every time on me.. Or, did at least.. The problem is not the machine, but the FSX 32 bit architecture. It can only access 3 gigs of ram, and it cant swap out for other ram that you may have as overhead. It also doesnt make real good use of your video cards. its mostly CPU driven. So, if like mine, your FSX is at any given time using over a gig and a half of ram, youve already used up half of whats available too it. Since it doesnt make any real use of the GPUs capabilities, all those textures are also loaded into its available ram. now youve got even less, and those textures are each 4096x4096 pixels in size. you animate them ( as in do a flight ) and now youve got two or three frames loaded into the buffers, or up to three sets of textures loaded into memory. Add in the floating point calculations that this bird needs to be as real as it is, and your talking some majorly serious usage of memory.. And thats where its suspected the freezes come from..I resized one of my textures to 2048x2048 and the last test flight i took, had zero problems. PS.. I'm running 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate. I could put 64 gigs of ram in this machine if i wanted, and the end result would still be that FSX freezes..