active Screen flashing on refresh

[leesline]

I own all the American regional modules as well as Global Base and Vector.  I've been trying for the last two weeks to get it all working together and while I've made a lot of progress, I still don't have a usable flight sim program. My current problem is that any time I do anything that causes the screen to refresh (e.g. open a menu item, change the weather, etc...) The screen starts flashing and I have no choice but to shut down FSX and restart.  This started occurring after I install northern and southern CA although I've done so many things in trying to fix my many issues that it's pretty much impossible to guess at which thing I've done that triggered this particular problem.

 

First, my environment:

3.4 gHz quad core i5 processor

8 gb RAM

4 gb NVidia GTX GPU

500 mb SSD drive

FSX Gold Edition

Only other 3rd party add-ons in use currently are My Traffic  pkg

and two Carnedo planes (King Air & Navajo)

 

My PC is a little long in the tooth, but has some horsepower and has always run FSX well in the past.

 

Things I've tried:

Refreshed, my terrain.cfg

Reshuffled  my scenery files as described in various forum post (see attached screen shots)

Run force migration

Updated my libraries

Uninstalled Vector (seems to cause problems for me, but haven't tried it since some of the other fixes...)

Stopped using Active Sky 2016

Tried days worth of tweaks to the scenery sliders

 

To be clear, I've come from things not working at all to where it runs smoothly and looks wonderful, but now it dies if I do anything that causes the screen to refresh, which pretty much makes it unusable.

 

Any help would be appreciated,

Ronald Phillips

recent order number: 5a237194a1838 (there are numerous others...)

 

[Stewart Hobson]

Welcome to the forums.  By any means, I am not a hardware expert, but my guess is that the fault lies with your video card.  I would be surprised if this an FSX problem or even an Orbx scenery problem.  What model video card and how old is it?

[leesline]

After looking again, it's a geForce card with 4 gb RAM.  It's about three years old.  What you say makes sense to me.  Think I'll try updating the driver for the card and then think about getting a new one.  Like I said in my post, computer is a little long in the tooth.  Was pretty high end when I built it three years ago, but getting dated...

 

Thanks for the response

[leesline]

just found the exact model of the card geForce GTX 770

[Stewart Hobson]

41 minutes ago, leesline said:

just found the exact model of the card geForce GTX 770

I still have my 770, but replaced it with a 1080FTW when I decided to go with P3Dv4.  The 770 should run FSX fine--I used mine for a couple of months.  But of course, in the course of using it, it's possible something happened to it.  Updating the driver is probably a good idea, IF, and I say if, Nvidia still has drivers for that card--it's not supported anymore, as best as I recall, but they might have some legacy drivers still at the website.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

interesting how when an upgrade is made, the thinking consigns the predecessor to ancient history

and also to inadequacy.

 

The 770 is still a very powerful graphics card and more than capable of running FSX.

For years, I had a 570 with 1.25 GB of RAM on it and that was more than capable too.

FSX doesn't need a hugely powerful GPU but it does need one that is not broken.

 

Before you even think of replacing your more than adequate card, I would suggest that you make absolutely

sure that the error does not lie with the software.

 

If it does come to upgrading and you plan to stay with FSX, you will see a far greater improvement if you upgrade

the CPU, in fact, if you upgrade from a 770, you might spend a great deal of money and see very little improvement.

Even then, if your i5 CPU is a K model, it will probably already overclock to 4 ghz

[Stewart Hobson]

By no means did I mean to imply the 770 was not adequate to run FSX.  In fact, I said it should be fine.  The 770, however, wasn't up to running P3Dv4 to my satisfaction.  As for the screen flashing problem, I would still suspect the gpu.  Perhaps there might be a way to eliminate it as the source of the problem?  I don't know--I'm not a hardware tech, by any means.

[leesline]

Thanks to both of you for your responses.  I updated the driver yesterday and it made no difference.  Over night I loaded in more Orbx modules just to see what would happen.  Put Vector back in and loaded on a couple more Regions (pnw and the Rockies).  Now, seems that after I fly for about ten minutes in any plane, fsx crashes.  Not the typical OOM crash, but the video freezes and a message comes up with detail saying there was an APPCRASH in fsx.exe. 

 

The thing is, I've been running this card with fsx and the same collection of add-on's, except for the new Orbx modules, with virtually no hiccups, literally for years.  Rarely had any problems other than occasional OOM's in certain regions of the scenery.  It wasn't until I started upgrading the Orbx mods that I had problems.  Seems like too big of a coincidence to think the GPU just suddenly died.  Really sad, love the look of the new scenery, but doesn't matter if I can't run it.  Maybe will upgrade my box and switch to the Lockheed FS, or maybe find a new hobby...  Shame to waste so much money on the Orbx modules though.

 

Once again, thanks for trying to help

[Doug Sawatzky]

Hi Ronald

 

I would try the following,

 

Go to your Users\Name\AppData\Roaming\Miicrosoft\FSX and delete the fsx.cfg,

Go to your Users\Name\AppData\Local\Miicrosoft\FSX and delete the entire Shaders folder,

 

Then start FSX and these will be rebuilt and see what happens.

 

Cheers

 

Doug

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

you could also try to investigate the nature of the "appcrash".

This will have been recorded in the Windows Event Viewer log

and may well indicate which module is causing the error.

This in turn may indicate the nature of the fault, whether it is

software or hardware based.

Until the exact nature of the problem is identified, speculation as to the cause

is of no value and is just a distraction.

[Larry_R]

On ‎12‎/‎17‎/‎2017 at 3:30 PM, leesline said:

The screen starts flashing and I have no choice but to shut down FSX and restart

Hello,

 

This is just a shot in the dark. If you are using a Norton product (eg NIS) and you notice flickering at other times, you might investigate Norton as the source. This has been a known problem for some time and apparently still is for some users. (For this and other reasons, I gave up on NIS some time ago.)

[leesline]

Thanks to all for responses.  Nick, checked my event log and it lists the faulting module as g3d.dll, shows exception code, 0x0000005 with offset 0x000ba79f if any of that means anything to would certainly be interested to hear.

 

Doug, will go ahead and try your two suggestions and will post if it makes a difference.  To Larry, thanks for the suggestion, but I don't run any Norton products on my box.

 

Thanks to everyone, at least you've given me some more things to try...

[Nick Cooper]

The g3d.dll error is as old as FSX itself and is usually cured by downloading and installing FSUIPC.

The unregistered (free) version is enough.

[leesline]

Yeah found that on Google after I posted last night and installed it.  Looks like it took care of the "crash to desktop", but still getting the "flashing death" if I do anything to refresh the screen like go the menu and come back.  Seems like that one is a tougher nut to crack...  Frustrating, to cure one thing only to be foiled by the next.  Been trying to get these modules working for close to two weeks now and pretty much out of ideas.  Getting close to throwing in the towel.

 

Been playing with this program since 1979 when it was FS1by Sub-Logic on an old TRS80 and have owned literally every version since then through Hercules graphics versions to CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA, all the flavors.  Hard to imagine giving it up, but getting too old for the frustration.  Shame because I really do love the look of this scenery.

[leesline]

Well, thought I'd finish out my tale of woe... Decided I really don't want to give up simming just yet, so bit the bullet and got P3D.  Was the right move.  Zero crashes.  All my add-ons either work or have versions available that work.  I did need to do an upgrade on my PC to get it to work all the time.  Found that in certain scenery areas with certain planes my frame rate would drop to unacceptable levels.  Was able to get away with adding a 1070 GPU and overclocking my existing Haswell CPU to 4.4 gHz.  Pretty close to perfect now. In the end, the whole thing makes me question whether its really accurate to say the Orbx libraries are compatible with the old FSX, but guess it might be possible to get a box pumped up enough to run them, so can't truly say they're not.  Once more thanks to those that tried to help in this thread!

 

Regards,

Ron