Is FSX inherently unstable

[Speedbird 11 2]

I have found FS X to be the most reliable and best version, having started with FS 98.

 

The occasional problem has always been traced back to add-ons, including some that receive high praise from many people. I now work on the basis that less is more, so run FS X with minimal add-ons of proven stability.

 

Michael

[6FingerSays 99]

If you all who report that fsx is 'unstable', than are you getting CTD errors? If so, just post your errors in the CTD forum, and get your problem solved!

[LHookins 3,109]

If you all who report that fsx is 'unstable', than are you getting CTD errors? If so, just post your errors in the CTD forum, and get your problem solved!

 

After the first hundred or so, it gets tiresome. We research the heck out of a specific error and find out that no one has ever found a fix for it. Eventually the OP just stops responding.

 

Hook

[BilboBaggins 82]

Although it is my primary simulation, I generally think FSX is a piece of junk, and I always have. Here is a prime example why: I was getting stellar performance out of an old Nvidia driver, 2.6whatever. Took me months, maybe years to get it running that good, and I vowed I would never change a thing! (yeah right). Then I bought DCS, and with the greatest reluctance, decided the time had come to finally move up to the latest. My performance in DCS is much better with the newest driver than it was on the old--excellent actually. 3 weeks later I decided to get the Dodosim 206, and had a blast learning to fly that. Performance seemed fine. Now, within the last couple of days, I've gone back to the NGX, and much to my chagrin, my standard performance was off by at least 30%. We're talking in the fps teens, and a total disaster in the clouds. I double checked my settings in Nvidia Inspector, and everything was exactly as it had been before. Quite annoyed now, I reloaded the old driver (just to check), and verified it was the driver. Well, I'm back to 310.90 because I NEED it for other applications, but now I'm also back to performance-tweaking 101 with FSX, reading the forums, trying this, trying that. Total trial and error. I hate it, every stinking minute of it!

 

So this is an example of why I think FSX needs to be replaced by something better soon. Stuff like this is so frustrating, I'm actually thinking about cutting my losses and abandoning it altogther. I won't, but the second something better comes along, FSX will be yesterday's tuna :t0103: After this year, and the good addons I know are coming, I think I would rather rip my eyeballs out of my sockets than keep running this FSX rat race, of always having to waste an entire evening getting things put back together again, or much much worse, making those painful decisions to upgrade the hardware you just spent lots of money on less than a year ago.

 

So to the original question of whether FSX is "unstable", well it didn't work well on the hardware that existed when it was released, and the pace of addons pushing it to its limits has ensured that I (just speaking for myself) always feel like I'm lagging behind the power curve, one driver/addon/tweak away from screwing the whole thing up. God help me if I ever have to do a re-install from scratch--it would be like trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

 

Just had to vent my frustration at the cursed FSX!

 

I understand your frustration, but for this very reason I have engaged in six long YEARS of aggressive self-discipline with regard to spending money on new computer hardware.

 

The reality is, for me at least, that FSX remains eminently functional even on my "ancient" (2006, back in the Paleocene Era.....) Core2Duo/Nvidia 9800GX2 PC with 2GB of RAM running Win XPSP3.

 

And I can even set a lot of scenery settings to near-max, knowing which ones (bloom, shadows, cars, etc.) produce big performance hits, and knowing when autogen scenery matters more for my enjoyment, and when max complexity does.

 

The only thing "wrong" I think Aces Studio did was not develop in/for a 64-bit environment, in parallel with their 32-bit support.

 

It's not trivial to convert from 32-bit to 64-bit development, even for experts; there are/were huge headaches, for instance, in the music software world making that transition over the past few years (lots of compatibility with hardware/peripherals/devices issues along with everything else).

 

Why "wrong"? Simply because of addressable memory. Surely, if they were providing the options for autogen and scenery complexity, as well as a relatively open environment for future development, they could have also anticipated the need to go beyond 4GB RAM and 1GB video RAM (or even 2GB)? OTOH maybe there was no way to anticipate the likely hardware architecture support required for all that. At least they went to some multi-threading support.

 

But the big thing for most of us is, the longer you use FSX, the more you understand it, despite the frustration, the more control you have over how it does what it's doing. You have to adapt to the constraints it presents, instead of arguing with them and screaming.

 

I'm even able to get the PMDG 737 NGX running, under certain conditions (lots of reduction in scenery, but its a systems/cockpit/procedures simulator, eh? not eye-candy!) on my ancient rig. And/or I can choose places in the world I know the environment is not going to kill performance if I push settings higher. (KSEA flying across Rainier in PMDG 737NGX on a stormy day with huge, billowing clouds.... well I think that will bring almost any system to its knees, if you're rapidly flipping between inside VC and outside Spot etc. views.... for example. Good way to get Salvador Dali spikes and a nice, sharp CTD! <G>)

[Jim Young 2,356]

Maybe there's a tweak for it somewhere in fsx.cfg:

 

[Magic]

ALLOW_CTDS=False

GAIN_30_EXTRA_FPS=True

LOAD_SCENERY_IN_NON_CORPOREAL_TIME=True

BLIND_TRAFFIC=False

 

Very good Steve! Finally the 'magic bullet' for all issues with FSX! :lol:

 

Best regards,

Jim

[Noel 4,561]

But then, you're right, back to FSX, with 20 to 30 fps on a sunny day, and 18 in the clouds....

 

OMG, that sucks wind! I'm on 4.5y/o hardware and I claim honestly the same criteria. Why bother upgrading?

 

Pathetic! OK, not really, just telling. I think it's what I was thinking before: as soon as people upgrade to the best possible hardware available, overclock it until it begins to smoke and the brown-outs commence, they're right there bringing in more and more eye candy (& a few other bits of non-eye candy overhead) until they're are right back to where they started. The main conclusion I can make from this is: eye candy matters...a lot!

[OzWhitey 3,353]

 

XP 32bit, no addons, no overclocking, after SP2 it crashed every third flight.

 

Some people don't have the problem and believe that it has to be what the user did if he's having problems. People who never had a crash don't research several years worth of crash reports, so they don't know just how bad it can get.

 

As one user put it, after trying every possible combination of fixes, "The only thing common to all these crashes is FSX."

 

Hook

 

From this thread, i note more crash comments with sp2 than accel. I have been using acceleration only recently, always as a clean install on its own hdd. As mentioned, i 've gone from unhappy to happy with stability.

 

The other thing is hardware - it seems those with the newer stuff are happier.

 

So i think you can get fsx stable, image your hdds - and then carefully add just the essential addons, watching for changes in stability.

 

I personally haven't found it necessary to do the full 'nick n' (very complex) install routine.

 

 

[LHookins 3,109]

From this thread, i note more crash comments with sp2 than accel.

 

Thanks Rob. In all the research I did, I couldn't get a definitive answer to that. When problems start again, I'll probably try Acceleration first.

 

One thing I do remember reading a few times was that Acceleration doesn't contain everything it needs from SP2, and people were recommending installing SP2, uninstalling it, then installing Acceleration. What's the current thought on that?

 

then carefully add just the essential addons,

 

I've only got few aircraft, no scenery. I've got other aircraft that I've modified, and one airport. I can always install aircraft and such as I want to use them. I've got some utility programs like Active Sky and CumulusX, and FSUIPC. I don't generally run CumulusX, and have gotten crashes without AS2012 running.

 

Right now, it's stable, and I'm not touchin' a thing! I'm still getting an occasional oddity, but whatever it is, it's not crashing FSX. The symptoms still point to FSX mucking around in memory it doesn't own, or at least pointing to the wrong place in memory it does. I wish I could blame it on hardware instability, but I had the same problems on my older computer.

 

Thanks for your help.

 

Hook

[tf51d 284]

Thanks Rob. In all the research I did, I couldn't get a definitive answer to that. When problems start again, I'll probably try Acceleration first.

 

One thing I do remember reading a few times was that Acceleration doesn't contain everything it needs from SP2, and people were recommending installing SP2, uninstalling it, then installing Acceleration. What's the current thought on that?

 

 

 

I've only got few aircraft, no scenery. I've got other aircraft that I've modified, and one airport. I can always install aircraft and such as I want to use them. I've got some utility programs like Active Sky and CumulusX, and FSUIPC. I don't generally run CumulusX, and have gotten crashes without AS2012 running.

 

Right now, it's stable, and I'm not touchin' a thing! I'm still getting an occasional oddity, but whatever it is, it's not crashing FSX. The symptoms still point to FSX mucking around in memory it doesn't own, or at least pointing to the wrong place in memory it does. I wish I could blame it on hardware instability, but I had the same problems on my older computer.

 

Thanks for your help.

 

Hook

 

Do you have the NGX? Does most of your memory issues happen when you fly it? The only CTD/OOM problems I have is when I fly the NGX, usually at the end of the flight on approach. This is because PMDG make it so detailed it uses almost all your available Virtual Address Space (VAS). After that it doesn't take much to push FSX over the limit. For me I solved it by setting my upfront DLL's to Manual load. I only then load the DLL's for the addons I'm using for the flight. (There's no need to load CS, Feelthere DLL's if I'm flying the NGX!) This is especially important, since VAS has to be contiguous. Clearing VAS up front, make larger amounts available at the later portion of the session. This is why the great many OOM errors happen on approach or just after landing, especially at addon airports. As it has to load the detailed 3 d objects of the airport/ground AI. Even though it may appear there may be enough VAS to handle it, it may not have a large enough contiguous gap to fit what is needed, causing the OOM. Since doing this I can now fly the NGX to any airport I own, without problems, and haven' had a OOM since. To do this add the following line to each optional sections of the dll.xml file. (These are usually the airplane addon dll's) Leave the entries for the dll's you want to use on all your flights alone. (Like utilities, llike FSUIPC). When you start FSX, it will then ask you if you want to load each dll, only say yes to the ones you are using.

 

<ManualLoad>True</ManualLoad>

[LHookins 3,109]

Do you have the NGX?

 

No.

 

I fly a modified stock Grumman Goose, modified Carenado C337, Dodosim 206, slightly modified DG808S stock sailplane, The DiscusX sailplane, SeaRey from Discover Arabia, slightly modified stock DC-3, and the A2A Cub. When the crashes stopped, I was flying the DC-3. Since then I've gotten the A2A B377. No scenery except a single modified airport, my home field. I've gotten crashes in everything but the DC-3, and the A2A Cub and B377, both of which were purchased after the crashes stopped in November.

 

When I noticed the crashes stopped, I'd changed my default flight to the DC-3 at Yakutat Alaska to do some weather tests. I can still fly from my home airfield and haven't had a crash doing so in many flights. Previously my default flight was most of the above aircraft at my home airfield.

 

Some possible culprits: the modified airport may be messed up. The default flight at my home airport always loads the same AI traffic no matter what plane I'm flying, and one of them may be messed up. Various settings don't have any effect. The weather got cooler in November, so that may have an effect, but last winter the crashes were there in full force.

 

Something that seemed to contribute to the instability was Windows updates. I've stopped doing that. I could fly with crashes, the crashes would get less and less frequent, then after an update would go back to normal immediately.

 

As I mentioned above, some odd things still happen, but FSX hasn't crashed.

 

Hook