Microsoft Flight Simulator and GE Force 6800GS

[jimmyj68]

I'm on my way to bed so I won't respond to you tonight but here is the issue.

I've just upgraded to a dual core 830D pentium and a 6800GS EVGA video card and the requisite DDR2 memory on a D945PSN motherboard. I ran flight simulaztor at 1280 on my old system with a vanilla 6800 VGA card and a 3.2 gig hot pentium. Now with the new setup, the game plays and looks fabulous on the ground but once in the iar, the background land and water scenery become triangulated, land and water masses shift and skip places with a lake for example appearng at the end of a runway as I fly over and then suddenly switching to the correct aspect. Oh - there is one thing that happens again with bacground scenery and landscape while on the ground - grassy areas along taxiways will suddenly switch from green to a blotchy brown and then after a time switch back again as you taxi toward the runway.

Do I need to RMA my new card or is this just flight simulator not being able to handle the faster video card and the dual aspect of the pentium D? Any body out there running flight simulator with a 6800GS that is working fine?

 

[Cheesetogo]

There's nothing wrong with your card, flight simulator is just switching between textures so the game runs better when your up high.

 

[jimmyj68]

Sorry to respond so late, but out of town for the holiday.

I routinely fly the lear at 40 t0 41 thousand feet with no disturbance of the textures whatsoever. What I'm getting now is texture triangulation, texture distortion, and texture confusion (e.g. land and water improperly intermixed). And these effects lag the movement of the aircraft across the landscape. I'm suspecting Flight Simulator.

 

[effee]

My 9800 pro has similiar problems, I suspect my drivers, but i'm just too lazy to reinstall as its the only game that doesnt run ok. besides i only touch FS2004 once in a blue moon

 

[jimmyj68]

Effee? Thanks - you've confirmed what this forum response was leading me to believe; there aren't many folks out there that do Microsoft's flight simulator. I'm a little worried that microsoft may stop investing in upgrading the game.

You raise a good point. I'm running with the latest nvidia drivers now and I installed another game I have that I don't do often (it's too difficult to master all the intricacies of fire control systems, radar etc) called Lockon. This game is noted for really putting your video card to test and it runs with no problems whatsoever (except I don't have a joystick because i use a yoke and pedals with Flight Simulator). I'm going to drop back to the drivers that came with the card and see what happens.

 

[vshah]

have you tried setting all the flight simulator texture settings to max? so that it always displays hi quality textures and never swaps. i believe there is some sort of option like that in the video settings.

 

[jimmyj68]

I'm back on this subject again. I've deleted and reinstalled flight simulator a dozen times. I've set and reset the texture settings three or four times. With everything set to max I get a beautiful picture but the landscape textures are screwed up. Land and water get transposed. What is land with buildings on it suddenly becomes water with buildings sitting on it. When the texture paramaters are set low, say 800 -600, not only is everything screwed up but 3d building like things are present all around the aircraft and runway that are made of different colors with large letters and numbers on them. I either have a bad video card which seems illogical since it works as designed with everything else - or Flight Simulator can't handle a dual core processor and is running itself in two streams that are out of sync. Can a video card malfunction in just one program? Does that mean the card is faulty?

 

[DireFog]

Just wanted to say: I have pretty much the same problem on my system. Textures get transposed and sliced at random. I even had building textures in the virtual cockpit and everything.

System: Athlon X2, Geforce 6800GT with 81.something drivers. MS timing hotfix is installed, /usepmtimer option is set.

FS2004 also has a timing problem when running on both cores. The timing problem is solved by restricting the process to a single CPU, the texture problem isn't. Otherwise, the game seems to run without further problems. I think it's an architectural flaw in the game, and since I heard that FS2006 was on the way, I don't consider it likely that we'll ever see a fix for that problem.

On the upside, I don't think that your hardware is broken.

 

[videopho]

Despite all have been said on this thread. I'd like to dispute that. Prior to upgrading to the current 7800GT I used to have the ATI X800XL which ran fairly smoothly at decent setting 1680x1050 with aa/af controlled by the game. I have recently switched to the new 7800 GT which has improved this game further with better fram rate.
There is a FS9 update patch for FS2004 so make sure your game has the latest patch upgraded. Not sure what the culprit at your end is but I think your 6800GS should be able to handle this game without any problem, IMO.

 

[DireFog]

Do you have a simple uniprocessor P4? There are quite a couple of games which have issues with SMP, just have a look at Serios Sam 2 (totally berserk), Battlefield 2 (loses net connection from time to time) or Dark Age of Camelot (loses net connection). However, unlike FS2004, those all run perfectly fine with affinity set to a single CPU.

And: the update doesn't help.

 

[videopho]

Originally posted by: DireFog
Do you have a simple uniprocessor P4? There are quite a couple of games which have issues with SMP, just have a look at Serios Sam 2 (totally berserk), Battlefield 2 (loses net connection from time to time) or Dark Age of Camelot (loses net connection). However, unlike FS2004, those all run perfectly fine with affinity set to a single CPU.

And: the update doesn't help.

See my sig. It's single P4 @3.4Ghz but it has 2gb DRAM which has big time in gmaes like BF2 which I have had no problem with.