Anyone using FSX and 8800?

[AD-15]

hello,

Is anybody using the 8800 series of cards with Flight sim X?

How on earth do you get rid of the torrent of problems like awful AA, rubbish texture loading, shimmering, and other issues that just shouldn't be happening with a card costing hundreds?

EDIT: Is there any way for people to force nvidia to pay attention to these problems? It's a comeplete nightmare...

[kungpo]

I'm one...it's the only game I play. I got a 8800 gts because of it.

Personally, I find it acceptable using NVidias guide on settings. But considering the amount of money spent so far, I would expect (much) better. I wonder what the optimal setup is (and does it exist?). I sure can't afford it...

[AD-15]

I've used nvidia's guide, but I'm still getting those silly problems. It's a bug, nothing to do with the card not being able to handle it.

[kungpo]

There's room for improvement though. The bizarre crashes after 30 mins have stopped since SP1. I'm now wondering if Accelerate will give us something, or we need to wait for SP2.

I suspect NVidia don't care. I think the FSX community is so small compared to the rest of the gamers, and what difference did they make...? Call me cynical....

[AD-15]

It's sickening to be honest, hundreds of pounds on a graphics card and this is what you get.

I have to agree with you though, the FSX community is tiny, there aren't many aviation enthusiasts that use sims.

[acrobat]

I have that game and an 8800GTX, but I don't think I've seen any of those problems.

Maybe I'm wrong though.

I was hugely disappointed anyway, and I uninstalled it after a few weeks. Some areas looked good, but some areas had really ridiculous, unrealistic, blurry, horrible, ground textures. And the water looked like blue paint. The sky was always pretty good, the planes always looked good, but when the ground looks bad, it ruins everything. I flew over the north west like Manchester and Liverpool, and there weren't many buildings, and the ones that where there, looked like cardboard boxes. And the ground looked like it had been finger painted with strange black patches all over it.

Very disappointing. What made it terrible though, was the performance. On maximum settings, it starts looking better, but my frame dropped into the single figures. When I start lowering the settings to get it above about 20fps, the game starts to look really bad.

The nail in the coffin was that I found it boring too. I just went back to LOMAC.

[AD-15]

Yep, those texture problems are definetly the ones I described. Basically, it looks like you're running FS2002.

[acrobat]

Yes thats what it looks like I didn't realise it was a bug.. I just thought it was crappy graphics Some places look really nice, and some just look terrible. I actually uninstalled it ages ago, and then they released a "Service pack" kind of thing for FSX recently, so I got that and it wasn't much better. So I got rid of it. Stupid MS. Its one of only 2 games to make my computer struggle.

[aidanjt]

You actually paid money for FSX? What are you like some kind of crazy person?.. Doesn't matter which GPU you use, it will still be awful.

[kungpo]

I will admit there was a massive improvment from the 6600GT that preceeded the 8800. And the visuals do look prettty good at max (but then very sticky frame rates). SP1 did make a little difference as it brought multi-core support.

I'm running it on Vista. What's everyone else running?

[Mullet]

I'm using XP. And I agree, my due lack of Sli support my system doesn't enjoy the FSX experience. I've just installed a quad core cpw...will be interesting to see if that makes any difference to the auto-gen of scenery.

[AD-15]

hello,

There's nothing wrong with the game itself, just buggy drivers for the 8800 that nvidia refuses to fix, which is what get's to me.

[aidanjt]

hello,

There's nothing wrong with the game itself, just buggy drivers for the 8800 that nvidia refuses to fix, which is what get's to me.

Do you have a 2900 laying around to test that hypothesis? Or did you hear it from someone who heard it from someone?

The fact is, the entire MS flight simulator series has always been buggy and riddled with graphical glitches. And that goes from 3Dfx, to ATi, to nVidia. Why anyone would fork out £50-70 quid (more than once) on that junk is beyond me.

[AD-15]

hello,

Yes, I've tried it on ATi cards, no problem. There is a MAJOR problem with the 8800 drivers, check out the nvidia forums, everyone is complaining. I don't know why you have such a problem with FSX, it's pretty amazing (well, ignoring the incompatibilty issues), guess it depends on what you like.

[aidanjt]

I suppose we should blame the horrific autopilot bugs in FS2000 on graphics drivers

[AD-15]

That's software- not graphics.

If there's a big problem with GRAPHICS, it might hint there could be a problem with the GRAPHICS card....