Desperate plea for help on sudden low fps

F

fuzz1

Charter Member
I haven't fired up my still beloved fsx in over 2 months. I've preordered the new sim but still wish to keep fsx to fly my
favorite addons. $thousands spent in this regard and when I last played, it ran flawlessly with a smooth locked 30fps.

I have spent hundreds of hours tweaking and troubleshooting over the years to get it in that shape.

So I launched it the other day and to my horror I was greeted by an entirely unplayable 1-4fps in almost every situation
I attempted. Followed all the standard remedies including rebuilding the .cfg and scenery indexes, swapping folders from my
backups for gauges, effects, etc., updating all drivers...etc. Nothing has worked. But here's the really weird part:

My Majestic Q400 works flawlessly when I launch it as a saved flight. It does not work and follows the 1-4fps horror if I configure
a flight with it from scratch. If I switch aircraft from the properly running saved Q400 flight, all aircraft be they payware or default
exhibit the flawed behavior. My best guess is that since the Q400 runs a number of processes outside the sim, it may not be loading
the offending file that is degrading my sim. I wonder if there is some .dll corruption somewhere, or a broken database (nav?). I am
absolutely stumped as to why the sim operates normally with a saved Q400 flight but nothing else.

The only recent additions were a number of the free 'Coronaware' aircraft and airports recently released by certain developers. Again,
All these were tested and ran well before I took a hiatus from FSX 2 months ago.

I'm at my wits end. The last thing I want to do is uninstall and start again as it would take me days or weeks to get it all
together again. I fear that I may not bother with it all after installing the new MSFS and simply endure missing FSX.

I would be most grateful for any suggestions or leads.
__________________________________
8700K running a stable 4.7 overclock
EVGA 1080Ti
1tb SSD dedicated to FSX and related programs
32GB Ram

WIN10 1809
Latest Nvidia drivers
Nvidia profile inpector
FSUIPC, SODE, FSRecorder, AI Carriers and vLSO
TrackIR
Numerous Orbx products
Majestic, A2A, Captain Sim, Carenado, Lionheart, ATS Antonov, Aerosoft, Aeroplane Heaven,
ANTS, Realair, Warbirdsim, Virtuacol aircraft.
 
I ran into a similar problem coincident with installing and running a "complex" add-on. Someone found a reference and passed it on, and it solved the problem.. although perhaps at the expense of disabling the add-on in question.

Before running FSX:
In your FSX root folder, find the FSX.exe, right-click and select "properties"; select the tab for "compatibility". If "Run in compatibility mode" is selected, de-select it. Select "OK".

Run FSX. If it works, you should be good.

I have found that every once in a while Win10 +FSX pops a dialogue when you close the sim that basically says "you 'need' to run in Compatibility Mode -click yes and shut up". If you don't catch it you may be getting it set for you.
Someone with more interested in the guts of the system might offer other/further advice.
 
Thanks for your willingness to offer help srgalahad. Good suggestion, not something I would have thought of. Unfortunately ineffective.
Compatibility checkbox was already unselected. Out of curiosity I attempted to toggle this off & on by selecting and running the sim in
Win7 compatibility mode. Problem persists either way. Also, I have never even for an instant seen that warning box appear.
My heart sinks each time I load the default Cessna and see an fps of 1.1.
 
Hi,

You might want to check if there are processes that are gobbling up your GFX card processor and memory.

Also do a deep antivirus scan.

Another possibility is that there are windows updates in waiting. Run your windows update and update all your drivers.

Priller
 
As Priller suggested, check the processes running in the background. I had a similar problem a few years back. It slowed down my sims to the point they were not useable. Seems a nasty Trojan had been loosed in my system. Unfortunately for me neither my AV nor Malwarebytes could see it. I could see it in processes disguised as a system service. I would stop the service and about 30 seconds after that it would restart itself. Nasty beast. I had to use an online service to get rid of it.

Steve
 
I noticed you are running Win10 1809. You may want to update to the latest version Win10 2004. There have been numerous fixes to the system since 1809. Robert
 
mcanx said:
I noticed you are running Win10 1809. You may want to update to the latest version Win10 2004. There have been numerous fixes to the system since 1809. Robert
Click to expand...

1809? I looked over that!

Good god man, update your system! Updates are free and for your security!!

Priller
 
Thanks to everyone for their help. Unfortunately proposed solutions have failed me. On the bright side, I now seem to have an up to date Win10 2004. I usually delay Win10 updates for as long as possible if everything is running ok; have suffered some bad Win10 update experiences in the past. This time the update appears (so far) to only have compromised my Nvidia Profile Inspector settings which was easily remedied.

Malwarebytes multiple scans in both safe and normal mode yields no infections. I do realize that there may be something going on in this regard that MWB has missed.

As far as background processes are concerned this might be a little beyond me. I have over 140 running and wouldn't know what to look for to troubleshoot.

The great mystery here, at least for me, is that a Q400 saved flight works flawlessly, but nothing else does. Would not viruses, permission issues, offending background processes etc, not also compromise this flight situation? It's as though the Q400 does not use the anomalous 'something' that every other failing aircraft does. Nav Databases perhaps? flight model? Sound? This is likely beyond me also to troubleshoot but if anyone here has any ideas on this specific point, I would be most obliged for your thoughts.

I also attempted to launch the sim as close as possible to default without reinstalling, by placing all aircraft folders in SimObjects in a temporary folder, leaving just the default aircraft. Unfortunately no improvement.

I'm looking forward to the new sim but would really like to keep my FSX intact also. I can't do carrier traps in a Q400 :)
 
Yes! It's fixed. Obscure problem the solution for which may help anyone that may become cursed with the same situation. After looking at everything addon, dll
and graphics-related I stumbled upon something that did not look right in my Asus motherboard's Realtek sound software. Having previously updated the Asus drivers and not seeing
a cure, I thought I had done all that's necessary in this regard. Wrong. I now decided to completely uninstall the sound device and let windows reinstall the
drivers rather than simply update the existing ones and....presto! Something was obviously corrupt within either the driver itself or the Sonic Studio 3
software suite that comes with the device, which a routine driver update did not cure. I suppose this may be similar to Nvidia graphics drivers, where generally
it is better to completely uninstall existing drivers before going to a newer version. Understand that I've had no previous problem simply updating existing sound
drivers many times in the past. I suspect that a windows update broke something in these drivers since the last time I successfully ran the sim 2 months ago.

Lesson learned. That a corrupt sound driver element could totally trash your sim as it did in my case was not something I had even heard of before.

FSX now working great and will continue serving me well in the years to come and this, despite my readiness for MSFS (2020).

Happy flights to everyone.
 
Great news Fuzz1! And a timely subject as I am in the process of updating drivers for my new build. Your fix has now been added to my resources.

Congrats and thanks...

Steve
 
Thanks Steve and good luck on the new build. Oh, and how you got to the bottom of a virus disguising itself
as a system process is quite remarkable, particularly when conventional scans failed to identify it.
 
fuzz1 said:
Thanks Steve and good luck on the new build. Oh, and how you got to the bottom of a virus disguising itself
as a system process is quite remarkable, particularly when conventional scans failed to identify it.
Click to expand...

Wish I could take credit for that but I can't. I did do the AV and MW scans which came up with nothing. When I got around to checking processes I found this one process that was using huge amounts of CPU processing capacity, 90% - 98%. It got to where I couldn't even use a word processor. I finally was referred to a reputable free online diagnostic operation. They are the ones who identified the problem as a trojan that was, according to them, using my PC to link with other PCs for the computing power and time to conduct their nefarious deeds. These guys sent me tools and walked me through the instructions to rid my self of the bug and block that one from ever coming back. These guys were very professional and knew what they were doing. Seems they loved what they did so much they had actually formed a "club" and took it online to help folks like me.

That was a few years ago and I haven't had an issue since. I did fire my AV after that and hired a new one.

Steve
 
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