FSX video problem

[WarHorse47]

I hate it when these things happen.

I just loaded up FSX and encountered a video problem. After loading my flight I can maneuver for about 1 minute before my monitor goes blank. Actually the sim and sound freezes and the monitor turns into a single color.

Yesterday, all was fine. The last thing I did was install the latest patch for the Milviz P-38L. I've been on the internet, sending e-mails and printing documents without any problems. No indication of any problems in Windows Error Reporting or with Dxdiag.

I suspect it may be a hardware issue as nothing has changed on my computer. I had Dell install the card when I purchased the computer in 2013, so its 3 years old - a AMD Radeon HD 7870 to be precise. I haven't update drivers for a while since things were working quite well. I do run the AMD Catalyst Control Manager and software to tweak the card to run FSX.

Not sure where to go from here, so I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

[Desert Rat]

Do you have any other demanding 3D games/apps? If so have you tried any of them, if so do they do the same after a period of time? If so, suspect you GPU may be overheating.

Do you ever clean out the inside of your case? a good layer of dust can cause these OT problems and left unchecked over time can cause permanent damage. If you need to dust it out, I'm sure there would be a video guide on youTube on how best to do this.

J

[WarHorse47]

Do you have any other demanding 3D games/apps? If so have you tried any of them, if so do they do the same after a period of time? If so, suspect you GPU may be overheating. Nope.


Do you ever clean out the inside of your case? a good layer of dust can cause these OT problems and left unchecked over time can cause permanent damage. If you need to dust it out, I'm sure there would be a video guide on youTube on how best to do this.

JYes. Always. Just did another cleaning and its very clean.

Also did a driver update. Nice and smooth, but didn't fix the issue with FSX.

Unlikely any MS updates are the culprit since the last update was prior to yesterday when everything ran fine.

And although I've tweaked graphic settings in FSX, nothing has changed.

I also attempted to rebuild the fsx.cfg and ran into an issue indicating a problem loading the Aircreation 582 SL red over Friday Harbor. I don't recall seeing an aircraft folder for that glider, but am not sure.

I'm going to check with AMD to see if they have a diagnostic tool.

[WarHorse47]

Did some stress tests on the card and it failed. It locked up just like with FSX and I had to do a hard reboot to get the computer back.

Looks like I'm getting a new card.

Any recommendations for a replacement? The local tech shop has several ASUS cards but I'm not sure what would work best (or how much my credit card can take).

[WarHorse47]

After a series of diagnostics by me and the local shop, my AMD Radeon HD 7870 was definitely toast after 3 years.

I'm now running with an AMD Radeon R7 360 which is supposed to be slightly better than the HD 7870. Not so sure at the moment.

Things are relatively smooth and sweet with all my programs, but I noticed some FPS dropping and staggering with FSX. My guess is that I'll need to do some tweaking within my FSX graphic settings to smooth things out.

Anyone else running with an AMD Radeon R7 360 that would care to share their tweaks?