UberSloth

uhhh... OK. I guess. :D I haven't played FSX but my dad's really got into FS09 after I bought it for him couple of years back for his 60th. I've played the choppers on there, the little commercial ones, can't really say I felt it any the more "realistic" then those in ARMA2 but I do agree with the map geography and vegetation. Lot's of fun to fly a chopper down a river canyon. Until I've flown a real helicopter, which isn't likely to be any time soon, I won't really know what one handles like so I can't help you.

What's disappointing about it?

Hi, this here be my first post, but I figure it might be half useful to those that may have a similar problem as my own. I literally bought this game about 3 days ago and have spent every night after work debugging my graphics problems. From that you can take away at least one thing - I'm a n00b. So my mate wanted me to play ARMA 2 with him a little while back and presented me with a couple bits and pieces to put in my (quite frankly ageing) rig... all I had to do was put it together and purchase a graphics card. I went for a HIS Radeon 4850 1024 for a £100. My wife's pregnant so there is absolutely No way I could have got something more expensive without her bleating. Bless her. It had a chunky heat sink and a big fan, figured that would be enough. So I threw it all together, installed the game, patched it, updated to the latest catalyst drivers ran it and walllla!! There I had a big shiny aircraft carrier chugging along towards me. Looks pretty so far... Running a bit fast for my liking mind. :) So I went to the video options settings and chucked everything up to Very High. Nice. Ran the Armoury ran about a bit and... wtf. I had quite reasonable frame rates, bloom looked nice, volumetric smoke effects looked pretty but why are the textures flickering randomly with a pattern of plain grey or red or green squares and properly ruining this quite frankly very pretty game. So I lurked in these here forum's and took all of the following pearls of wisdom away to try and fix this problem. I... from the advice of many others... and I recommend you do this 1. Uninstalled Catalyst Control Center - It's a piece of junk anyway so get rid of it. 2. Installed and ran Driver cleaner Pro in Safe Mode - the amount of redundant crap that gets rid of is quite impressive but use it carefully. Make sure you have specific target driver set to get rid otherwise you could find yourself reinstalling your motherdrive drivers or worse... 3. Installed and ran CCLeaner to hlp clear redundant registery items - Helps clear away Catalyst control Center too so best run this after uninstalling that. 4. Installed and ran Ati tray Tools - Basically a light weight Catalyst Control Center with a lot more optimization features, and allows you mess with clock settings on your graphics card. Now at this point I tried absolutely F***** everything for about 6 hours to fix this problem disabling features, enabling features and messing about with all the Graphics settings in game whilst in window mode so I can see results but all to no avail. I then read a post about a fix for a Warhammer game using Radeon cards which basically boiled down to overclocking the card to run at 750 mhz using Rivatuner. Tried it. good software, but didn't work. Then I thought I'll use the ATI Tray tools to overclock my card whilst keeping the temperature between 60 and 70 degrees. No matter how high I got didn't make a blind bit of difference to the stupid flickering. Tried underclocking it. Still had the problem. Seriously thought my card was broken at this point. Maybe there was a problem in one of the memory modules. Ran some analysis programs. No artifacts, no slow down, a sizeable benchmark, and no problems or warnings. So if its not my hardware, and it's not the graphics settings... then that leaves memory. Which in way makes sense because the flickering is as if there is a lag between the reading and writing of the texture to the screen. Well I only have 2 Sticks of 1024 DDR... but I have a maximum of over 12 gigs of Virtual Memory spread over three partitions... thats pretty much maxed out each with initial sizes of 2GB so VRAM shouldn't be a problem... So if it's not Memory, then we're back to hardware. Hold on what about hardware memory. I checked ATI Tray tools again, looked at the overclocking section. I'd overlooked it before but there's a Memory Speed slider. Now bare in mind here I still had ARMA 2 open in a window and it was running in the background I was monitoring the values of the BIOS Mem speed and the Current Mem speed while I was flying my Apache. Bugger me... why hadn't I noticed that. Bios speed runs at a steady rate (as expected). Current Mem though fluctuates dependent on the power needed to render a 3D scene / frame. Occassionally the Current Mem would rise above Bios Mem. this means that the Bios mem would be playing catch up with the Current Mem which would mean that it wouldn't be able to render a whole scene within a frame lifetime resulting in flickering squares of default color on a polygon surface it would have been dropped at the end of the current frame lifestime. This was my theory anyway. Lets put it to the test. Dropped the Memory Speed right down to 700. So that's 200 mhz slower then then what it was, what happened to the game? Well For starters it slowed down considerably by about 8 frames or so... but there was no more of that stupid flickering! Oh yeah. Played with the settings a bit and stuck with a setting that was 40 Mhz slower then the Bios Mem. I can now fly around in my Apache at break neck speeds with no flickering and the video options maxed out. Not a glitch in site. Lucky for some I guess. So well that worked for me, try it, I hope it helps some one. Thought I'd add this, give something back to the community for all your help.