How to fix "Black Screen" problem in Vista (when using AA)

[s0cks]

Hi all,

After much hunting I found a soultion (that worked for me) to get FS9 to run with AA and show the FSP menu system rather than getting a black screen.
This should also fix other menu systems like PMDG. The problem is FS9's "in-built" AA is useless. What you want is your gfx card to handle the AA and
not the game. Unfortuantly nVidia disabled this function for both FS9 and FSX!! Why!?! I just don't know. Anyway you'll need a great app called
nHancer to manipulate the FS9 or FSX profiles.

- Download and install "nHancer" - http://www.nhancer.com/

- Find the "MS Flight Simulator 2004" (or FSX) entry and press the "Duplicate" button. This makes a copy of that entry and disables the default one.
Click "Yes" to making a duplicate.

- DELETE the copy you just made.

- Make another NEW profile from scratch (call it what you want)

- Under the "executables" box, if it isn't already, press "Add" and point it your your fs9.exe file on your hard drive.

- Tick "Profile can be activated manually"

- On the right hand side, under "Enhancements", play about until you get the desired settings. Mine are as follows:

Anti Aliasing ticked
Multisampling 8x selected
"Enhance in game AA setting" MUST BE UNTICKED if you want this to work
"Gamma Correction" MUST BE TICKED if you want it to work
Anisotropic filtering 16x selected

Under optimisation:

Texture filtering - high quality
Trilinear optimisation - off
Aniso. sample optimisation - off
Negative LOD bias - Clamp

- Now click "Tools" menu at the top and choose to "Write all profiles to registry"

- Close nHancer

- Right click the "n" symbol on your system tray > Activate profile > and select the new profile you made for "MS Flight Simulator 2004"

Start FS - Ensure Antialiasing is switched OFF and filtering to Trilinear (in the FS9 Display options)

Close FS and start it up again

Enjoy your new look FS! The in-built AA is ony 2x so if you pump up all your gfx settings it should look awesome! And the menu's works!

[Wally]

YOU ARE MY SAVIOUR!!!!

I cant' go on and do it now, as I'm quite busy at the moment, however I will do this ASAP!

Thanks for the info!

Oh, maybe someone should make this a 'sticky'?



Post Edited ( 03-04-08 16:05 )

[Joeflyer]

It would be nice to see a tutorial about those who use the SLI configuration, as pointing to the FS9.exe in SLI will not cure the AA
problems...at least that's what I quickly found out. Using the global SLI profile seems to work fine.

Duh me...I was thinking in terms of XP, not Vista.



Post Edited ( 03-04-08 17:35 )

[s0cks]

No worries. It is far better using the gfx card to run the AA. The menu system is all in AA too so the plane previews look smooooth. Its still a bit
"gay" when you press alt in fullscreen (where it goes black and then comes back and shows the menu). But its only a small price to pay. I was getting
so annoyed with playing FSP without AA!!!

[pontiac51]

This only seems to work on my 7600GT if i use at least the 169.09 drivers from Nvidia. All others give me the blank screen no matter what AA settings
i use (in nHancer oder FS2004). This drivers also correct nearly all blank screen probs in FS2004.