This is actually very surprising because the game did not run very well on Windows Vista. Whatever, forget about Vista; that is history…

Solution

Download and install the direct-x 9.0c runtime you can find on the Microsoft website. I did not encounter this problem but found the question on a Windows 7 forum.

On another forum I found this important remark:

You do not need to install DX9.0C. DX11 is a superset of DX10.0/10.1, both of which are backwards-compatible with DX9.0C in the sense that DX9.0C software and hardware can run non-DX10/11 code. For this reason you do not install DX9.0C on Vista either, as it is “emulated” (for lack of a better word). (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/185-63-directx-installing-directx11-problem-win7)

So on my installation FS-X did not complain about missing DX9. If anyone can give the final solution Can this issue be in some way related to problem concerning the video-card or driver. To be continued…

Answer:

Well, of course this strongly depends on the hardware you are using. But if we must believe the author the next text from a forum will give you an idea (http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-games/1827-flight-simulator-x-anyone-installed-2.html)

I have Windows 7 Ultimate running on the following hardware…

Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard
Intel Core i7 920
2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR3
GeForce 8800GTX
TrackIR 4 Pro
… various hard drives, optical drive, yada yada yada…

… and I can honestly say that my performance in FSX has easily DOUBLED compared to WinXP and DX9!

Seriously, it’s like I’ve rediscovered FSX all over again. I can’t tell you all the detail settings off the top of my head because I’m at work currently, but here’s how I used to run it under WinXP and DX9. (The basics.)

….Video settings….
Display resolution: 1680×1050 32bit
AA: 4x (forced ON at the driver level)
AF: application controlled (ON in FSX)
Triple Buffering: ON
Force Vertical Sync: ON

…..FSX settings…..
Global Texture Detail : Max
Detail radius: Small
Terrain Mesh Detail: 50
Terrain Resolution: 76m
Water: Mid 1.x
Aircraft: full 3d cockpit and all options ON except “aircraft casts shadows on itself”
Cloud draw distance: 60 mi. (detailed 3D clouds ON)
Scenery casts shadows: OFF
Scenery complexity: Normal (sometimes I’d set it to “Sparse” if flying over major cities)
Autogen density: Normal (sometimes I’d set it to “Sparse” if flying over major cities)
ZERO AI air traffic
ZERO ships
ZERO ground traffic (airport & road)

Sometimes I would turn the autogen up to “Dense” if I was flying out in the wilderness, like Alaska or whatever.

With those settings, I was LUCKY if I could squeeze out 20-30 fp/s in areas like Seattle, Denver, Miami, etc. Most of the time, it constantly fluctuated between 5 and 25 fp/s. I’d say the average was somewhere in the high teens. Out in the rural areas, I could get closer to 30 fp/s, but it still wasn’t very consistent. (I had my framerate locked at 30 fps.) The general idea is that I was constantly just getting by with mild detail settings and just learning to live with the mediocre frame rates. If I ever got 30 fp/s consistently for any reason, it was like a “Wow! Lookit that!” sort of moment.

Now, I just reinstalled FSX the other day, installed both the service packs for it and installed my SceneryTech North America Landclass package…… and with those same settings as listed above, flying over Seattle, my framerate in FSX varies between 35 and 60 fp/s with the framerate lock set to “Unlimited”.

If I lock it down to 40 fp/s, I can turn the Scenery Complexity and Autogen up to “Very Dense” and it will stay at or near 40 fp/s consistently. If I’m out in the rural areas, I have no trouble with cranking the Autogen up to “Extremely Dense”. (Trying that on DX9 and XP, would have guaranteed me a slideshow of single-digit framerates.) The wild variating in the framerates is GONE. I also no longer see the ground textures scrambling to switch between low and high res as I look around the cockpit. I’ve added only about 5% to the AI air traffic, 10% to ground (airport) traffic and about 5% to ships and leisure boats but I am seeing slightly less consistent framerates with those settings. I also bumped up the Terrain Mesh from 50 to 75, my Cloud Draw Distance from 60mi. to 80mi, and the Water Detail from Mid 1.x to High 2.x. (Actually, I prefer the Mid 2.x).

Even though I’m far from maxed out and I’m sure it would go back to the slower framerates if I did max everything out, DX10/11 and Windows 7 gives me MUCH more “play room” when tweaking the graphics settings. And I haven’t even tried some of the external file tweaks that are possible yet!

Thus, Windows 7 and DX10/11 definately get a huge thumbs up from me with FSX!

So far this forum item. At least the graphics card is similar to the one I use so I will certainly try these setting and let you know.

On my Dell  system a 32 bit version of Vista is installed, the main disadvantage of wich is that approximately 1 GB of memory is not being used because the required addresses are reserved for the video memory. Therefore, I have eagerly waited for Windows 7 64 bit. A version which I hope will put an end to the problems with a 64 bit operating system and an OS which we hope would be appropriate to carry out work faster than Vista. In this blog I will write about my experiences; the problems that I have encountered, but also of the potential benefits of Windows 7. And the latter, in particular in relation to FSX. Perhaps my flightsim hobby will get a “boost” simply because everything will run with a acceptable framerate.

The first attempt

If this is completed, it is really very simple. Start the system on to a Windows 7 DVD, in my case, an English Home Premium 64 bit, and then choose after a number of initial screens of the W7 Setup for a “custom install”. Choose the partition on which you want to install from the list, and the rest will be almost completely automatic. There are a number of restarts and you will still need to make a few choices, and a key to fill out (if you want to activate). The installation of Windows 7 is really very simple. Almost as easy as Ubuntu, or a Mac. And nice and quick; within 20 minutes it was done. Including a little outdated driver for my graphics card, and the good chipset drivers. Only for my sound card, Sound Blaster x-fi Xtreme music, a driver was installed. The card was recognized, however ,not correct. With a second installation attempt I adressed this problem.

At nVidia, I fetched the latest driver for my video card and I did a check on the nVidia chipset drivers. The latter were uptodate, so that was perfect. The videodriver I first downloaded and then installed it. That was all still ok.

After this the misery began. I still do not know the real cause of this. It was by the search of the recommended download Antivir where a script began to rotate what had to be stopped. Yes, I was looking for a security program, and then a security issue arizes. Or was there some other reason; e.g. the format of the partition is not good. For example, does W7  no reformat  if something is not quite ok with the selected partition.  Or probably I should not have attached all peripheral devices already (my flightyoke and rudder pedals, for example).

In fact this is what happened. I wanted to go to my flightsim input devices, and thought that “Devices and printers” was the right choice to do this. Unfortunately the screen stayed empty and in the address bar, the progress indicator stopped after a long time just before the end. Restarting Windows, that shoeld do the trick. Only then the misery began; checkdisk wanted to restore the partition because it seemed to be corrupt. Strange for a fresh installation! But now it was started on every system start, even if I chose Vista in the Boot Manager. Furthermore, it turned out the eventlog (System) filled with error messages about a corrupt file system. What to do next????
I eventually opted for a radical solution. A complete reinstallation. Read on …

You use the tool bcdedit whichVista installed by default. Go to start, all programs, Accessories, command prompt, click with the right mouse button and choose “run as administrator” . In the Command Prompt window, type bcdedit at the command prompt and then press ENTER. You will see the entries in the bootloader. At  the end of the mentioned article is a howto for deleting an entry. In my case the identifier of the Windows 7 entry was  {default} so the command would become: bcdedit/delete {default}/Cleanup  Always use a space before a forward slash (“/”) . A message is shown telling you “the operation completed successfully” and if you  run bcdedit again you will see that the Windows 7 entry has disappeared. Restart the system now and if everything ok now you won’t see the bootloader screen again and Windows Vista will start.

In Vista, click with the right mouse button on  ‘ my computer ‘ and choose  “manage” (“manage”). Go to “disk management”, and delete the Windows 7 partition by right clicking and choosing “remove” (“delete”). Furthermore do nothing. You will see   “Unallocated space” now, that is OK.
So far for this piece of manual. I installed Windows 7 in the Unallocated space simply forcing the installer to format this partition before installation. I just followed the whole process the same way as at the first attempt up to the activation. Sorry, I forgot to tell but before installation I removed all peripheral devices; so a completely clean installation.

Then I downloaded the 64 bit Saitek drivers for my Flight-yoke and Rudder Pedals and installed them. During the installation, when the installer asked for it, I have plugged in my USB devices in one of the USB ports. After this I immediately tried whether “Devices and Printers” showed these devices immediately. And Yes, they are listed. So far, everything is perfect. Now the installation of FS-X.
And then there seemed to be something strange. Not using Windows 7, but with the software compatibility list for Windows 7. FS-X standard seems to be completely compatible with Windows 7 32 and 64 bit. But when it comes to FS-X de Luxe edition there is a notification more information will follow soon. Are those versions  so different? FS-X de Luxe edition will have more aircraft and perhaps a few extra scenarios. I  assume  there is no significant difference between these versions technically. Read the sequel!

The installation itself is, of course, quite straightforward. I did not ran into trouble with that; also the activation gave no problems. The latter is interesting because  my FS-X is also installed on the Vista partition. Probably, however; I have not tried. Anyway, it is not difficult to FS-X to install multiple times.
After this base installation I flew around  several time in FS-X. I had the feeling it was responding more flexible compared to my Vista installation. I am still expirimenting  to find out the optimal settings for  the display for example.
Only once the program hung; I will not mention the message in the application log, because it is not very significant. I was trying out some settings with an additional monitor when the application suddenly stopped. Windows 7 kept on working fine after this crash.

The service packs

After this upgrade I flew around for a while and did some experiments with multiple monitors. A simple howto for the latter can be found at http://www.fsinsider.com/product/learning/documents/Using Multiple monitors.pdf.  And flying with this configuration feels very good. I also copied some flights from my Vista installation to this W7  installation. FS-X saved flights on Windows Vista and Windows 7 can be found in  “documents” > “Flight Simulator X files”. Per flight  3 files (. WS, FSSAVE and .flt) are stored. You will also find a .PLN file for the flights with a flight-plan attached to them , for example, VFR … … PLN or IFR … … PLN. The directory also contains a logbook.bin file. This file keeps track of your flights. Among other things it contains the pilots logbook. You can copy that file if you want to keep the flights of the previous installation (of course you will; your a pilot   ).
All in all,  my experiences with Windows 7 64 bit are cautiously positive in regard to the combination with Flight Simulator X

Usually I worked with 1 screen and in the so-called windowed mode. That is to say, FSX runs in a window, not in full-screen. With a single-monitor configuration, it is possible to change the window mode to full-screen (ALT + ENTER) without problems. With a second monitor this is certainly not the case. In that situation FSX may stop working at all. Also saving a flight in full-screen mode with different views occupying the second screen by and loading this again leaves me with a black primary screen and some views on the secondary screen. In a windowed mode saving multiple views on multiple monitors is acceptable. I say acceptable because not all screen settings are saved properly. The views on the second screen are usually in their default size, and on top of each other. If the same thing happened in Vista  I do not know. And, perhaps disabling the direct x 10 preview  helps to solve this issue. If so I will write about it here.

As promised I have tested the direct x 10 preview to the ordinary (direct x 9) version. In DX 10 mode (can be set after you installed SP2 in the display settings tab) everything doesn’t looks more attractive. Lines on the taxi lanes are dancing in the picture, the concrete lanes themselves are very disturbing. In short, it does not appear that this is a vast improvement. Once in the air it is not so much of a problem however.
I cancelled out the DX 10 preview (restart FSX) and noticed that at the same airport (Rotterdam Airport in my case), the view was much better; no more dancing lines. Then, of course, I have been experimenting with fullscreen and that seemed to be surprisingly well, until now. It seems at the moment, that the DX 10 preview is not yet good enough. Let’s hope for a new service pack that fully integrates DX 11 in the very near future .