Periodic freezing even with vanilla install

Question

This has been going on for over a year now.  No matter what plane I fly or what tweaks I make to video I get occasional freezes every five to 10 minutes.  I've never been able to replicate a specific event that causes it.  I've tried disabling all unnecessary processes.  To eliminate third party plugins I did a vanilla install of 10.51 with no plugins, scenery, or aircraft loaded.  The problem persists even with the stock aircraft.

I have observed CPU usage from the sim dropping to 0 when this happens and as far as the sim is concerned it reports frames drops from 40 to about 20.  Disk usage and memory don't seem to be affected when the event happens.  In reality frames are less that 1 per second.  It is as if the sim gets frozen in time.

This was happening on my DVD version as well as my recently upgraded digital version.

With a dozen other sims and hundreds of games (sad I know), only X-Plane is having these issues.

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Answer 1

We had heard reports of FPS issues with X-Plane 10.50 & Windows 10 anniversary edition, but it sounds like your issue started before that. 

Please make sure Windows is up to date, as well as your video card driver. Some people found that fixed their issue.

If not, here is an older thread from X-Plane.org that discusses some other options for Nvidia card users. 

Comments

I keep my PC up to date with the latest drivers and system patches on a monthly basis.  I recall when I upgraded to Windows 10 shortly after its release hoping that it would resolve the issue though it didn't

When it first started happening, I used to think it was scenery loading.  It wasn't till much later I realized it would happen even while idle at the tie down.  I will try the 3yr old driver mentioned in the post this week though I've tried everything else there.  This isn't a sustainable solution if it does work because the majority of my other games/software require the latest drivers and rightfully so.   Reinstalling video drivers every time I want to use X-Plane is pretty ridiculous.

Answer 2

Try to update NVIDIA driver, you have 375.70 while latest is 375.95 (I use it) and also that 375.70 driver had problems and NVIDIA released HOTFIX 375.76 to fix those. Again, no reason to stay on 375.70 since you keeping Windows up-to-date, so you should do same with NVIDIA drivers.

Another thing could be your 970 has 3.5 REAL GB + 0.5 FAKE GB of VRAM (google it for details) so keep monitoring VRAM usage in X-Plane and in GPU-Z (mine shows 4.7GB VRAM usage)

Comments

Ya I update my video drivers frequently and anxiously hope that this will be the update that fixes it.  Every time I'm disappointed..  I updated to 375.95 tonight.  No change.  Further I tried it out under X-Plane 11 beta too.  Still does it.

I'm aware of the 970 issue.  While this shorts the card on memory ever so slightly, It has never caused an issue before.  With a game library of over 500 games, X-Plane is the only software on my computer having an issue with my system.

While I would love to just go out and buy a new video card, that isn't very practical.  I'll see if my son would be willing to let me run his video card to test the theory.  Barring anything else I'll have to try wiping my computer and starting over.  I'd really rather not go there due to the stupid limited authorization DRM systems most of the add on designers use.  That will have to be a last resort.