Disappointed

[johnost]

I bought Dovetail's Flight School at Steam out of curiosity to see what DTG could do, not because I need training. Initially I was favorably impressed with simple setup, nice graphics, good looking planes, world coverage and nice flight characteristics considering the low price. However, after having made numerous free flights in different parts of the world, I have experienced a consistent problem. After flights of 15-30 minutes my computer freezes without any warnings, to the point where I have to throw the power switch to the computer and restart. This happened with the default game settings of "high", and lower settings only increased the time to the freezeup. This behavior looks like an OOM problem, but I run FSX Acceleration on the same computer with high settings and Orbx scenery and no such problems.

 

An additional disappointment has been posting the problem on Steam's forum twice and finding my postings deleted in short order. Reading through many other postings in the DTG FS forum on Steam indicates that many people are having similar problems with computer crashes, blue screens, etc. Furthermore, DTG - who initially have been running the forum asking for comments to the sim - seems to have lost interest in participating. This does not look promising for the upcoming full simulator!

 

I am posting this out of curiosity, hoping to hear other participant's experiences with the DTG FS sim.

 

 

CPU I7-960 OC @ 4.0 Ghz, Asetek Water Cooler

Asus P6T X58 MB, 6Gb RAM Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600Mhz

EVGA nVidia GTX 570, 1.28Gb DDR5 RAM

1 Tb SATA II HD, Kingston 128Gb SSD (FSX only)

Apevia 800W PS, Win 7 64-bit, FSX Acceleration

OrbxFTX Global BASE, OrbxFTX Global Vector, OrbxFTX open LCEurope & open LC NA, FS Genesis World Mesh, DX10 Fixer

[johnost]

OK - in spite of no apparent interest in this subject I feel I should correct the above statements. I have done some testing and found that - as we all know - in FSX the CPU works hard and the GPU is more like loafing. However, in DTG Flight School the opposite is the case, the CPU is loafing and the GPU is heavily stressed. In my case the GTX 570 GPU and memory was running at 100% and, because the fan speed in Auto did not increase as it should, the GPU temperature reached into the 80's C resulting in the eventual shutdown.

 

I am getting a new graphics card!

[PhantomTweak]

I am not "not interested", I just don't have the DTG FS. Bettter I remain silent and be thought a fool...

 

because the fan speed in Auto did not increase as it should

Isn't there a way to set it to Manual, and 100%? You can't make it run too cool, so setting it to 100% won't hurt anything, as long as your PS can handle the constant draw. If it can't, a stronger PS is in order.

Nothing wrong with a new GPU, don't get me wrong, but if just setting the fan speed to 100% solves the problem, why not save the money? I'm a cheap SOB...errr frugal. Very, very frugal :)

 

Anyway, good fortune to you. Hope things work out well no matter what route you take.

Pat☺

[johnost]

Hi Pat, thanks for your comments. I downloaded a program called Performance Control Panel from NVidia, which allows me to set fan speed to manual among other things. This allowed me to set the fan from 0 - 100%, and at 70% it keeps the GPU temp in the 60's C. That seemed to solve the problem, but after a while I got freeze ups again. Since this is a 64-bit program, it should not be caused by the classical FSX OOM, but I suspect it may be caused by the graphics card limited RAM of 1.28 Gb, as the RAM usage in flight is running very close to this value.

 

Since the GTX570 is several years old, and the GURUs say that CPU speeds are not going to increase much, but more emphasis on GPU performance, I have purchased a GTX1060, which has gotten rave reviews for its price/performance ratio - and it has 6Gb of RAM. I have not had time to install it yet, so we will see.

[tgon]

DTG should be interested in memory leaks. Not even acknowledging your requests for support makes an unfavourable company statement regarding its customers.

 

I hope the new card remedies your woes but you might wish to consider another flight sim if not.

[johnost]

Thanks tgon - yes I am a little disappointed at DTG. I have visited their website looking for a forum, but all that comes up is the Steam forum, which they don't seem to participate in any more.

 

This is no biggie, I only purchased Flight School out of curiosity, it is cheap and it may not stay on my computer, but I will be very cautious about their new to come flight sim, which by the way now has been delayed beyond the announced end-of-2016 release.