Sample sim setup diagnostic

Windows recorded 4,401 live dumps in the last 90 days — a live dump is Windows quietly saving a record of a driver fault without going to a blue screen. 4,083 of them are graphics faults: the GPU engine hung, or the display driver stopped responding and had to be restarted. They start on 7 July and run right up to 2026-08-27 14:41, roughly two hours before this snapshot. Thirty-six of them landed in the ten minutes after the PC came back from its unclean restart on 25 August.

In the cockpit this is what a momentary freeze, a black flash, a stutter that lasts a second, or an outright crash to desktop looks like. At this volume it is not background noise — it is the most likely single explanation for the sim crashes further down this report.

What these files cannot tell us is whether the fault is in the driver software or in the card itself. The card reads healthy at idle: 39 °C, no thermal or power throttling ever recorded, PCIe link at full gen-3 x16, no memory errors. The driver is version 591.86, dated 20 January 2026, so about seven months old.

Given the volume and how current it is, getting the graphics driver reinstalled cleanly — or moving to a different driver version — is a reasonable next step, following NVIDIA's own guidance rather than any procedure from here. Be aware that NVIDIA's "clean installation" option wipes every custom Control Panel 3D setting, and this PC has four that differ from default (including a Threaded optimization value on the X-Plane profile), so they would need setting again afterwards. MSI Afterburner is also installed; these files cannot show whether a GPU overclock or undervolt profile is being applied at startup, but if you use one, flying a few sessions without it is a cheap way to rule it out. If the faults continue on a freshly installed driver with no tuning profile, the card itself becomes the prime suspect.

X-Plane 12's log for the session that started at 09:52 on the morning of capture carries the sim's own crash footer — that run did not shut down cleanly. The sim's crash folder is empty because seven dumps have already been auto-uploaded to Laminar, with the upload index last touched on 19 August. X-Plane 11 has five crash reports on disk from the last 90 days, MSFS 2024 is holding five older crash reports plus five NVIDIA GPU dump files, and MSFS 2020 has one.

What is notable is what X-Plane 12 did *not* log: zero errors, zero warnings, no plugin load failures. A sim that dies with a clean log is usually being taken down from underneath, which fits the graphics-driver faults above rather than any add-on misbehaving. The NVIDIA GPU dump files sitting in both MSFS folders point the same way. That is a consistent pattern, not proof — nothing here timestamps a specific crash against a specific driver fault.

One other thing shows up in the X-Plane 12 log: six pieces of software inject themselves into the sim's rendering — OBS, the Steam overlay and its shader cache layer, the Epic (EOS) overlay, and two NVIDIA layers. Overlays hooking the renderer are a well-known source of stutters and crashes in Vulkan, and X-Plane 12 runs on Vulkan.

If the crashes continue after the graphics driver has been dealt with, shutting those overlay apps down before launching — one at a time so you can tell which matters — is the cheapest test available, and it changes nothing permanently.

In X-Plane 11, pitch, roll and throttle are all on a device that is plugged in right now — your Thrustmaster stick. Yaw (rudder) is not. It sits on a device slot the sim last saw on 17 August and which was not present at capture. That slot is the virtual joystick (vJoy) that carries your one-G PC-12 panel: the same slot holds 87 button assignments for the PC-12's battery, avionics, autopilot and de-ice switches.

So the practical picture is: when the one-G rig and its bridge software are running, you have rudder. When you launch X-Plane 11 with just the Thrustmaster stick, that stick has no yaw axis assigned in XP11 at all, and you will be flying with no rudder input beyond the keyboard. X-Plane 12 is not affected — there the same Thrustmaster device has yaw on axis 3.

The uncertainty here is only about intent, not about the reading: the binding genuinely points at a device the sim did not have. If you always fly XP11 with the one-G panel powered up, this is normal and nothing needs doing. If you sometimes fly it with the stick alone, assigning yaw on the Thrustmaster in XP11's joystick screen is worth doing before the next flight.

MSFS 2024 is holding 25 saved control profiles, including eleven for the T.A320 Pilot stick alone and seven for the Logitech Flight Yoke, with names like "Test", "Blank test", "My new general profile_1/_2/_3". Three of them contain no bindings at all: the keyboard profile "Props", the T-Rudder profile "My new general profile", and the vJoy "Tobii" profile.

These records carry no marker for which preset is actually selected, and deleted profiles can linger in the data, so nothing here says a blank one is in use — and you have not reported a dead device. The risk with this many near-identical names is simply picking the wrong one and then wondering why the stick behaves differently from last time.

Worth a glance at the Controls screen to confirm which preset each device is currently on. Do not delete anything unless it still shows up in the sim and you know you do not want it.

X-Plane 12 has four keys carrying two commands each: Ctrl+F is bound to both "fail system" and "rotate view down slowly", Ctrl+comma to both a dataref test and "backward slow", and Ctrl+minus / Ctrl+equals each to both a radio standby flip and a zoom command.

The practical effect is that one of the two fires and the other does not, so a shortcut occasionally does the wrong thing — and Ctrl+F triggering a system failure when you meant to move the view is the one that could actually spoil a flight.

This is minor and easy to leave alone; if any of those four shortcuts have ever behaved oddly for you, the keyboard page in X-Plane 12's settings is where to untangle them. X-Plane 11's keyboard map has no duplicates.

Your only working drive, C:, has 30 GB free out of 931 GB. On it sit MSFS 2020 (Store), MSFS 2024 (Store), X-Plane 11 and X-Plane 12, plus Windows itself and a full Visual Studio installation.

That is enough to fly today, but it is not enough room for a single MSFS update, which routinely wants tens of gigabytes of temporary space on top of what it finally installs. A drive this close to full also tends to show up as longer scenery loads and the occasional stutter, because Windows has less room to work with when it swaps memory to disk.

There is nothing here that says the sims are currently failing for want of space. Clearing sim leftovers would barely dent it — X-Plane 11's replay folder is 164 MB and X-Plane 12's shader cache 137 MB, and the shader cache simply gets rebuilt (making the first flight after slower). Getting back to comfortable means moving or removing something substantial, or adding a drive; worth planning before the next big sim update lands rather than during it.

Both X-Plane installs have the master sound switch set to off in their saved preferences. This is the single switch in Settings > Sound that mutes everything the sim produces — engines, warnings, ATC, the lot.

If you have been flying X-Plane in silence, or wondering why SayIntentions ATC audio never arrives in the sim, this is the first thing to look at. It is one toggle in each sim's own sound page.

One caveat worth stating: it is possible this was set deliberately, and it is also possible it reads that way because you sometimes use this PC remotely (the only audio endpoint Windows reported at capture was the remote-session one). Either way, checking the master slider on X-Plane's sound page costs nothing.

MSFS 2024's settings define three sim windows totalling 8.2 million pixels a frame, and MSFS 2020 defines two totalling 7.2 MP. Pixels per frame is the single biggest lever on frame rate, and on a 6 GB RTX 2060 an 8 MP frame is a heavy ask — that is the same pixel count as a 4K screen, drawn across several windows.

Two caveats matter before you act on that. First, this counts every window the settings file *defines*, not the ones actually open on your last flight — MSFS keeps a definition for every extra window you have ever set up. Second, two of the MSFS 2024 windows are saved at positions on no currently active panel, and this snapshot was taken over a remote connection, so that may simply reflect your normal monitors being absent from the remote session rather than a screen you no longer own.

Your settings already show you compensating: MSFS 2024 is on the Low preset with a 30 fps target, dynamic settings on, DLSS anti-aliasing and FSR frame generation enabled. MSFS 2020 is on High with vsync on. That is a sensible read of the hardware.

If MSFS 2024 feels heavy with several windows open, the specific lever for you is SecondaryScaling, currently 1.000000 — that is the render resolution of the extra windows, and lowering it keeps outboard panels usable without paying full price for them. It has no effect on the main view.

X-Plane 11's Custom Data folder contains an AIRAC cycle 2009 — valid 13 Aug to 10 Sep 2020, so about six years out of date — and anything in Custom Data overrides the data the sim ships with. Alongside it are 13,769 CIFP procedure files from that same old cycle. The sim itself grumbles about it in its log, warning that the provider data has an outdated format and asking for data built for X-Plane 11.50 or later.

What you will notice is approaches, departures and frequencies that no longer match your charts, or procedures that simply are not there. X-Plane 12 is clean on this front — it has no stale override.

You already have current US terminal data in place: the FAA CIFP cycle 2608, effective 6 August 2026, installed into earth_424.dat by the Hub's Navdata Updater. The old files just sit alongside it. Three ways to resolve the rest, and which is right depends on where you fly: refresh the cycle through Navigraph FMS Data Manager, which is already installed on this PC and covers the whole world including enroute data; keep using the Hub's Navdata Updater, remembering it covers US terminal procedures only — approaches, SIDs, STARs and airport fixes in FAA airspace, with everything enroute and everything outside the US staying on X-Plane's own database; or remove the old Custom Data files entirely and fall back to the cycle X-Plane 11 shipped with (cycle 1802 — older still, but it never expires and never warns).

In the MSFS 2020 Community folder, the package scenery-ma-flyingscool-kbedv0.2.1_VMSQ2 contains another folder of the same name inside it. MSFS only looks one level down, so it sees a folder with nothing recognisable in it and skips the add-on entirely.

The symptom is simply that the KBED scenery is not there when you fly to it, with no error message anywhere to tell you why. This is the most common reason a downloaded add-on "doesn't work".

The fix is to move the inner folder up one level so it sits directly in Community, replacing the outer wrapper — a file-manager job rather than anything in the sim, and worth doing with the sim closed. Everything else in both Community folders is valid; the SayIntentions entries that look unusual are shortcuts created by the SayIntentions installer and are working as intended.

In X-Plane 11's scenery order, KSEA Demo Area sits at position 12, below Global Airports at position 11. X-Plane reads that list top-down and the first pack to claim an airport wins, so the default Global Airports version of Seattle hides the custom layout underneath it.

You would only notice this if you fly to KSEA and wonder why the demo area's layout is not showing. Everything else in the list is above Global Airports and is loading fine.

Two entries in the same list — "FSC Training" and "Aerosoft - EGLL Heathrow" — are empty folders with no scenery inside. They contribute nothing and are not causing any harm; the Heathrow one is worth noting only in case you thought that add-on was installed. X-Plane 12's list is ordered correctly (the only entry below Global Airports there is a Salzburg library, which is exactly where a library belongs).