However, after messing with the settings according to your recommendations, I see only slight differences; not nearly enough improvement to change my mind about the taxiways.
Have you seen this screenshot ?
http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php?topic=1260.msg10164#msg10164This is not a "slight difference", it's totally different. So, if you don't see this on your PC, we should find WHY, and you are free to contact me in private so we can check better your config.
Don't forget that we have a Demo version, which has been downloaded by many thousands of users so, by leaving your review in public like that, instead of investigating the reasons why you don't get the expected results that most of the people are getting, the only damage you do is to your review only, since we have the Demo that is far more eloquent than any review might be.
How have scenery creators such as FlyTampa been able to produce such incredibly high-quality ground textures across whole airports?
Give the ample evidence that has been given in this forum, I think that until you are not able to find your issue, and reach the quality that JFK has been designed for, it's better not comment about other "incredibly" high quality ground textures. Also, I think you said yourself that you never had this issue at KORD, why don't commenting about that, instead ?
I get higher frame rates on FlyTampa in San Francisco, Miami, Dubai, and Boston than I do with your FSDT JFK.
These airports are all way smaller than JFK, none of them has so many terminals with so many different textures ( texture repeteability keeps vram requirements down ) and none of them stays in NYC area, which has a considerable impact on fps on its own. Again, have you tried other airports we did, like Zurich for example ?
And, evaluating fps for a scenery should be done in the correct way. For example, if you *really* want to know the fps impact of the scenery itself, you should turn off AI entirely, because in that case you are testing more of your AI package fps impact than the scenery. This is more true, the more parking stands the airport has, and also which models appear more often, which is another variable that should be excluded for a correct judgement.
Speaking of which, I would like to point out another problem of the review: you complained about not being able to selectively turn off features, like other developers do. It IS possible to turn off features, and of course in the most logical and simpler way: by using the Scenery Complexity slider, since the scenery objects that impact the most, DO respond to the complexity slider. And, this is better than simply cutting off whole BGL, because instead of turning off all objects of a certain kind, the scenery complexity slider allows for more granularity so, at Extremely Dense everything will be in, something will disappear at Very Dense, something more at Dense, etc. This way, it would be possible to still see some objects, instead of having to choose from on or off for whole classes.
I'll be checking this thread a couple times a day until then if you guys want to continue discussing it.
I'll be away for a couple of days but, feel free to contact me anyway, so we can discuss your system config in detail, your settings, your other addons, etc.
