Seriously? You put Flightbeam ahead of ORBX? I have everything John Venema and company have released, and the only airport that gives me any fps issues is Brisbane.
Yep, you heard right, but I am talking about just ORBX airports not the ground textures, landclass, etc.
Here's the reason. I own PNW and AU SP3 and the following airports: KORS, Cairns, Brisbane, Coffs (Came with SP3 download), Melbourne, and Canberra. Granted the airports have their own respective Control Panels where you can uncheck features to gain performance, but none the less, I find them to be way less optimized than the airports by FSDT, FlyTampa and Flightbeam.
Just to be clear, I am not saying that I think ORBX airports look bad, because they dont, however I am not really impressed with the performance unless you uncheck some/a lot of the scenery items. Granted they all perform well when you are flying around them in simple g/a type a/c, but once you load up the major hubs and fly into them with something like the PMDG 747 or LDS 767, then the performance can be a little less than desirable unless you uncheck some of the features, where as FSDT airports dont suffer the same fate due to the way addon manager loads and off loads scenery objects, and FSDT seems to LOD their objects more than most other scenery designers. A good example is the wheels on ground vehicles at often dont appear until they are closer.
In all fairness to ORBX, they never claim to create super FPS friendly stuff, even John has said so himself, and that if you plan on using the larger hubs with a fair amount of options checked, lots of AI, and a complex a/c, you better have a newer/faster computer with lots of RAM.
I had put of buying PNW and AU SP3 for a long time, basically since their products first came out and it wasn't until the Christmas sale that I took the plunge and basically bought all the products I mentioned in the course of two days. I had put it off all that time because I primarly fly airliners and didn't think it would really be cost effective and that good of a purchase decision for me since I wouldn't really get my monies worth at 30k feet. Having said that, I bought it all anyway because it was a good deal and frankly, aside from tooling around KORS in helicopters and other light a/c, I haven't even used the scenery much because I cant get the KSEA or KPDX area ground textures to stay in focus when flying an airliner or at speeds of greater than 150 kts. Granted this is probably because I have a older CPU (E8400 @ 3.85ghz), still run XP 32bit, and only have 2 GB of RAM, however I can fly the same areas (KSEA/KPDX) using GEX textures, complex a/c, and loads of AI and suffer no ill effects of blurry textures. Trust me, I have tried all sorts of combinations of autogen and scenery complexity settings, but when flying tubes, those areas just dont perform well for me, in light a/c they work fine, but not with tubes on my rig.
I haven't even flown AU yet, except to test different airports with varying amounts of stuff unchecked. I can say that I have found pretty decent compromises at those airports, but none the less I wish I had stuck to my gut feeling and not purchased the AU stuff since its been almost 3 months now and still have absolutely no desire to fly around Austrailia. BTW, the only airport that I have found in AU that really sucks the life out of FPS is Canberra, and apparently I am not the only one since there are a fair amount of people asking for a performance patch for that field.
Lastly, in regards to ORBX airports, I am not really fond of the way they do the ground textures for the airports using those mega sized photo bgl's. I wish they could find a way to do it like FSDT did the ground textures for KDFW. However, they dont use an engine like FSDT does to add/subtrack objects so it is what it is.
All I can do is compare their products against other products I already own and make a judgement based on how they perform on my rig. When I can fly into FSDT's KDFW or Flightbeams KSFO and maintain FPS in the mid to high 20's with a lot of AI buzzing around and other scenery objects present, then compare it to what ORBX products give me, I would have to say that for me personally FSDT and Flightbeam wins hands down on performance and amount of scenery objects vs. ORBX stuff.
I dont wish I could get a refund on all the stuff I had purchased since I got all PNW Blue and AU SP3 and 6 airports for just a little over $200, but if John sent me an email saying he would gladly refund my money I would probably take him up on his offer since I just cant get into Austrailia, the PNW and flying small g/a aircraft, which is what their products seem to be mainly geared to, with the exception of Austrailia since they offer some large hubs.
I think that one of the best and worst assets of ORBX is that they have a lot of people working on stuff which is good because it allows them to develope large areas in less time. However, and this is just an assumption on my part, due to having a lot of people working on different airports can also mean that each developer can had a different level of skills and knowledge which can ultimately lead to some airports being really FPS friendly and other airports like Canberra being FPS hogs despite its small size when compared to Melbourne or Cairns which deliver fairly good performance and are bigger airports. I would be willing to bet that if all those airports had been done by FSDT, they would look just as good and most likely perform much better without the need for unchecking objects.
In the mean time, I just leave the ORBX Control Panel set to "Default FSX" and continue to enjoy all my FSDT and FlyTampa airports in the US, and now Flightbeam's KSFO. When I get the urge for some g/a action I will enable ORBX and go to KORS or any of the other areas I bought.
