I was searching the forums and seen that a lot of people complained about the SimFlyers airport scenery. Most said it was a complete hog and made your FPS go to hell.Are there any airport scenery free or payware that doesn't do this? I understand that adding any airport will cost some FPS, but if it was done well you could get a nice airport without it driving your FPS into the ground. Is there anything like that?Thanks for the info anyone might have.. :-)

Aerosoft's German airport series are widely renowned for their accurate sceneries which don't really affect FPS at all.Well worth taking a look at!www.aerosoft.comFly Tampa! sceneries are excellent,I have all of them and they really are superb.You can download demo's from his site so give it a go.www.flytampa.comJohn http://homepage.eircom.net/~eamonnmca/images/logo_ba.JPGwww.bavirtual.co.uk Senior Captain Simflight.com Staff Reviewer

A bit of a double-edged-sword, that question....Yes, most add-on airports will have an effect on overall FPS, but of equal importance is also the quality and amount of AI traffic present.For example: Gary Summons' marvellous Heathrow Pro will have an impact...in my case it knocks it down from aprox 30FPS (default Heathrow) to around 20, when facing in towards the airport center. Once I add AI (using PAI traffic; all of the commercial and cargo from their Official Packages site) then it'll drop to around 10FPS.This is using the AFCAD as supplied with Heathrow Pro. Smaller airports obviously will not have the same impact...such as Gary's Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, etc.One recently found airport which is brilliantly detailed and with the games' default AFCAD, very busy.....Brussels International (EBBR), by Robert Buysen (http://users.pandora.be/robert.buysen.fs2000.pages/index.html) is surprisingly good on FPS....I lose maybe a total of 5 compared to the default airport :)Many airports now have the moving, dynamic scenery which will also eat a few FPS, but they can be turned off in the sims' settings, but thats a shame as they help make the airport 'come to life'......If you are having problems with addons and cannot accept the performance hit, maybe look to the 'Jetways and Terminals for ACOF' (http://www.januranusjaymartin.de/airflightsimulatoraddons.html) which will enhance many default airports by adding , surprisingly enough, jetways to the terminals!!! It's very effective too :)Gary Summons' UK2000 series airports mentioned above are payware and come highly recommended if your system can handle them, and that lovely Brussels, and the Jetways enhancer are freebies.....OK, I hope this is of some use....

Have a look at Swedflights ESSA, ESGG, ESMS + EKCH - packet. I think they are both nice and fps-friendly.

Hi,Well, the best detailed and FPS friendly scenery I have EVER used is the Dubai Int by Flytampa, its a marvel how he managed to make such a detailled airport and have FPS that are as good, if not better than the defaults.Excellent workDan.

Oh I'm so hurt that no one mentioned our Gatwick scenery.:-roll This is my first plug for our own stuff. I know several of you have it already. lol. :-)

In my experience:I'd have to agree that Aerosoft has the best record of offering exceptional detail while keeping framerates in mind. I just wish they'd do some U.S. airports. The fellow/team who does the UK2000 series of airports also knows how to balance great looks with reasonable framerates. http://www.uk2000scenery.bizland.com/puplic/index.htmFlyTampa's San Diego looks great and doesn't affect framerates much, but then it's a smaller airport. Their larger Tampa does hit framerates, though still not as bad as most Simflyers'.Don't completely rule out Simflyer's, though. Their latest Houston Intercontinental does incorporate a feature that allows you to easily set the level of detail displayed, without having to change your overall display settings within Flight Simulator. With this feature, you can easily exclude excess vehicles, buildings, trees, etc.. that do most of the framerate slapping. Even with the extras gone, the airport still looks a whole lot better than the default. I don't know if Simflyers has plans to add this nifty tool to previous airports, but I'm sure future releases will have it. - Matt D.

Try the excellent products (freeware!) from ISD. Their italian airports are outstanding and FREE. I have noted no appreciable loss of frames using them with great satisfaction. Just do a search in the avsim library or check out their web site. (www.isdproject.com)Eric

I find it really comes down to the airport itself. Large airports with multiple terminals and countless objects are going to be framerate killers. I find that although they look nice, the sudden drop in performance actually takes away rather than adds to the flight sim experience. Once you add traffic using multiple runways, framerates plummet. On the other hand, smaller airports that maybe only have one terminal and not as many objects don't suffer from this problem. Madeira from Aerosoft is a good example of this. It performs great on my system. Flight1's Islands of the West Indies vol 3 is another example. Much smaller airports, and very little hit on framerates.This is why I tend to stay away from the larger airport addons. Another product I like is Lago's FS Enhancer. It allows you to add a decent amount of objects to airports, with little or no framerate hit. Sure, the objects look nothing like the high quality addon airports, but they look much better than the default, and can still offer higher performance.

How about George Grimshaw's KBOS? AWESOME scenery; payware quality and free. Download here in the avsim file library.

Thanks for all the input guys. It seems like there are tons of great airports for Europe but not as many for the US. huh.

That may be true but you probably are not aware of many great airports on this side of the Atlantic. There are a few top-notch free Canadian airports done in GMAX done by those two brothers (forgot the name but first letter is 'M')) and a beautiful package of Californian coastal GA airports - it was even reviewed by Avsim. All these airports are listed in Avsim library under FS2002 but most will work just fine in FS9. I would claim there are at least 30 top-notch payware quality airports in North America available in Avsim library. The trick is to have a few key author names and then search through the library is much easier. If you are interested I might give you those names by tomorrow.Michael J.http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg