One particularly interesting - and surprising - thing I noticed is how good XP10 ... flies relative to FSX, ...

 

And that's what you can't show neither in screenshots and not even in videos - you have to feel it ...

 

Apart from that, a lot of work you invested in this .

Good effort here.  As a guy who once hated XP and now flies it at least 40% of the time I can tell the other FSX people in this thread that XP is really doing a great job of looking better and better - lots of freeware additions to how it looks too.

 

Biggest complaints for XP still for me are:

 

No seasons (can be brutal since I live in northern MN where the ground can be white white white

 

No stock buildings at default airports

 

No mouse wheel operation by default... some addons do it.

 

Biggest complaints for FSX (even after 8+ years):

 

32bit architecture - VAS saturation and OOM's... which will only get worse as customers demand more eye candy

 

Bugs like dissappearing clickspots

A good comparison, thanks! A few comments from a long-time X-Plane user, but I didn't start there. Way back when, in the early days of FS and before the Web came online, I was a SysOp on the Compuserve flightsim forum where we had FS fly-ins and traded user-made scenery files with the first tools available for that. Then I got out of flight simming for years, and when I came back a few years ago, I decided to try X-Plane and just never looked back. If I had more free time, I'd probably jump back and forth between both sims, but with limited time it has to be one, and so that's X-Plane, warts and all (and boy, does it have warts).

 

One quick comment about the RealityXP GNS430 you mentioned. That *is* available for X-Plane, but it only works with 32-bit X-Plane 10, because they never upgraded the plugin for 64-bit (and even there, it requires installing under version 9 first). I think just about everyone in the X-Plane community would like a more full-featured general aviation GPS, but until that happens, the choice seems to be stay in 32-bit X-Plane 10 and use the RealityXP GPS, or move to 64-bit and use various hacks like using flight planners that can load waypoints into the stock 430 as if it were an FMS (which does work).

 

As for the graphics... there's one thing I've always disliked about X-Plane terrain, and that's the brown "beach" line that's drawn around every single coastline, every tiny island, anywhere in the world. You can see it in the screen shots above, and it drives me nuts. FSX coastlines look much more natural. 

 

On the other hand, even without the SkyMAXX clouds, X-Plane clouds look better to me than the ones in FSX, which to me look like they've been hand-painted on the background. Maybe it's the hard edges, I dunno. But you're right that FSX does a better job with approaching weather. X-Plane has this weird, sudden shift in weather effects. And it's currently not very realistic with turbulence, and doesn't model actual cumulonimbus look or feel. Weather needs improvement. On the positive side, I'm pretty sure that realistic weather is something Austin does care about, unlike ATC or auto-gen airports that he doesn't care about when using this as a personal simulator. So I expect weather will continue to improve as the sim moves forward over the years. And it is moving forward, just not as fast as we'd like.

Great topic and thanks for the time you have spent putting this all together.  I use both sims and has similar experience as you.  However I use FSX less and less these days, despite all the money I poured into it in the past ORBX etc.  I had yet another OOM mess last week flying with autogen set at sparse reduce traffic and 10 minutes from approaching the airport with the NGX.  At this time I just don't know which flight will or will not end in OOM in FSX, and I am tired of the endless tweaks cycles and debugging.  Tried DX10 but there are graphic artefacts and back to more tweaks.

 

For some of us doing these tweaks is part of the game, but after two years it's over for me.  I don't have unlimited free time to waste.  ATC, season and AI is nothing if you can't complete your flight or putting up with FPS jumping all over the place, so for me the heck with ATC, seasons and AI  LOL.

very thorough

 

well done

 

 

No seasons (can be brutal since I live in northern MN where the ground can be white white white

 

Until John Spahn's seasons payware is done, you can at least have a decent snow-covered winter with Simple Seasons. A bit tricky to install, but works well. Since version 0.5 (last week) it also has better snow textures.

Nicely done! But I'd like to point out that most of the addons you described as freeware are actually donationware, and it is a very good idea to give some of your hard earned money to the creator of these excellent sceneries, I just love the OSM sceneries!

Other than that, XPX can look even much better without spending a single $, £ our EUR. Simply by using the dataref manager to bring up cloud shadows (with the default clouds) and wonderful atmospheric scattering effects (with HDR on).

Very informative, very helpful, very much work. Thanks a lot!

*Warning: My own opinion, may not be yours*

The shots further cement my thoughts that Xplane wont be my sim of choice for at least years to come.

 

As a user:
1. Even with SkymaxPro, Xplane clouds still look like cotton wool. FSX looks way more realistic to me, although its not up to a satisfactory standard.

2. Global scenery as a whole doesn't look realistic to me. (World2Xplane might be a game changer on this aspect)
3. Water looks like a bottomless pit at times.

4. Colour palette not to my taste. 
5. User Interface is messy at best.

There is reasons why Xplane is still not mainstream. All kinds of theories/reason can be put up about the user/dev cycle, but I dont believe that that alone is the reason for Xplane lack of popularity compared to MSFS. If the sim has such great capabilities, users will FLOCK to Xplane in a heart beat, and so will devs. (Although some will stubbornly stay with FSX, much like FS9)

There's more to X-Plane than just the eye-candy:

 

- flight physics

- memory management

- GPU usage

- tbc.

 

Now, where's my PMDG A350 for X-Plane?  

A great piece of un-biased work and very interesting to see the comparisons.

I for one enjoy the smoothness of XP10 and hopefully we can see the platform iron out some of the showstoppers like weather, ATC and Seasonal changes.

Well done

There's more to X-Plane than just the eye-candy:

 

- flight physics

- memory management

- GPU usage

- tbc.

 

Now, where's my PMDG A350 for X-Plane?  

Well, eye candy is the deciding factor for me.

 

I do short haul mostly with my settings set for smoothness. Hence, I do not have OOM or as such. The only tweak I have in my FSX.cfg is HIGHMEMFIX thats it.

I think the only reason FSX is comparable is because of the extensive amount of addons. Give X-plane that same attention and you'll be miles ahead.

 

I enjoy and fly in both sims, but will only invest in addons for Xplane going forward. FSX is getting too slow and getting pushed too hard for today's standards. It will be a slow transition, and FSX will likely be part of my simming for a long time since I have lots of great stuff for it, but X-plane is starting to offer some really nice stuff and it's time to support that.

 

It's also nice to know that if I need more computer power, I can upgrade and see results. I don't have to overclock, and I could just upgrade my video card.

Very entertaining, enlightening, and educational for me!

 

JOHN

I think the only reason FSX is comparable is because of the extensive amount of addons. Give X-plane that same attention and you'll be miles ahead.

In planes and scenery, maybe yes.

 

But some things like the way clouds are and many others just put me off. Even with REX in Xplane 9, the clouds still look cotton wool-nish, its just the way xplane layer the cloud textures. They are too transparent.

 

If those plus many others mentioned are corrected in Xplane 11, we have a winner.