Considering FTX Global / + Vector

Hi All,

Have been out of the flight simming loop for quite some time now but the recent pick up and promising future ahead of the series, with FSX now re-invented on Steam, has made me rekindle my hobby and I've been re-installing a lot of my old add ons as well as treating myself to a few new ones over the past weeks.  I find it quite remarkable just how much the level of detail and fidelity of these flight sim products has come in the last couple of years. Even my girlfriend, who has no interest in my hobby whatsoever(!), stopped to say 'wow' as I landed the NGX into FlyTampa's new Toronto and taxied to the terminal, as even someone with little interest can't deny that it's like actually being there!

Despite the amazing level of detail in some of the airports I've got, I still find myself underwhelmed with the default FSX terrain and landclass while en-route. As I live in the UK, I've got the Horizon Gen X photoscenery, Treescapes and UK2000 VFR Airfields to cover most of that which gives me a really immersive experience in that part of the world. I've looked at the OrbX EU offering and while I think the airfields are fantastic, far better than the UK2000 ones in terms of detail, I don't really like the generic nature of the landclass and terrain. In an area where I do a lot of VFR flying, I like to be able to pick out the landmarks. So for the most part here, Gen X photo scenery and airfields suits me perfectly.

For the rest of the world though, it's obviously a different story. I know to improve things I have two options: UTX+GEX, or the much newer FTX Global+Vector. I'd like to know people's opinions on which is better and whether you would recommend either. Is there a performance penalty? My system is pretty good but I always consider myself on a knife-edge in terms of performance in FSX. I don't use AI traffic, but I like high quality airports (FlyTampa, FSDT etc) and aircraft (PMDG, most recently A2A..). With Autogen Dense and default terrain my FPS in the NGX on approach to FlyTampa Toronto drops to about 15FPS with no AI. I don't really want it to drop lower, and I don't want to open myself up to all these OOM and VAS problems I've read so much about but (so far) been lucky enough to avoid.

Will FTX Global play ball with my existing add ons, most notably my UK photo scenery which I don't want to dispense with? I've already got FTX NA and AU (although not currently installed) and while they're great, one thing I don't like about Orbx is how it changes the autogen files and in some cases causes issues with other scenery add ons (like Earth Simulations stuff).

Sorry for this long, rambling post. If anyone had any advise on what to go for, bearing in mind Orbx have a sale on at the moment, I would really appreciate it.

Kind regards

Tom