Hi guys,

A few days ago, I returned to P3D after a long break and went on a shopping spree.

I purchased Orbx ESSA, LYBE, EFHK and LOWI, Simwings EGLL and EDDF, FlyTampa EHAM and Taxi2Gate LFPG.

I have an i7 processor and a GTX 1080ti card, 16 GB ram and M2 SSD, and spent a long time optimizing my sim to have amazing visuals and performance until I found my perfect sweet spot.

Then sadly, I found out that dynamic lights at some airports is done with an extremely bad optimization tanking FPS by more than 50-70% in some cases. My worst offenders are the Orbx products, namely ESSA, LOWI and EFHK. 

LOWI is a very scenic airport, so I'll forgive that one, and will use it only during the day. LYBE's impact is not too great, and I'll try to work out on a fix with MK Designs for EFHK.

However, Orbx ESSA, is extremely power hungry. Even on the runway, I am loosing FPS over there despite its not even in the terminal area.

I have contacted Orbx for a refund on ESSA, but sadly got no response. A lot of people have also complained about the Orbx sceneries in the past that their performance is horrible with dymamic lights even on high-end machines, and all the Orbx devs say is that they are unable to replicate the problem, and that "they don't get a lot of complaints" about dynamic lights performance, yet I have seen several at their forums, and here on avsim as well. 

The only way to solve the issues at Orbx airports is to change the AA from 4x SGSSAA to 8x MSAA, but then I get a very bad shimmering at other sceneries. For example EFHK is an eyesore with 8x MSAA somehow, with all the shimmering (even at night it was very hard to read the taxi signs with 8x MSAA over there).

At the same time I am able to perfectly keep 30 FPS locked at Simwings EDDF and EGLL, same at Taxi2Gate LFPG and FlyTampa EHAM (with occasional drops to 25 FPS in terminal areas but that's acceptable and still smooth).

Keep in mind that these are much bigger airports than Orbx ESSA, EFHK and LOWI, yet they run fine, so lowering the settings should not be an acceptable fix from Orbx. Their dynamic lighting is simply bad, and unfortunately they have not admitted it. I do not own KSAN but have read many people have complained about the performance of this Orbx airport as well 

Now, thankfully, inibuilds (https://www.inibuilds.com/dynamic-lighting), have fixed the dynamic lighting at some of the Orbxs airports. If a third party developer is able to issue great dynamic lighting at a low performance cost, how come Orbx can't despite its their own scenery? 

Sadly, they have not released any fix for Orbx LOWI or ESSA. So my question is, is there any way that you can replace the badly customized dynamic lighting on Orbx airports somehow yourself, like they have done?

I will not be able to buy anymore Orbx if they continue releasing unoptimized airports and at the same time not responding to refund requests. I run my screen at 3340 x 1440 4x  SGSSAA which is heavy, but if my system is strong enough to handle other developers mega airports like London, Frankfurt and Paris (even with dynamic lights on) the problem is clearly with Orbx as you are forced to lower AA to 8x MSAA. Even others in the forum had issues with RTX 2080ti which is an even stronger graphics card than mine...

Sorry for the long thread. I just wanted to make everything clear. Any insight would be appreciated. 

 

Yeah, this happens with some airports due to the techniques used during development - usually related to how the ground polygon was modelled and layered. There isn't much you can do about it unless you're willing to cut back on SSAA or create and place your own dynamic lights which are dimmer and smaller than provided by the scenery (even this sometimes doesn't work). I just disable the dynamic light BGL at the airports where this is a problem. Sadly ESSA is one of those airports and especially the ones with large amounts of PBR when running in v4x. Or alternatively v5x is much better at handling PBR and high SSAA.

12 minutes ago, DModjo said:

Yeah, this happens with some airports due to the techniques used during development - usually related to how the ground polygon was modelled and layered. There isn't much you can do about it unless you're willing to cut back on SSAA or create and place your own dynamic lights which are dimmer and smaller than provided by the scenery (even this sometimes doesn't work). I just disable the dynamic light BGL at the airports where this is a problem. Sadly ESSA is one of those airports and especially the ones with large amounts of PBR when running in v4x. Or alternatively v5x is much better at handling PBR and high SSAA.

I am running P3D V5.2 and have great performance everywhere except for Orbx airports, but ESSA is especially bad. 

Will try your suggestion to delete the BGLs from ESSA and EFHK to hopefully fix the problem. I'm pretty sure it will plunge those airports into total darkness as the developer claims they were developed with dynamic lighting in mind, although very badly optimized one 😄