4 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

That presumably means that the bottleneck is the laptop itself, not the CPU?

Well, it's this CPU model on this laptop

I haven't bought any as I'm pretty happy with default airports. Annoying thing is airport lighting at night hopefully they fix that.

Only purchased VHHH and Hong Kong scenery -- it's home 🙂 

Every other sceneries and airports are default, and will most probably stay that way.

Cheers,

2Low2Slow

Something has changed could be the XBOX customisation , 4K ULTRA no addons CPU load 40% GPU load 70% that`s better than 6 months ago.

I don`t buy addons because MSFS is still work in progress and will be likely for a few years, and still not fully DX12 in beta. 

When they make it so easy now to buy them, honestly 2 clicks and it's in your sim and your bank account is 25 bucks lighter and you're at the gate

I dont buy airports (and only have very few payware aircraft)  I downloaded some to replace missing or poor quality asobo ones in the region I depart mostly.

 

I really only buy when something is on sale.  When Orbx has any of their regular sales, I'll grab some of their airports.  I also use the "on sale" filter in the MS Store to see what is discounted.  I mostly stick with the small to medium airports anyway so I don't see a huge performance drop. 

I really try to go easy on the payware and even the freeware.  The default airports look so much better than past versions.  I remember a lot of smaller GA airports might have a rectangular grey shape with no textures that is supposed to be a terminal.  Now, you might not get perfect accuracy and detail, but even smaller airports are plausible.  You see kind of what you'd expect. 

20 minutes ago, kerosene31 said:

I really try to go easy on the payware and even the freeware.  The default airports look so much better than past versions.  I remember a lot of smaller GA airports might have a rectangular grey shape with no textures that is supposed to be a terminal.  Now, you might not get perfect accuracy and detail, but even smaller airports are plausible.  You see kind of what you'd expect.

This.

I only bought two airports in the year I use MSFS.

I am happy with the default airports. Of the time I am using the sim, about 1% of it as at an airport, the rest of the time I am flying from one to the next one.

Default airports are typically so good the drive to buy 3rd party ones has dwindled for me.  The one glaring omission is night lighting and I think that might have been by design by MS/A so as to give one compelling reason for users to use the marketplace.   Initially I bought 5 or 6, uninstalled 2 as the perf hit wasn't worth the enhancement, and have since reinstalled them post SU5's performance enhancements.  I've bought 2 or 3 more since this happened including Fly Tamp's KLAS and environs, and also FT's KLAX, which for FT I think must be decent.  This morning pre-dawn flew out of there with a slew of Real-Time Online planes coming and going and did not have even the slightest hiccough/stutter for the entire pushback/taxi/TO, in the B78X HD.  I honestly don't know how they pull of this kind of performance.  Night lighting was fabulous, VRAM up to 11Gb there.

This thread kind of sums up the topic:  https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/616302-best-looking-default-airport/?do=findComment&comment=4737318

 

So many airports, so little time. Many MSFS airport add-ons are overpriced and some are just overlooked. One of the best airports & POIs ever created is Digital Designs URSS (Sochi.) This one did not get the hype it deserves and it's a steal at $12 US when on sale.

I will certainly, as an airliner pilot it's the primary visual "candy" you get. FlyTampa, Flightbeam, DD Designs and someone else I forgot is a must buy therefore. Anything else maybe if it's an intriguing airport, well priced and/or on sale.
Freeware is all good and great, but once that person gets a new girlfriend (or other personal stuff), the very next sim and/or world update usually renders that Freeware unusuable, so I can't rely on it. Payware is a lot more consistent.

I still buy quite a lot, but I limit myself to buying the addons I want when they are on sale, with some notable exceptions. For example, I recently got FlyTampa's Las Vegas and Toronto, and will probably get their Boston when it's released. Their quality is always top notch and with the price, especially at the lowr-than-P3D price point that they release addons for MSFS. Other developers, particularly of airports that are not my focus, I'll get on sale. Recently I bought a slew of OrbX airports during their March Madness sale, for instance.

I do feel, as others said, that the default airports are sometimes of sufficient quality, particularly if it's an airport that is not super important for me, that I don't really feel the need to get a payware addon for it (freeware of course is a different story). But that's really only true for the default enhanced airports. The likes of Atlanta, Orlando, Zurich... these are all good enough for me, although I'd like to get rid of those default jetways at some point. The default not enhanced airports I still find quite bad, in general, and will buy addons to get better representations for those. BEcause for me having an okay terminal layout is not enough. I do want to see  a model that actually looks like the airport I'm flying into.

I only usually go for my local airports or ones I know well and will fly in and out of often. Pyreegue's EGPH and EGPF are my favourites and superbly well done although I also have others from Pilot Plus, Orbx and UK2000. Pilot Plus is definitely another top tier dev.

The quality of a lot of freeware addons is spectacular and with Addon linker its a cinch to pop them in and out. The community addon airports and mods are often a big step up from the default. Fligthsim.to is awesome!