56 minutes ago, Stearmandriver said:

It's funny; the LNAV / VNAV performance is the first thing that brought me to the iFly from the PMDG.  I see people make these comparisons and I don't understand them.  Now I agree that LNAV isn't perfect on the iFly (supposedly improvements are coming in SP1), but compared to the PMDG even with their new navdata format, the iFly seems much better to me.

My airline has a large network of proprietary RNP (AR) procedures that we rely on, and I've always enjoyed coding them into the navdata of various sim 73s and seeing how they work.  Many of these procedures are RNP .10, include things you don't see in public procedures like an RF leg to a runway waypoint, and they're built to a proprietary TERPs criteria that allows for closer proximity to terrain.  In other words, they're perfect for torture-testing the performance of a sim aircraft.

The PMDG puts me into mountains on some of these.  It won't even parse an RF leg to a runway, despite that combination being -424 compliant and used in real life.  It re-calculates VNAV path at every waypoint, sometimes with a couple hundred foot instantaneous change. 

The iFly parses all this stuff perfectly, the only complaint being that the auto flight doesn't always stay right on course.  But handflying the guidance, man, it's nice, and amazing to see this stuff work in the sim.  It's a night and day difference from the PMDG, so I'm always surprised when simmers say they're seeing the opposite.  I'm not sure what we could be doing differently. 

As far as flight model, I've seen people say this too, that the iFly feels light in turbulence.  Maybe it's because I don't use any third party turbulence apps and I have in-sim turbulence turned down to low (in 2024) because that seems more realistic to me, but the iFly flight model is better than the PMDG, and not by a little bit, and that's not even really an opinion but I'm willing to make it an objective statement - the iFly is a MUCH better 737 flight model.  I'm not sure if people are having a different experience than me, or if we're just talking about preferences or what.  Likely a little of both, there's so many different ways to set up the sim.  But it's funny - I used to defend the PMDG flight model, figuring it was plenty good enough for a desktop game, what else can you really expect?  Then I tried the iFly and saw what was possible 😉.

Good to know, Stearman.

Now, would all of you stop twisting me aarrmms to get yet another plane?!?🤣 I'm trying to pay for this dental work flying the maddog I just bought a few days ago. I think I will see what the other developer entails and if the cup of coffee is some pumpkin spice mocha frappe latte thats 20 bucks then....we'll see. But it seems that the iFly is better in several ways.... oh choices

I'm not a real pilot but I can only support what Stearmandriver says:

The IFly's flight model seems far superiour to PMDG's to me. Maybe the thrust to pitch ratio is now better in PMDG's 737 and maybe they further tuned it for the MS2024 release, that remains to be seen.

But the way the IFly handles on approach and landing in particular, much less forgiving for inaccuarte piloting, always made me think, that this is how the real thing behaves.

1 hour ago, Sonosusto said:

But it seems that the iFly is better in several ways.... oh choices

To be fair, neither addon is perfect but they're both fantastic, considering we're discussing sub-$100 entertainment products here.  I'm continually amazed by what is possible on home computers these days.

The picture of which 737 sim is better should become clearer in the next few months, when we see both PMDG's latest iteration of the NG, and the iFly SP1.  I've seen the same photos of the iFly SP1 everyone else has and they look great of course, but I'm not really a "visuals" guy.  But the chatter about the additions and polishes to SP1 have me stoked.  But, we won't know what we've got until they're both out.