Having just spent most of the last 4 days getting any sim to work to my satisfaction on my hardware, I've arrived at XP 11 running in Win 10 on an iMac with the Radeon Pro 570 X GPU. I am very happy with the performance of XP 11 , but I am disappointed with Auto Ortho. The main problem is: I don't know what I was supposed to experience. What is it really supposed to look like? The next problem is: I predominantly fly VFR and use the sim for rehearsing my real world flights in regional Victoria, Australia, so I need reasonably accurate terrain, roads, railways, power lines, buildings, airports and buildings for a reasonably accurate experience. Also I like to add in my own VFR reporting points and landmarks. What is the best answer, or isn't there one? 

I've read through a long post on visuals and I saw lots of acronyms that I don't understand, and I saw references to Orbx True Earth, FENIX, SimHeaven and DCS. Will any of these do what I need? I'd appreciate any advice on these before I spend days and days installing each only to find that they don't deliver.

Thanks in advance

 

Foggy

Recommend XP12 beta with a few add-ons … will get you the list later (it’s not too long).

 

1 hour ago, fognozzle said:

I predominantly fly VFR and use the sim for rehearsing my real world flights in regional Victoria, Australia, so I need reasonably accurate terrain, roads, railways, power lines, buildings, airports and buildings for a reasonably accurate experience. Also I like to add in my own VFR reporting points and landmarks. What is the best answer, or isn't there one? 

Since you seem to be isolated to Australia, you could download tiles at a much higher resolution with Ortho4XP. This is from four years ago using photoreal ZL18/19

 

For last few days i've been playing with AutoOrtho myself, and end effect is rather poor, was dissatisfied to the point that i uninstalled it...

For terrain / scenery the closest to reality, at present there's no option other than MSFS 2024 IMO... 

For other aspects such as weather depiction, clours and lighting, Xp12 wins hands down...

I use MSFS 2024 to simulate / analyse my RW glider flights because where I fly that sim gives me an astounding reproduction of reality, scenery wise... The rest, well... it's countryside...

Edited April 24Apr 24 by jcomm

Dare I ask if the OP installed AO correctly and followed the steps?  I had problems when I first installed it.  Then I realized I had to edit the scenery_packs.ini file

I was wondering the same as GoranM. My AO does a pretty good job with Australia and NZ, but the ini file is the key to success or abject failure. Our OP might like to try Lyndiman's NZ orthos, all in ZL17 and rusing XP12 bathymetry.

I couldn't find anything useful or downloadable on Australia. 

https://lyndiman.com/lyndimans-new-zealand-ortho-photography-set/

And neither AO nor Map Enhancement have the XP water effects. AO is also a work-in-progress, and users should expect to do some work installing updates (which aren't always right first time). 

Thanks for the responses. I am very impressed with the videos, and I have played with the settings in XP II, and I can see some improvements and the interaction between the scenery quality and frame rates.

I suspect that I'm not going to get much more out of my old 2019 iMac. 

I now need to decide between XP 12 and MSFS. It looks like my requirements are best met in Windows, and this needs a complete new machine. I still have more testing to do with the VFR folks in VATPAC before I decide on Windows, because everything else I do is in MACOS, and I've got to purchase a laptop for travel later this year. Looks like it may be one machine for good simming at home and another machine for travel and everything else.

I had been considering giving up on real flying, but this gear could be expensive enough to change my mind.

Foggiest

The advantage of Windows, of course, is that you can run MSFS and XP on the same operating system, side by side. And you can try XP12 for free - it is light years ahead of XP11 in many respects. Whatever you do, try for as much VRAM as possible and don't stint on the CPU either.

On 4/24/2026 at 5:52 AM, Beardyman said:

For last few days i've been playing with AutoOrtho myself, and end effect is rather poor, was dissatisfied to the point that i uninstalled it...

That's weird...for me it's like night & day and I even have to admit that I couldn't fly without it 🙂

On 4/23/2026 at 8:52 PM, Beardyman said:

For last few days i've been playing with AutoOrtho myself, and end effect is rather poor, was dissatisfied to the point that i uninstalled it...

Are you using the free or paid version? I thought the paid version has higher quality otho?

33 minutes ago, Pugilist2 said:

Are you using the free or paid version? I thought the paid version has higher quality otho?

There is no paid version of autoortho. You are likely thinking of XP Map Enhancement.

Keep in mind Laminar does not really like the use of these tools and immediately ban any discussion of them in their discord for reasons that were discussed at lengths here before

 

 

1 hour ago, peroni said:

Keep in mind Laminar does not really like the use of these tools and immediately ban any discussion of them in their discord for reasons that were discussed at lengths here before

Laminar seems to dislike a lot of things that make XP12 look better!!!! Instead of banning these types of discussion, they should have a non-support section for those that want to use these types of additions! 

Edited April 25Apr 25 by Mike_CFII_MEL

2 hours ago, peroni said:

reasons that were discussed at lengths here before

That’s very interesting. I’m not on discord but would like to read their reasoning. Could you direct me or at least provide a time frame where I might search for that discussion?

37 minutes ago, Patco Lch said:

That’s very interesting. I’m not on discord but would like to read their reasoning. Could you direct me or at least provide a time frame where I might search for that discussion?

This is the explanation in discord:

Unfortunately, due to copyright concerns, we cannot provide official/community support for Autoortho or Map Enhancement. The mods and helpers of this Discord have been assigned to lock/remove support requests. We suggest contacting the original authors for support queries. Apologies!