ericcan

I designed my own concept LOT livery, but my PS skills are limited when it comes to actually painting it onto the kit. If you have the time and skills to give it a try, please PM me. I'll send you my concept, please also show some example of your previous PMDG work. Regards, Derek

I'd like to use XPX on my mid 2011 iMac, but it just doesn't perform as well as FSX in Windows on Bootcamp. I was quite surprised by this, I assumed that XPX would be able to take better advantage of Mac hardware and 64 bit OS. But I have to keep my graphics on their lowest settings, clouds on the lowest settings, and as a result things are blurry, complex airports run poorly, nice 3rd party aircraft look terrible inside and out to the point that the resolution on gauges is not all that greatly visible. I would love to use XPX more often but it's just not near as usable on my particular Mac, I bet it performs far better on a current Mac since their hardware, and GPU is greatly improved. Oddly though I can run PMDG 737, 777, tons of high quality 3rd party airports and applications on the same Mac in bootcamp and get a better visual, and better performing experience with frames in the mid to upper 20's. Back to the main question though, a Mac user does not miss out on much since it seems all of the great sceneries and aircraft run on both platforms. The only thing I've noticed is some 3rd party applications might only run on windows.

I'll give you another perspective that can help you. I use an iMac from mid 2011. For my daily and personal computer use I always prefer a Mac, it works better for my life, but I wish I had a gaming PC dedicated just for flight sim. I put my money into my flying career rather than sim flying so for now I do not have a gaming PC. I do however use FSX on my Mac in Windows 7 64bit. Everyone knows that a Mac's hardware is not geared for gaming, but here's my specs to give you a perspective on that you can do. 2.7 GHz i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM and only 512 MB of video memory from an AMD 6770M. I run the PMDG 737 and 777 on it as well as many great airports and sceneries from UK2000, Orbx, Flightbeam, FSDT, Taxi2Gate, FlyTampa, and so on. I run ActiveSkyNext, and I have run AI traffic, but I found that tends to push it a little far and it crashes after a while, so if I want some traffic I stick with VATSIM flying. My settings are obviously not super high, but scenery, and aircraft look good, and my frames are often in the mid to upper 20's which is totally fine. There are some airports that just do not work well with this system. LatinVFR's Miami V2 works, but the frames are in the mid teens to low 20's, but all other LatinVFR works. Other big complex airports work, like Flightbeam SFO, UK2000 Heathrow, Taxi2Gate Istanbul, and so on work very well. I don't know the rhyme or reason why one complex airport works very well, and another is just terrible. Lighting at a 3rd party airport can be a big problem. For example Geneva, I can fly in there during day VFR, but IFR or night when lights are on, then the frames are terrible. Belgrade V2 works great when there are no approach lights. All other lights at this airport are fine, just approach lights cause problems for me. At UK2000 Heathrow, I can do night flights no problem, and it looks very nice. Ultimately what I'm getting at is yes with older and under performing hardware you can still have a good experience, but if you are able to upgrade or over clock some stuff, I'd do it.

If anyone is interested in if they should take the plunge on buying charts cloud subscription, there's a somewhat long review/overview of the charts service on the iPad on YouTube. There's not too many in-depth reviews, but this will give you a view of how it operates, and looks, and the ups and downs of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS_WIPs6TsU Regards, Nelson