Bdub22

I did two test flights tonight to compare performance between the iFly and the Fenix A320 - Ketchikan to Juneau. Same settings for both flights and using AutoFPS along with GPU-Z to monitor VRAM usage. It’s such a bummer because the 737 is seemingly still a hog after the hotfix. Granted, I’m on a somewhat “outdated” rig @ i7 11-700k, 3080 with 32 gb of ram, but the test still stands. My vram usage was around 68-70% with Fenix, but pushing 97% with the 737. I love iFly’s version of the Max. I flew it for hours and hours in 2020, but I’m just wondering what’s going on with the optimization for this newest update. I’m not here to be critical, as I’m likely one of their happiest customers, but man I wish I could get this thing to run closer to comparable high-end addons. It really says something though that even when dealing with choppy performance, I still can’t get enough of this absolute banger of a plane.

I think we might have differences on how we define "huge". There is barely any difference, especially flying at a buck 50 a few thousand feet over the ground.

This is a common misconception. T(errain) Level of Detail will increase draw distance and quality for terrain, runways, roads, coast lines, etc. The best way to increase your draw distance and quality is O(bject) Level of Detail. This will increase quality of photogen and photogrammetry. If you're getting melting buildings or buildings that pop in out of nowhere, the best thing you can do (if you can, but AutoFPS helps) is to increase OLOD.

I know we can choose which servers we access, is there a best practice to discover which has the best bandwidth?

Seriously. The flight model is one of the best aspects of this plane. I have no idea what they're talking about.

I'm not getting great performance on this update. It's definitely not bad, but far more power hungry than the Fenix birds. Maybe the they'll do some further optimizing.

Wow! This is a SLAM DUNK! So much detail in this airplane and I think this the best EFB we've seen yet. I love nights like these when you get a new or updated plane and that feeling you get when you just know you have many fun hours ahead of you for the next few weeks. Thank you to all the people who updated this amazing plane...for free!

For a free update....the community is getting one heck of an upgrade in this "Service pack". I wish another well known 737 developer shared their same business practices…

I for one, thank you for your knowledgeable and insightful posts here. I wholly agree with you, too. If PMDG wants to claim they make the best plane addons and have the reputation for making the most realistic desktop sim of Boeing planes (which they do), then I think they should be listening to what you have to say. Unfortunately, PMDG isn’t the same company it used to be. They used to be pioneers who innovated and now they’re just happy to sit back, port over the same 3-4 planes to a new platform and count their cash, which is fine — but they can’t make claims that they are anywhere near the best anymore or that they care about replicating as close to a 1:1 version of the airplane on a desktop sim that they can.

What do the MR SAT taxiway markings mean? Is that code that’ll be released this Saturday? No? Ok, one can still dream though.

I would argue that their modeling and visual development has gone down hill, too. Look at the 777 flight deck. The screen brightness, when turned up, enacts this weird mix of decreasing contrast and saturation. It certainly doesn’t make it…brighter. The nav displays are like this weird black hole that have zero reflective quality. I realize they’re not meant to be reflective, but look at the Fenix displays. There’s finger print smudge marks. When you make the screens brighter, they actually get…brighter.

2024

This is hogwash. Of course I understand the motivation behind owning a business, but if you look at other developers that charge less for far superior quality, you'll finally begin to understand what I wrote and why. It's upsetting watching a company that used to put everything they had into a product and now, they're doing the bare minimum while still commanding top dollar. If you can't see this, you're either not looking close enough or a word not allowed beyond all help. edit: why did this forum allow me to say "far" earlier in my comment, but then changed it to "word not allowed" at the end? I literally wrote "far beyond all help". Why would that be censored? edit 2: but it allowed me to write it in my edit? Mods, if you have some insight, that would be great. I'm 99% sure I wrote the word "far", but I'm 100% certain I didn't swear or use a word that anyone would find offensive.

I can literally reproduce this nearly 3/4 of the time. Give it another 3 attempts. The thing about the PMDG 777 is that it doesn't feel BIG. It's as nimble as an A318. It doesn't feel like it has the massive amount of inertia that the real thing (likely) feels like. I know that FBW mitigates a lot of that "big RV driving" feel, but its responsiveness and overall pitch just physically doesn't make sense to me. Granted, I'm a PPL flyer that does circuits in a Cessna, but the Fenix A320 "feels" what I would guess is much closer to real life and the PMDG 777 is way "twitchier" than that plane. I have been a PMDG customer for literally almost 30 years. They were revolutionary in their early days. I've probably bought every product they sold up until I saw what they were offering for 2020. It's almost sad to watch a company go from the pinnacle of effort and reproduction to what they are now -- a company that essentially has only offered 3 planes and have ported them over with touchups for 4 different platforms. Think about it -- in over a decade, they haven't released an honest new plane. All that tells me is they're happy sitting back doing minimal effort for maximum payout. I just wish people would start voting with their wallets.

Let me guess, as a horse and buggy operator -- you absolutely hated the invention of the car? This is what you sound like.