I would like to share with you insights on my recent experiences in comparing the performance of two top photorealistic sceneries on very different computer systems:

The zoom level 18 custom USA scenery and the Orbx TrueEarth North California HD zoom level 17.

As you can already see the comparison will be very unfair … Not fair to my scenery, which is much higher resolution so computer will need 4x more data to transfer during the flight from the hard disk! The difference is huge. I do not use SSDs because for me they are just too small (I install removable 10TB disks with the USA regions). The Orbx scenery was installed on the fast SSD.

In addition, the mesh resolution is significantly higher in my scenery, it is 1/3 arc second. This is the highest resolution covering the entire US territory. I compared my scenery and computer performance using other video while testing the Orbx scenery around San Francisco. When I saw this movie, I decided to check how my professional X-Plane system will deal with the Orbx scenery and the fastest CPU/GPU combo. The City of San Francisco is my favorite place to which I traveled with my brother many times when real world flying across the America. I know the Golden Gate quite well from all sides.

Are these already all unfair points? Not at all :) Both scenes work on completely different computer systems. My system based on Intel 6700K and the system with the Orbx scenery was installed on a computer with Intel 9900K – i.e. 3 generations newer …

My GPU is 1080ti and 2080ti on the other system. And I would forget, there is a slight difference in the resolution between the system… My system works with 12 times higher resolution!! Yes, the system with the Orbx scenery renders just shy of 8.3% pixels of the professional XP11 system…