John Dow

Isn't posting a real photo not in the spirit of the competition?

Haven't made many video clips lately, coz VR is such fun but hard to share, so I went back into 2D to make this little effort. Enjoy!

Have a read of the various topics on this subject in the old support threads. They explain it is almost always your ISP and other parts of the internet that throttle the speeds, and Orbx has no control over that.

The dev tried hard to get both PG on and off to work but PG just won't let that happen, so a decision had to go one way or the other. PG won, because MSFS has developed places like Canberra where PG is pretty well mandatory. With PG off, there are many more problems that just the ends of the harbour bridge, many of the roads in the CBD are malformed and look worse than even the melted PG buildings.

Is it not the case though, that in order to be informed of updates, all you need to do is go to Orbx Direct and any and all updates will be listed and immediately downloadable. This current system seems to me to be far more efficient than loading up everyone's email boxes, not to mention the difficulties in managing emails targeted to every user's specific list of products.

Just turn off the unrealistic crash detection and accept the premise that things will be thrown at you in the sim that require a suspension of disbelief, and that's about it. The other day I was landing at an airport I know and there were trees right on the boundary blocking the glide path. I just continued the approach and pretended the trees weren't there and landed normally after having flown straight through them. Sure, it reduced the realism but once past them I forgot about that and concentrated on the flare etc.

Sounds like you might have a bad RAM stick? Firstly, use the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool, and if it doesn't show any errors, download a RAM test program like Memtest86. See this page for more detail: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/how-to-test-ram

The Content xml does nothing to your setup except rebuild its database and gets rid of errors.

I just loaded Sydney after deleting the content.xml file and I can report all is as it should be with PG on or off.

I just loaded Sydney after deleting the content.xml file and I can report all is as it should be with PG on or off.

I just flew a test at YBBN in the Aermacchi MB339 with YBBN and Brisbane City Pack enabled. Takeoff and flying around YBBN I had no problems with the performance. No fps counter but it all looked smooth, just some minor stutters during major changes of attitude or direction. Headed over to the city and performance was still good but as I turned left and right over and around the city I was getting pauses and stutters. I then turned off photogrammetry as the Brisbane area is a well known resource hog for PG, and the performance went back to smooth everywhere. Conclusion. Photogrammetry is probably the biggest contributor to poor performance in the Brisbane area, without it, on my average spec computer, the scenery presents no problems. By the ay this is running 4K 3840 x 2160, 95% Render Scaling slider, and most settings High with texture settings at Ultra.

I haven't seen any problems with Fly Tampa YSSY, and Sydney Cityscape update is in testing at the moment. Depending on the time taken to resolve some mesh and elevation issues between photogrammetry on and off, it shouldn't be too much longer.

\ Perhaps, but if it's a small incremental update it might have no effect on your flight simming. In my experience a lot of updates make no difference to the scenery for me. Sometimes it's a tweak to a gate animation or apron traffic or a slight mesh adjustment. For me, if the scenery works when I visit it, then I don't need the latest fix unless it is something that affects my simming directly.

My MSFS appears to be locked to 30 fps because I have screen sync on, and to be honest in a flight sim 30 fps is all I need. I recently updated my rig and the 11900k CPU at 5GHz is much better than the 4790k in dense scenery, in landscapes there's little difference

Generally Orbx sceneries are released as point in time products. If a problem with the scenery requires further work, any pending updates may be incorporated as part of the work to be done. But changes in landscape and airports etc aren't enough to generate further development. Not sure if there are fixes pending for this scenery, if there are, often the dev will seek to incorporate all possible fixes into a release, this can take time, and many factors can influence the progress including changes in the core sim which occasionally can make the fixes much more time consuming to develop.

My system is similar with a 3060ti and I can run MSFS in 4K at mostly Ultra settings (with the resolution setting at 90%) and get 30fps in normal scenery and 20+ in cities. Yours should be fine. But remember every scenery is different so if some don't run all the way to Ultra, knocking a few sliders back a notch makes little visual difference.

You might be better to install W10 again and then download the Shell program that let's you run the W7 start menu. I did that and I wasn't even conscious of the fact that I had changed to W10. Fact is computers move on and software is sometimes forced to, to meet the demands of Operating Systems. I have a couple of printers that are still in perfect working order but the software is no longer installable. No thing I can do about it. It's possible that your W7 install has also reached the end of its extendable life and the requirements placed on the Orbx software developers by Microsoft coding mean that there's nothing that can be done to prolong the inevitable.

See today's release announcement

And therein is the crux of the matter. It's probably not your ISP, it's probably somewhere further up the pipe. It can even be a corrupted file in a server or routing junction that causes the download to reset to a lower speed, even a ridiculously lower speed like you're experiencing. Have you tried a VPN? Some users report success using that service. Otherwise all I can suggest is that most of these problems seem to go away after a day or so as the servers all get reset every 48 hours I believe, and hang tight. You could also submit a support ticket so the Orbx staff can be alerted to your problem. I doubt there's anything they can do, because if it was an OC server problem we'd have hundreds or thousands of users experiencing the problem.

You can reset or restart OC or your computer, your download will resume without losing what you've downloaded.

JUst like an exam at school or uni... gotta read the (question) carefully and make sure you understand it!

I guess one analogy that is relevant is the fate of the fax machine. Somewhere in the back of my shed is a perfectly serviceable fax machine, but for some reason I can't buy any of the rolls of thermal paper it uses. The reason is the population stopped supporting the technology. There were many many people who had supported the industry, but in the end the companies producing the machines and the paper rolls found it uneconomic to continue as demand fell away.

Many topics in the support forums to read. Basically the answer is almost all problems have been outside the control of Orbx and appear to be ISPs and other Internet gatekeepers are responsible for throttling Orbx Central downloads.

I have the HP Reverb G2 so I can't comment on Oculus stuff sorry

Just a heads up for those with VR headsets and those who might be considering the move The latest version of OpenXR Toolkit Companion with Fixed Foveated Rendering is a game changer. With just the Microsoft Mixed Reality Portal as originally released, my VR in many cities was either very lo res or down around 12-15 fps, which defeated the purpose of trying to get extra immersion. Now I just completed a tour of Canberra in live weather (lots of rain and clouds today) and it was smooth as silk the whole flight. If you have VR and haven't tried it, go get it. If you have a pc with similar specs to mine or better, but haven't got into VR, now might be the time!