Currently loaded up @KMDW with the PMDG 737 and there is never ending stutters at this airport. FSDT KORD the complete opposite .Bigger, more detailed and more performance friendly. If DD expects everyone to be running 3090s I am sorry in the future I will be avoiding their airports.
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Same issue for me. I have the PMDG737 plus DD Chicago Landmarks and Chicago MIdway. The performance is absolutely horrendous and by far the worst I have had in the Sim to date.
I have a RTX3070 card and even dropped the settings to MEDIUM and it did not change a thing. The overall performance in the Chicago area and especially MIdway with the PMDG 737 are just awful.
I also had to remove RENTON KRNT. I noticed after SU9 its no longer playable. Donât get FSDT KORD being bigger,just as detailed and surrounding photogrammetry runs better. All of flytampa airports run well on my rig.
Unfortunately having the landmarks installed takes a huge fps with the airport installed!
and the ground texures are lower quality at KORD. The DD textures just seem higher quality.
I also have the FSDT KORD and performance is smooth. I bough the DD KMDW and Chicago sceneries and both are stuttery and horrible on performance. Iâve uninstalled both. Not to mention the approaches at KMDW are completely misaligned and unusable with the DD KMDW scenery. Uninstalled it and the approaches to default KMDW are perfect and aligned as they should be. The only 2 sceneries I canât / donât use are the 2 DD sceneries Iâve bought. Literally every other payware and freeware scenery I have runs smooth and without issues. I keep hoping DD will fix these but Iâm just going to have to accept I wasted money on this dev and wonât do it ever again.
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I just want to confirm what others have said in this thread: DD Chicago performance is horrible and unusable. I kept waiting for a desperately-needed patch, but such a patch has yet to be issued months later. Iâve suffered no performance hits with any other scenery or aircraft add-ons. Even DDâs Washington DC Landmarks works beautifully and without stutters. But DD Chicago is another story. Let the buyer beware. DD Chicago is the only add-on I ever purchased that I permanently deleted from my system. And donât even think of buying Meigs Field, from a different developer, if youâre planning to use it with DD Chicago Landmarks.
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Iâm chiming in here as well. I bought KMDW on sale. It looks nice (as do all the DD products) but performance is horrible. The first day I used it, I had three CTDâs, the 4 time I scaled back the live traffic in hopes of dropping RAM usage just a bit. That seemed to allow me to finally get airborne but frame rates were extremely bad. I used other DD products, never had an issue like this before. You guys have been warned!
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I returned the DD Chicago landmarks and got a refund from the vendor I bought it from, also horrific performance. And all the dev says on their forum is they canât reproduce any issue anyone reports. Stay clear, their sceneries look great, but turn your sim into a slide show. And the KMDW scenery has mis-aligned RNAV approaches that the Dev refused to fix. Like Aerosoft, DD is on my donât buy list going forward.
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DDâs Chicago landmarks and KMDW are truly the only addons I regret buying. As others have said, the performance is horrific, especially for Chicago landmarks. Apparently, if you have a GPU with at least 11 GB then you will be more or less ok. But anything less and you will be in trouble. They say on their forums that they canât reproduce the issues and that they have no clue what might cause the performance loss. They say that Chicago is a difficult area to handle for any system and that you canât expect to have the landmarks, KMDW and KORD and whatever all together and not have a performance loss. WellâŠ
Anyway, DD is also on my black list. Not even Aerosoft or Carenado have that honor. So my standards are probably already pretty low 
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I wouldnât go as far as to blacklist them (can we even use that term in these more enlightened days?), I have their KDCA and itâs great. Fantastic details and Iâve not seen a significant frame rate hit (Iâve got a mid-range system). Certainly never had any CTDâs there.
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The real problem is there needs to be minimum or recommended specs for some of these airports. I enjoy all of the DD airports (including Chicago landmarks + KMDW) but have a high-end system now with 16GB VRAM and it gets close to maxed out. Before when I was on xbox all the DD airports were unusable.
I think the quality of DD is excellent but for some scenery it seems only usable for systems with sufficient VRAM. Itâs unfortunate they donât make that clear or admit that is the real issue to avoid people being mislead and buying unusable products.
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If the textures are too large and 8GB of VRAM is not enough, you may be able to improve this by resizing the DDS file to half resolution using software such as paint.net.
For marketplace airports, I do not know if you can access the textures.
Youâre spot on. Iâve got a 3060Ti and obviously itâs not a sufficient card for KMDW. Wish I had seen this thread prior to purchasing. At least I got the airport on sale, so the money outlay was minimal.
The performance hit is not about âpoor quailityâ. In my oppinion, its about âtoo much quality.â
Many 3rd party aircraft and scenery packs include hundreds, if not thousands, of very high resolution 4k PBR textures. These textures must be loaded into your GPUâs VRAM and will eventually overrun available VRAM and begin to use shared system RAM, which is way slower. Even the fastest overclocked DDR5 memory is no where near as fast as average VRAM. When your VRAM is overrun, you wil get a stutter fest as memory is swapped between GPU and CPU.
As a reference, I just loaded a quick flight in the default Asobo C152 from Meigâs Field (KCGX) runway 36. Iâve both the DD Chicago scenery pack and the Meigâs Field airport addon (donât recall the developer) installed. I have all in-game settings, including Texture Resolution, at Ultra. DLSS enabled at Quality setting.
Sitting on the runway, my VRAM usage is just shy of 13GB of my available 24GB. After takeoff, I flew a very low level loop around the city center and observed VRAM fluxuate between 13 and 15 GB. I was getting between 68 and 78 FPS for the entire flight.
If I were to have used a 3rd party aircraft, say the Blackbird C310, Iâd expect VRAM usage to be even greater becuse it too includes a lot of high resolution PBR textures.
My RTX 3090 has the luxury of 24GB of available VRAM, therefore Iâm getting decent performance with Texture Resolution set to Ultra. This wasnât always the case for me. My old rig had an RTX 2070S that I later upgraded to an RTX 3070. Both had only 8GB of VRAM. I needed to set Texture Resolution to Medium to keep VRAM usage within limits.
In my oppinion, the key to good performance in MSFS with 3rd party addons is VRAM management. The wasiest way to accomplish VRAM management is to lower MSFSâs Texture Resolution setting to keep usage within the limits of your graphics card.
If youâve a graphics card with 8GB or less VRAM, try setting the Texture Resolution setting to Medium, change no other settings, and then quit and restart MSFS. Give the scenery a try again. I think youâll find it performs far better at minimal visual difference. If you donât like it, or simply donât want to âlower settings,â then restore the setting and restart MSFS.
Youâve nothing to loose other than a few minutes of time restarting the sim.
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I was just about to post the exact same sentiment. They are packing in way too much quality in these add-ons, and for not much added benefit to whatâs supposed to be a âflight simulatorâ.
Have you seen DDâs recent updates on progress for Newark KEWR? I have no plans on purchasing that either. They seem to be detailing almost every interior space throughout the terminals. Why? Unless Iâm floating around in the drone camera, I really donât care how much of a terminalâs interior is modeled when Iâm in the pilotâs seat. Why would I want to waste so much of my PCs valuable resources into irrelevant airport scenery?.. especially in the most scenery intensive area of the world in flight sim.
Everyone always dumps on the current KEWR add-on because it looks âlow qualityâ. It looks great to me and for many, guess which one is going to perform better?
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Precisely! Iâve said this on many threads: This is Microsoft Flight Simulator, not Microsoft Texture Simulator. I desire great flight performance and donât need to stare at the texture of the carpet in the aircraft Iâm flying.
It is my belief that the true âproblemâ here is us, the consumer. Far too many YouTube influencers and forum pundits clamour for high resolution textures and decry deveoplers who donât provide them. Developers, in turn, pack their products with high resolution PBR textures to meet the market demand.
But to what end? Poor performance.
MSFSâs default scenery and aircraft all use 2K textures and no one complains about them. I believe 3rd party developersâ use of 4K textures creates an imbalance in loaded resources that can only be addressed by fiddling with the texture resolution setting to find a balance that stays within VRAM limits.
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Wonder if it would be possible to offer the option to not install all that interior detail? I personally could care less what the terminal interior looks like. My main concern is getting decent framerates.
Does anyone know how to uninstall KMDW? I give up on it, itâs â â â â . 75% of the time, I get crashes before I even get off the ground. The few times this doesnât happen, the framerates are horrid.
Iâve got a DD folder but it only has info for another airport of theirs, so I canât find a dedicated uninstaller. I also canât find KMDW in my community folder. Any ideas how I can rid my system of this airport?
Where did you buy it?
Just figured that out. Got it on the Marketplace. Thatâs the first product Iâve bought there. KMDW is now deleted. What a waste of $. Too bad, it really looked nice. Maybe they will update it to resolve the performance issues.