Big price but a limited time release offer entitles you to a free copy of the city pack if you buy the airport.
Airport:
City:
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I purchased it, not flew there yet though. Definitely the biggest scenery I’ve ever seen for a simulator, beating PacSim’s Incheon. 16.1 GB on the disk 
The Doha city and landmarks are another 2.6 GB.
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Bought despite the eyewatering price, because I will shuttle back and forth between here and Dubai in the A350 a fair bit and had been waiting for the release. The launch offer softens the blow, and initial flight into OTHH with the VisionJet was very nice due to the surrounding scenery. Airport is massive, and despite that I did not see any obvious areas that were neglected in modelling. Terminal windows are weirdly opaque during the day, a shame given the detailed interior. Also some floating bits missing their posts on the ramps. Frame rate was great, at least in the VisionJet, even with BATC traffic around.
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Yes, it looks really nice, IniBuilds’ usual high quality airport. I confirm that the terminal windows have a strange effect, from some angles looking like there are no windows at all. I don’t regret the purchase though. A nice hub for the big birds like PMDG 777 or IniBuilds A350.
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Many thanks for the screenshots and your experiences!
How is the performance? Despite my high-end system (RTX 4090, 7800x3d), the A350 doesn’t work really well for me in the 2024 versions of Heathrow or Dubai. Despite having 24 GB, the VRAM fills up very quickly. Terminals, cars or buildings were sometimes just grey blocks like in the old days on my Xbox…
The performance was very good, I didn’t see any fps drops even with BATC AI traffic. Intel Ultra 9 + RTX 5080 16GB VRAM.
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I have a similar system as you and I found the performance to be mediocre at best. Flying into the airport, I was getting FPS in the 70s. I’m use to getting 90s+ running 4K. Maybe the 5xxx series cards do a better job, but I found the performance to be subpar.
I really don’t get why there’s such variation between seemingly identical systems. I’ve learned that fps isn’t the best indicator, since framerate doesn’t account for micro-stutter (which is the biggest issue with resource-hungry airports). We’re told that FS2024 is particularly VRAM-hungry yet some with 16gb seem to do better than those of us with 24gb.
It makes no sense. And Asobo have never really explained the reasoning publicly.
I do notice generally that FS2024 performs better for me when using pretty complex airport scenery. I’ve been flying a lot in Hawaii these past few days, between my new Northern Sky airports (Lihue and Kahului), and it’s a much smoother experience than in 2020.
We are all aware of slight system variation but surely PC power is PC power? Correct me if I’m wrong but I do attribute FS2024’s smoother performance to my having 24gb VRAM. I’m left wondering if standard RAM has any real bearing (my PC builder advised against going for the fastest RAM so I dropped it from 6300 to 5600MHz), and whether I should have plumped for 64gb instead of 48. But whenever I use an overlay to see my RAM usage, it’s only ever miniscule.
Does hard-drive quality have an impact? I went for a midrange 2tb.
I think it’s also about the settings. I have a rather high-end HW and yet I’m careful with the settings and I keep most of them at High, and just one item on Ultra which is the Off-Screen Precaching which I found helps me with the camera panning smoothness. My RAM is 64 GB and as for the drives I use 2x 4TB SSD Samsung 990 Pro but I doubt it has that much of an effect except loading times which are superfast with MSFS2024. It takes only 10 seconds to load me even into an airport like this.
Actually I tried another flight from OTHH today, a cargo op in TFDi MD-11 and it was smooth as silk. FPS probably lower than on a cruise level but isn’t that expected with a complex airport like this?
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Speaking of settings, I wonder how much impact the 2024 ‘dynamic settings’ option has? Since most stutters occur on short finals, you’d be hard-pressed to notice any real detail loss that close to the ground (not to mention while concentrating on your touchdown). Clever stuff and a welcome sim addition, I think.
I don’t use that at all, though I’ve seen some people using it and saying they have better results with that enabled.
I don’t personally suffer of any stutters on short finals. Actually I landed with CRJ at MK-Studio’s KLGA runway 4 a couple of minutes ago, for the first time after I upgraded my HW and it was so smooth and stutter-free that it blew me away. I just can’t complain. I also use 2x FG.
I’ve always felt I perhaps should be getting more out of my 7800X3D, 7900XTX, 48gb RAM-equipped machine. But I seem to have done everything I can. KLGA plus traffic is simply not possible without stutters for me (certainly in 2020).
Yes, I think the settings and choice of aircraft are the keys to why performance varies so much on similar hardware. I have most of my settings on Ultra (which is not a problem at most airports). If I then choose the A350, Heathrow is barely usable for me. I don’t have such extreme drops in performance at any other airports. So it is quite clear to me that the large 2024 Inibuilds airports require more resources than, for example, Flightbeams San Francisco or MK Studios Düsseldorf. With these inibuilds airports you have to reduce your settings.
I immediately deactivated this setting because it affected the visual appearance too much. This was particularly noticeable with mountains in the vicinity of airports. The surrounding mountains became very blurred due to the dynamic settings.
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True. IniBuilds airports are definitely more resources hungry than Flightbeam’s masterpieces. That’s one of the best developers out there. I know that for example using textures on Ultra at Ini’s OTHH or EGLL would be a ticket to a full VRAM and a stutterfest for me. The other user said the fps drop to 70’s at this airport for him which is still pretty good in my book and totally expected given how big is this airport. I don’t regret buying it, there’s simply no better OTHH and makes me fly more in this area which I kind of overlooked before.
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There’s an update to OTHH (v1.0.1), shrinking the size on the disk from 16.1 GB to 3.76 GB. So that should solve some performance problems for many people. I recommend to do a full uninstall and install in the IniManager. They also made much more items optional. The landmarks were updated too…
I’ve been leaning towards buying this as the offer of the city pack for free constitutes a 34% discount on both products. Not bad for a new release. That’s a lot of optimisation, to get it down to under 4gb from over 16!
I’ve been a little concerned about performance, given the wildly differing observations thus far, so I last night decided to put Ini’s OMDB through its paces. Despite the annoyingly erratic behaviour of AI traffic, it performs beautifully in FS2024 (way better than it did in FS2020), even with all the config sliders turned on. OMDB being bigger and busier than OTHH, I thought it might be a good measure of the latter’s performance. I’m now pretty confident OTHH will run fine on my system.
Would you recommend it? I know the approach from the north is very close to the city so I’m hoping for some pretty eye candy!
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Yes, I think you would like it. The departures and arrivals to the airport are nice, especially at night. If OMDB works fine for you, this will be too.
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Purchased two minutes before the Hamad and city offer expired! Not had a great deal of time to check it out but managed a landing (from Dubai) and taxi to stand in the Ini A359. Performance for me seems great — one tiny stutter just before the flare but the trundle to the gate was perfect! All config sliders in the IniManager were turned on, and FS Traffic was running (although not a great deal moving).
I briefly caught a distant glimpse of the city skyline while on finals (through some typical Arabian morning haze) but with the sun about to rise, it wasn’t lit as it is in darkness. I’ll have a better look tomorrow but my first impressions are definitely very positive. I’m so glad we finally have a sim that can handle Ini’s notoriously resource-hungry airports!
Can’t wait for the wind to change direction so I can approach from the north, over the city.
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