XPlane 12 AutoOrtho and Sim Heaven Benefits and Costs

When evaluating AutoOrtho and Sim Heaven for XPlane 12, I could not find any videos that showed the differences, both visually and performance related, with each and both packages installed.

I created this video to contrast the visual and performance impacts for XPlane 12, XPlane 12 with Sim Heaven, XPlane 12 with AutoOrtho and XPlane 12 with AutoOrtho and Sim Heaven. The video shows the startup time, New Flight load time and finally the VFR visual flight impacts benefits so you can judge the value of installing the packages either individually and together. It should be noted that for this video I used AutoOrtho version 0.4.4 as I was unable to get the 0.5.x versions working. Lastly, all flights were done with the same XPlane video settings to allow a true evaluation even though there are some significant frame rate degradation, especially when overflying Manhattan.

For the flight I used the stock XPlane 12, Cessna 172 starting on a 3nm final for runway 31R into KJFK at 1000 ft MSL then overflying KJFK, climbing to 3000MSL and an overflight of Manhattan, NY at 3000 ft MSL. I tried to keep each of the 4 flights as consistent and synchronized as possible, but given that I was hand flying (with the help of an autopilot), there are some minor deviations. To provide the best visual evaluation, I disabled the panel view and used the Sim Innovations PA-28 panel I developed to control the Cessna.

I really hope you find this video of value. Let me know what you think and if you'd like to see more XPlane 12 videos similar to this.