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ORBX or UTX


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ORBX has a sale right now, so it's not necessarily prohibitively expensive for me; but I've also seen UTX on the Flight1 website, and I was just wondering what are some of the pros and cons of each software. I'd like to have better rivers, roads, cities, coastlines, etc, so I'm ready to upgrade. Do these FTX/UTX products help with those, or do I have to purchase a 'vector' product?

 

Also, how do these products interact with photo-realistic scenerly like MegaEarth or an autogen program like Nuvecta or a 3D night scenery?

 

Thanks for your help. I've only been simming for about 3 months, so I've got a lot to learn from you all who have been simming for years.

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ORBX has a sale right now, so it's not necessarily prohibitively expensive for me; but I've also seen UTX on the Flight1 website, and I was just wondering what are some of the pros and cons of each software. I'd like to have better rivers, roads, cities, coastlines, etc, so I'm ready to upgrade. Do these FTX/UTX products help with those, or do I have to purchase a 'vector' product?

 

Also, how do these products interact with photo-realistic scenerly like MegaEarth or an autogen program like Nuvecta or a 3D night scenery?

 

Thanks for your help. I've only been simming for about 3 months, so I've got a lot to learn from you all who have been simming for years.

 

Buy ORBX. UTX can mix with ORBX but at the end of the day ORBX is designed to work `wholistically`. As long as you don't use all the options on FTX Vector (I turn off tertiary roads) the combo of FTX Global, Vector and OpenLC is the current sweet spot. There is far m ore ongoing development with FTX.

 

However, if you had already invested in UTX, or ORBX wasn't on special, the advice would be different.

 

ORBX has a page on their website to tell you precisely what each product does.

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UTX does a decent job in the U.S. ORBX Base and Vector cover the whole world, and make (IMHO) the whole world somewhat prettier in the bargain. Be sure to try the ORBX free demos (PNW and Tasmania, small areas of their respective regions), too. And the ORBX free airports package fits in better with the Base and Vector. Add in OpenLC North America and you have a much better package than UTX can provide, even within the U.S. I have all of those, and I much prefer the ORBX stuff.

 

In many respects, UTX earlier version was better than the current version, largely because of their goofy looking roads in the latter, even though some features were added to the later version. I still use the UTX Alaska for areas not covered by the Southern Alaska region in ORBX.

 

No doubt you'll get differing opinions from some here, though, as so much depends on what you want out of the package and what type of "flying" you do. If it's mostly airline stuff, the ORBX isn't quite the advantage (other than airports themselves) over UT that it is for those of us who fly lower and slower a lot, though it's still great stuff either way.

 

Larry N.

As Skylab would say:

Remember: Aviation is NOT an exact Science!

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UTX is far cheaper and looks just fine. ORBX's airports and smaller sceneries look great, but their FTX Global, in my opinion, is just better autogen. UTX does the same thing.

(Also, their FTX Nevada is far too green for my tastes)

CLX - SET Gaming Desktop - Intel Core i9 10850K - 32GB DDR4 3000GHz Memory - GeForce RTX 3060 Ti - 960GB SSD + 4TB HDD - Windows 11 Home
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  • 2 years later...
:confused:I have ORBX SA and it works fine. I installed UTX Alaska and my elevations at least at PANJ and PASI conflicted. I moved my scenery priorities all over the place to no avail. I solved the problem by uninstalling UTX Alaska. Is there a less drastic solution? Also, the "rocky coastlines, to me, look like sugar crystals when on final. Thanks for any help........Steve
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mallcott is right, even in FSX, ORBX uses very few extra resources over what FSX does on its own, AT THE SAME DISPLAY SETTINGS. But if you push some of those sliders more to the right then yes, ORBX eats up more resources. Of course FSX without ORBX would do so, too.

 

UT, in my experience (yes, I've got both, even run both at the same time, to a limited degree), uses about the same amount of resources as ORBX (not much), but doesn't do nearly as much for you. And that's on a machine that was put together in 2010, though I did update the graphics card a few years back, when I got P3D. That card helped a LOT with P3D, not very much with FSX, which is pretty much as expected.

 

So if you have resource problems, you're doing something wrong, or not doing something right.

 

Larry N.

As Skylab would say:

Remember: Aviation is NOT an exact Science!

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