clavel9

The 1.6 GHz CPU simply isn't up to demands required by X-Plane and neither is the integrated GPU.

~ 70 GB. I only fly around Europe and parts of North Africa and the Middle East so I don't have any scenery, custom or otherwise, installed for the rest of the world.

I'm with you on that one. Liveries are nice and sharp, and the Delta is especially attractive.

No reason why you shouldn't upgrade providing your computer supports it. My X-Plane performance (on a late-2011 MBP) hasn't changed significantly: if anything it might be slightly smoother.

The most interesting thing about this development is that PMDG have decided to produce a classic prop-liner rather than a modern airliner - an area already well populated with Boeings and Airbuses from many other developers. I'm glad to see it and wish them the best of luck.

By all means try the demo, but I think that the Air is not capable of running XP10 with any fluidity: the CPU and GPU are just not up to the task. Perhaps at the most basic rendering settings you will get workable performance - it just depends what your needs and expectations are. The demo should answer your questions.

There's only one choice: the FlyJSim 727 series available on the X-Plane.org store: http://store01.prostores.com/servlet/x-planestore/Detail?no=432 There is a much older freeware 727 for X-plane 8 available from XPFW here: http://forums.xplanefreeware.net/topic/1190-boeing-727-200/ - which can be made compatible with XP10 by downloading the XP9 demo and saving it Plane-Maker. Bear in mind though that it is a very old ACF and will seem very basic compared to more up to date offerings.

The same 2D panel is still used in the current (i.e., non-beta) RJ Series.

The beta doesn't have a 2D panel, at least not yet. Given the way most developers are going, and the fact that so much more functionality can be incorporated into 3D panels, I'd be quite surprised if at this stage there will be a 2D panel in the final release. And I've always been a fan of 2D panels too.

Well, very much improved 3D model, with correctly shaped windows, for starters. There's been a lot of progress since the last update. Much better texturing, too. I did a couple of liveries ages ago for the previous full release so I must look back and see how much work there will be to fix them up for the latest model as the UV mapping is completely new. Looking forward to getting reacquainted with it.

I hadn't realised that there had been recent updates to the nightly build beta. Thanks for the heads-up: I'll head over there now.

It was just as possible to have a high px/m count in v9: the limiting 2048 sq. single texture size just meant breaking up textures differently. Say a fuselage takes up the full length of a 4096 sq. ("4K") texture in v10 - the same level of detail could have been achieved in v9 by mapping the fuselage along two lengths of a 2048 sq. ("2K") texture. Leen's point, I think, is not about the limiting size of the textures, but the way in which they are used. The examples he uses in his first post make that quite clear.

Excellent post, not at all a rant and very informative too.