Review – Zinertek’s Enhanced Airport Graphics greatly improves airport ground textures in MSFS

Zinertek released their ‘Enhanced Airport Graphics‘ for MSFS earlier this year, aiming to provide simmers with improved runways, taxiways and overall ground markings in all the default airports available in Flight Simulator. After using this mod for several weeks now, we can confidently recommend it for the way it improves the look of all the default airports in MSFS, as well as some payware ones too!

Enhanced Airport Graphics contains more than 100 ground textures that improve on the existing ones for runways, taxiways, ground markings, tire skids, and more. They provide a more realistic look to the sim, with a more “used” feeling, instead of the default “new airport” look that airports in MSFS typically have.

The overall environment in each airport is now more weathered, with rubber markings and darker spots, with better details and textures everywhere you look. Colors are also better looking: rather than flat and clean, they are now recreated with defects and imperfections.

These new textures extend to the entire airport grounds. Ramps and gates are now represented as if there have been countless aircraft activity over them, with cracks, faults and even what appears to be liquid spills.

When it comes to runways, different surfaces such as asphalt, concrete, cement and bitumen have been overhauled. Note that some of the default ones do not show tire skid marks, which means you will also not see that effect with Enhanced Airport Graphics. Since it installs as a mod on your Community folder, instead of replacing the default textures, it can replace the existing ones for a better version, and doesn’t add anything that isn’t there from Asobo. In fact, all the ground layouts remain the same: everything is in the same place (even the unfortunate double markings), it just looks better and more varied.

As you would expect, the effects of seasons and weather are also represented here, and you will notice the difference with snow and rain on the surfaces.

If you’re worried that this might interfere with your existing addons, worry not. Most payware airports have their own custom textures and will be unafected by this addon. Remember, Enhanced Airport Graphics only replaces the default textures. You may, therefore, see it in action in many freeware airports or even some payware ones that use the default textures.

In our experience, Enhanced Airport Graphics has no impact on performance on its latest version (v1.6, at the time of this writing). Some users reported a slight performance degradation upon release, but subsequent updates seem to have solved the problem.

Overall, Zinertek has done an impressive job here, one that anyone can appreciate immediately after installation. With Enhanced Airport Graphics, every airport instantly becomes more interesting, at least when it comes to the ground textures and markings. It’s a simple but dramatic overhaul that we can easily recommend!

Zinertek’s Enhanced Airport Graphics is available for purchase through SimMarket for just around $20 / 17€.