Paris Charles de Gaulle LFPG: simMarket sells three of these, and this is the wrong one

In August 2017 a customer called Samuel left a two-star review on simMarket. Not because the scenery was bad — he said he had "always enjoyed" it — but because Taxi2Gate had charged him again to move it from FSX to Prepar3D v4, and the installer had shipped an obsolete copy of SODE that deleted every jetway at the airport. Seven years later, in September 2024, a customer called Raul left a four-star review on the same page. The scenery was "really very good", he said, the performance balance "very good", and the fixes he needed could not be downloaded. "Support is zero."

Those two reviews, seven years apart, are the whole story of this product. Almost nobody disputes that Taxi2Gate built a good Charles de Gaulle. What people have been arguing about since the day it appeared is everything around it: what you are being charged for, which simulator it actually goes into, whether anyone is still home at the developer, and — the question that matters most in 2026 — whether this is even the right one of the three Taxi2Gate CDGs on sale to buy.

Because there are three. simMarket lists PARIS CHARLES DE GAULLE LFPG FSX P3DV3 (20 January 2017), PARIS CHARLES DE GAULLE LFPG P3DV4 (8 July 2017), and PARIS CHARLES DE GAULLE LFPG P3D4-5 (20 April 2021). All three cost exactly € 26.99. All three carry a word-for-word identical feature list. The one this review is about — the P3Dv4 build, product ID 11044 — is the one that sits at number 34 on simMarket's all-time bestseller chart, above FlyTampa's Athens and Drzewiecki's New York, and it is also the one the developer replaced five years ago.

That is an odd pair of facts, and it needs saying plainly at the top: the sales rank belongs to a version that has a newer sibling on the same shelf at the same price.

This review reads twenty-one sources — three store listings, simMarket's own bestseller chart and vendor catalogue, the developer's website and update pages, six AVSIM threads running from January 2017 to May 2021, contemporary coverage from FSElite, simFlight and MSFS Addons, an independent written review, and what little video record exists. Reddit is structurally unavailable in this environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; for a product whose community conversation stopped in 2021 that matters less than it usually would, but it is worth knowing.

What you are actually buying

You are buying a 1.58 GB scenery of Paris Charles de Gaulle that installs into Prepar3D v4 and nothing else. simMarket's own copy is unusually blunt about it — the description opens with the line "This product is only for P3DV4!" and the requirements field says "P3D V4" with no elaboration. It is not an FSX product. It is not a v5 product. There is no v6 support from anyone at Taxi2Gate, for this or any other airport.

Here is the full shelf, verified on simMarket on 20 August 2026:

SKU	Released	Simulators	Size	Price	Upgrade	simMarket rating
LFPG FSX P3DV3	20 Jan 2017	FSX SP2/Acceleration, P3D v3	3.14 GB	€ 26.99	—	4/5 from 33
LFPG P3DV4	8 Jul 2017	P3D v4	1.58 GB	€ 26.99	€ 5.00 from the FSX version	5/5 from 7
LFPG P3D4-5	20 Apr 2021	P3D v4.5, v5	3.56 GB	€ 26.99	€ 15.00 from either older version	4/5 from 12

Two things fall out of that table. The first is the € 5.00 upgrade, and it very probably explains the bestseller rank. The FSX/P3Dv3 edition sold in real volume — 33 store reviews against this one's seven — and every one of those owners could add the v4 build for a fiver. A large number of cheap transactions is still a large number of transactions on a lifetime units chart. There is no evidence anywhere in the record that this scenery was ever given away free, and the star rating is not the thing that looks inflated here: seven reviews averaging a true 4.57 (four fives, three fours — simMarket rounds that display up to a flat 5) is a small, honest sample. Report the rank and the rating separately. The rank has an explanation the rating does not need.

The second is that € 26.99 is € 26.99 across all three. simMarket's terms say displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for a browser with no resolved session means 0% — the same listing quoted € 32.39 to European press in April 2021, which is exactly € 26.99 plus 20% VAT. So compare the three SKUs to each other, not to a figure you read on a news site. What you cannot do is find it cheaper direct: taxi2gate.org has no store of its own. Every "BUY NOW" button on the developer's site points at simMarket. There is no parallel channel and no discount hiding behind one.

What is in the box, on the record and in the shots: custom ground textures and photoreal surrounds, custom mesh, hand-placed autogen, the full terminal set including the circular Terminal 1 satellites, modelled terminal interiors with see-through glass, volumetric grass, static ground vehicles, fencing, an AFCAD, night illumination with a dynamic-lighting option in the configurator, and SODE moving jetways. The configurator also switches seasons and vehicle density. There are no charts and no GSX profile in the installer, though Taxi2Gate publish a separate LFPG GSX profile on their updates page.

What the community consistently praises

Performance, and it is not close

This is the one finding that repeats in every source class, from launch to the last post anyone made about it. CDG with full AI is among the heaviest things anyone has ever modelled for a 32-bit-descended engine, and Taxi2Gate got it to behave.

AstralNought, flying AMS–CDG in the A320 with AS16, ORBX Global/Vector/OpenLC, FreeMeshX and 70% AI traffic on the day of release, reported frames "always around 35 (locked)" and 900 MB of VAS remaining at touchdown (AVSIM, 20 January 2017). SimSmart Reviews ran fifteen round trips with the PMDG 747 and the Aerosoft A320 without a single out-of-memory crash, against one every seven or eight flights at FlyTampa's Schiphol, and logged 25–30 fps in the 747 virtual cockpit (26 February 2017). Emmanuel on simMarket: "very well optimized no problem falling FPS" (12 May 2018). LH340fan, who lives near the airport, said performance was "great" even with a payware Orly loaded alongside (AVSIM, 26 March 2020). Raul, in 2024, still led with the performance balance.

For a 2017 product that has to hold four runways, three terminal complexes and a cargo city in memory at once, that is a serious engineering achievement and it is why people kept the scenery installed long after they stopped talking about it.

The terminals, and the ground under them

The praise for the modelling is nearly as consistent. SimSmart Reviews singled out the see-through terminal glazing and the interior modelling, and called the ground work — "every ground marking, oil spill, and MAX WINGSPAN warning" — crisp and immersive. CDG has genuinely varied architecture across its terminals, from the 1974 concrete drum of T1 to the glass tubes of 2E, and multiple sources agree Taxi2Gate caught the differences rather than averaging them. Davide, on simMarket in February 2022: "every detail is modeled as close as it gets to real life."

SODE jetways, when they work

Every source that mentions the jetways treats them as a reason to buy. ELMAR's 2017 store review — "I like the SODE integration" — is typical, and LH340fan called SODE jetways "a must have" and credited the scenery for having them. See below for the large asterisk.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The airport layout is frozen in 2016 — still open, and permanent

This is the deepest problem and the one no patch is coming for. The AFCAD and taxiway network reflect CDG as it was when the scenery was built, and CDG has moved on. The most precise complaint on record is Tristan's, on the successor product in April 2021: the layout was "still outdated in many areas", specifically missing taxiway D between QD1 and QB2, "one of the main corridor taxiways in LFPG". VAGNER, the same week: "the taxiway system is not even updated." If the 2021 rebuild was still carrying that, the 2017 build certainly is.

LH340fan, who knows the real airport, put the ceiling on it honestly in March 2020: "it's accurate enough if you don't know it." That is a fair verdict and not a dismissal — but a reader flying a real-world CDG SID out of a modern chart will find taxi routings that do not exist.

SODE jetways and the installer — mitigated, but you will do work

Samuel, 30 August 2017: the installer shipped SODE 1.3.4, which "causes the simulation to remove all the Gates", and he had to fetch 1.5.3 himself. Riah069, on AVSIM in August 2018, found the SODE stands XML missing entirely from his install and from the official SODE-LFPGV1.2 patch — fixed only by uninstalling and reinstalling as administrator. Michael Moe hit the SODE "X" placeholder objects at LFPG in May 2021. Taxi2Gate do publish a SODE jetway fix and a dynamic-lights fix for LFPG on their P3D v4 updates page, and — checked on 20 August 2026 — both files still download, which contradicts Raul's September 2024 complaint that they could not be had. Call this mitigated: the fixes exist and are reachable, but you are expected to find and apply them yourself, and running the installer as administrator is not optional.

Elevation and third-party conflicts — still open

LH340fan warned buyers to bring "a good amount of patience to fix all the issues with the elevation" alongside ORBX, and said it took two months of troubleshooting. That is one detailed report rather than a chorus, but it lines up with the general shape of 2017-era P3D scenery layered over ORBX landclass, and there is nobody left to fix it.

Support — still open, and it has been for years

The oldest complaints are about getting a reply, not about the product. AVSIM's "out", who owns the scenery, wrote in March 2020 that his problems were eventually solved but "it was not easy to get any support". A prospective buyer opened that same thread by asking whether Taxi2Gate were "still around". Raul's 2024 verdict was blunter. The official support forum runs on iFlySimX rather than the developer's own domain, and it did not load for us at all during research.

You paid twice, and might be asked to pay a third time

The single loudest complaint in the store reviews is not about scenery at all. Samuel and Erik both marked the product down in 2017 purely because Taxi2Gate charged for the v4 conversion when FlyTampa, FSDreamTeam, Flightbeam and UK2000 did not. ELMAR defended the charge in the same review set. That argument returned, louder, in April 2021 when the € 15.00 v5 upgrade landed — blaunarwal's line on AVSIM, "The old version runs fine in v5 and I can't see, what they changed/improved", is the most quoted sentence in the whole record. Status: unresolved, and now permanent, because there is nobody to argue with.

Performance and stability

Covered above in the praise, because that is where the weight of the evidence sits, but two stability notes belong here.

First, the installer. Multiple independent reports of a botched first install — missing SODE XML, errors thrown at the end of the run, gates vanishing — and in every case the fix was the same: run it elevated, then apply the patches from taxi2gate.org manually. Erik's 2017 review mentions "strange errors at the end of the installation program" with everything working fine afterwards. Budget an hour.

Second, the v5 question, because it is the one people actually ask. This product is sold as P3D v4 only and the installer targets a v4 root. But blaunarwal reported on 20 April 2021 that the v4 build "runs fine in v5", and P3D's add-on XML mechanism lets you point a v4-installed scenery at a later simulator. Treat that as a community workaround with one credible report behind it, not as a supported configuration — and note that if v5 is what you own, Taxi2Gate sell you a build that officially supports it for the same money. Prepar3D v6 is supported by nothing in the Taxi2Gate catalogue.

Who should buy it

On Prepar3D v4, and you already own the FSX/P3Dv3 LFPG. Buy it, and only this one. Five euros for a native v4 conversion of a scenery you already like is the best value anywhere in this product family, and the € 15.00 jump to the 2021 build buys you PBR textures and a redone night lighting pass that the people who paid for it argued about for a month.

On Prepar3D v4, buying fresh, with no CDG at all. This is the profile the product is for, and it is a real recommendation: nothing else covers CDG properly on legacy Prepar3D. Aerosoft's Mega Airport Paris CDG was built for FS2004 and FSX and, as AVSIM's regulars noted back in 2017, was never brought properly to P3D — AES, its headline feature, does not function there. Compare this SKU against the 2021 P3D4-5 build before you pay, though, because they cost the same and the newer one has more in it.

On Prepar3D v4.5 or v5. Do not buy this one. Buy PARIS CHARLES DE GAULLE LFPG P3D4-5 instead. Identical price, officially supports your simulator, adds PBR and a proper night lighting rebuild, and you are not relying on a five-year-old forum post that a v4 installer can be coaxed into a v5 install.

On Prepar3D v6, MSFS 2020 or MSFS 2024. Nothing here for you, and nothing coming. Taxi2Gate announced on 9 February 2023 that LFPG was one of three airports heading to MSFS. Three and a half years later it does not exist, and as of MSFS Addons' September 2025 survey the only serious CDG in MSFS 2024 is Xavier Ossedat's freeware; the announced payware is from Pilot Experience Sim and Aerosoft, not Taxi2Gate.

Anyone buying for accuracy to today's Charles de Gaulle. Do not buy any of the three. The layout stopped tracking the real airport around 2016 and no version fixed it.

Where it stands today

Taxi2Gate are not formally gone, and that nuance matters — a colleague looking at their Hong Kong VHHH will find the same picture. taxi2gate.org is up, it responds, and the LFPG patch files on its P3D v4 update page still serve as of 20 August 2026. But the front-page news items are still "Our next project is KIND (Indianapolis) and some other updates for p3dv4" and "EDDM for P3D v4 is now released!!!" — copy that has been stale for the better part of eight years. The last thing the developer shipped for any simulator was an Orlando photogrammetry fix on 6 July 2023. The last thing they said in public about their plans was a Facebook post of 23 September 2022 promising, after "a pause", to keep updating and to bring the catalogue to MSFS. Two MSFS airports arrived in 2023. Then nothing. Read that as dormant rather than dead, and buy accordingly: assume no future patches and no support reply.

The product itself has aged better than its developer. Load it in P3D v4 in 2026 and the terminals hold up, the ground textures hold up, and the frame rate at Europe's second-busiest airport is still better than it has any right to be. What has aged badly is everything the passage of time acts on — a taxiway network that no longer matches the charts, a SODE integration that needs manual attention, a support channel that stopped answering, and a shelf position now occupied by a newer version of itself.

So the score is a compromise, and deliberately so. As a piece of scenery this is a 4-ish product. As a purchase, in August 2026, it is a 3.1: it is the wrong SKU for most of the people who will find it, it is priced identically to the SKU that supersedes it, and the only buyers it clearly serves are P3D v4 holdouts and FSX owners with a five-euro upgrade waiting in their simMarket account. That is a narrow door. It is a real one.