1.6.11 - Low bandwidth: terrain, airports, and planes all blurry

[AirBerlin7421]

ISSUE DESCRIPTION

Description of the issue: In every SU4 beta build so far, I’ve encountered this issue where the terrain does not load properly. I get a “Bandwidth too low” warning (when my bandwidth is more than fine), which only occurs on the SU4 beta builds. My internet is more than fine, very reliable, and fiber 300mbps up/down (on ethernet). This does not happen in SU3. Back to the sim, the terrain is blurry, along with the runways and taxiways at airports. Occasionally, details inside planes are not loading as well, potentially a LOD issue? After about 10-15 minutes of flying and climbing to airliner cruising levels, the ground terrain is simply so low quality that it basically doesn’t exist anymore. On the ground, taxiways and runways also do not load properly, making the appearance blurry. The world map also struggles to load the ground textures too. Again, this does not happen in SU3. This happens anywhere in the world. After some time at cruise in the flight levels, eventually the terrain completely disappears and bugs out, leaving an empty “void” of missing textures.

I’ve attempted numerous fixes, including reinstalls, empty community folder, and even messing with the hosts file, if that was messing with this. However, I feel this is more of a LOD issue, because after a long time staring at any location, minutes actually, the details eventually come in. It just takes minutes.

I hope this explanation makes sense. I’ve also provided a few images to help back up my issue.

FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

How often does this occur for you (Example: Just once, every time on sim load, intermittently)?

Occurs every time in SU4.

REPRODUCTION STEPS

Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:

1. Open 2024 on SU4 beta. After a few seconds in the main menu, a “bandwidth too low” pop-up appears.

2. Check the world map (ground textures do not load), can also start a flight with the same issue.

YOUR SETTINGS

If the issue still occurs with no mods and add-ons, please continue to report your issue. If not, please move this post to the User Support Hub.

What peripherals are you using:

[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it? Yes and no, makes no difference.

[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use? 5070Ti

[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share? i7-12700K, 64gb ram, nvme ssds

MEDIA

Here are some examples of things not loading in properly. You can see the blurry ground, flight deck details, terrain, and even roads not loading in at all (along with black tiles?). Please disregard the weird things I am doing in the flight, this is just to show the actual issues!

[xxYUNIORxx]

What is your AMD sharpening setting set to?

[johnwhite92]

Are you experiencing connection losses from your network card, even for a short time?

I had this when playing msfs, my network card lost connection, sometimes reconnected at a lower speed multiple times, I had “low bandwidth” messages and problems loading textures. Finally I understood that the network card integrated into my motherboard was defective, I bought a PCI network card as a replacement (about 20 dollars) and since then, no more problems. Monitor the behavior of your network card…

This could also be a temporary server problem at Microsoft.

There is also the case of some ISPs that are suspected of reducing traffic to Microsoft servers and in this case, a VPN connection would help in some cases. There are some threads that talk about this in the forum.

[nickmcpilot]

@johnwhite92

Are you experiencing connection losses from your network card, even for a short time?

It’s a good point, to absolutely rule out connection problems, run in a command prompt the following:

ping -t 8.8.8.8

This will run a permanent check of a far away Google DNS server once every second and if there’s instability in your internet connection you’ll see “connection failures” and then you’ll know if you’re internet connection is reliable or not. This is a very lightweight, low bandwidth test and won’t impact flight simulator in the slightest.

[nickmcpilot]

This ain’t nothing to do with AMD sharpening, this is no doubt the poor loading of textures due to either a bad connection or Bing maps servers not serving up data quickly enough.

[SmotheryVase665]

Similar issue:

Bad textures rendering in v1.6.5.0

After the latest Betabuild (1.6.5.0) I see very outwashed and blurry textures especially at airports. The settings are the same like in the first Betabuild where everything was crisp together with an outstanding good performance. Maybe the rendering process was changed? Hopefully this will get the same state again as it has before in future releases. [1]

[AirBerlin7421]

Thanks for the replies! However, I have no issues with any network-related issues outside of FS24 in SU4 (all is normal). Keep in mind, this only happens in SU4, not in SU3 for me!

[IceManDBB]

Although I don’t get the low bandwith notification, I still sometimes get blurry tiles and textures that take more than a minute to get to load. Sometimes have to circle around an area a couple times for it to load in highest detail:

In the first screenshot you can even see the download isn’t that bad (mine is 100Mbit max), it still doesn’t seem to be enough to stream the highest detail fast enough. I think their CDNs are just garbage, at least during this beta.

It also happens in the world map when zooming in, I can see the tiles loading in from outside the screen to the center over ~1minute.

Don’t know why it’s not the other way round. One would think you want the things closest to you (center of buble/screen) in the highest detail first.

[AirBerlin7421]

Yeah, I wonder. Thanks for the detailed reply! I have a feeling it might be as well. My only other thought would be that locally downloaded packages (such as planes and airports) that are not streamed also have issues with blurry textures. I believe my first screenshot included the flight deck of the A350, which you can see is unreadable. I don’t have any issues with my computer build as it is rather high-end, and I also have a very fast and reliable internet connection. It also seems that in the beta, the ground textures at least just get worse over time, eventually turning into nothing (https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/aiu41hKG0mw This happens after 20 minutes in the flight levels. Not really sure what else it could be, but I also agree it could be part of their servers.