In my opinion they need to add more graphic setting choices - there are systems out there that have no business trying to run everything on High and Ultra and there are others that can certainly run those settings just fine. The loudest voices complaining are often the ones that are trying to run everything maxed out on systems that can’t and will never be able to handle that. To blanket drop everyone’s visual fidelity is not a great move and will, in the end, be reversed by demand I would expect (at some point). If you have slaved to save money, worked for over a year to prepare, cut out things and gone without others, to make sure you had the funds to build a rig that could handle it all on Ultra (or most of it) you shouldn’t have to now take a bowl of soup with no salt because some people have high blood pressure.
I’m afraid that if everyone had systems powerful enough to handle ultra settings, the bottleneck would become the central system. A viable solution in this case might be that users who want to fly using online data should settle for medium-low levels of detail. Instead, users who want maximum detail should use the manual cache and download the data to their disks first. I already have 10 terabytes of ortho of XP, I would have no problem handling as many for FS. The problem is only Microsoft which should admit that they underestimated the network problem.
Hmm. The LOD settings are not increasing the draw distance that much here, defintely not back to Alpha pre 1.6.11 quality.
But disabling the Sharpening setting is worthwhile and does get rid of some of the zaggies and nasties which have appeared recently.
Thanks for that.
That’s exactly what conspiracy theorists do. Observe an interesting correlation or “fact” and concoct an “explanation” without considering anything that goes against their brilliant theory.
Please explain why your stated performance correlation would make MS and/or Asobo want to disable the best possible settings on any given platform?
Besides, they have already said that the reduced 3d drawing distance and dysfunctional anti-aliasing were unintentional side effects.
Furthermore, the community has established that both can be fixed by editing a configuration file. One would think that such a malicious attack at our PC graphics would be buried deep inside the programming code.
A lot of frustration is coming from a seemingly visually deteriorating sim from release to update to update. So a comparison between different iterations is perfectly fine.
Comparing to real world photos would belong into a thread about how realistic the sim actually looks.
Some of the things I see people complaining about seems really ridiculous. I’m sure even on a clear day in a real plane you cant see clearly for miles. I saw a thread over at avsim where someone was complaining about the gauges looking washed out in the hanger smh, like really? lol
Was that english? The forum requires posts to be in english.
I’ve also been playing with these and agree 100%
What would be great is for things like this going forward to get published on this forum as work-arounds. Then we can get some of these issues resolved prior to the monthly patch cycle. If people dont want to edit files then they can of course wait for the patch.
Maybe a sticky thread for issue work-arounds and sorry if there already is one.
Users shouldn’t have to be manually editing configuration and OPT files to change graphical settings. How about what would be great is if Asobo gave you the appropriate flexibility in the GUI to choose what you wanted? Just like most people don’t root or jailbreak their smartphones, most people don’t edit OPT files.
as i said if people dont want to edit files then they can wait. 99.9999999% of the sim world has been editing files for decades 
What is LOD? What does LOD stand for? really don’t know.
Level of Detail
Downgrade of LOD for photogrammetry buildings and objects plus much worse ground textures are real pain. I have all set to Ultra, Teredo working, good internet , Bing ON etc. and still i see melted photogrammetry buildings and horrible low res ground textures all the way. I love this sim, i just want it to look like before the patch. I played this game at summer and it looked much different , better on my rig. Then i bought it on Premium, Steam and it just sucks visually now. I really hope for a patch. Also i have data consumption 0gb i don’t know why as i have all Bing streaming ON plus working Xbox services , teredo etc.
Just turn Photogrammetry OFF until they fix it, much better visuals without it.
Will do, it’s all i can do now, tried everything including 2 reinstalls etc…
Level of detail. Think of a big circle that moves around the world with you at the centre. All flight sims need to number crunch and display the folowing around you. 1) The mesh (a scan of the planet surface to paint on), 2) Landclass , detais what should be there, grass, houses etc, 3) Vector (coastlines, roads rivers, rail) painted on from real world data again, 3) Textures of fields or houses or factories etc and 4) Autogen, the 3d buildings you see so that the world doesnt look like a 2d picture.
Each of these has an increasing impact for processing so the trick is to bring the circle in as much as you can get away with so you draw what you would normally see without having things popping up in-front of you or being drawn 800 miles out when you cant see them.
The 2 numbers being referred to here control the radius of the ground textures and the buildings and how far out to draw them. Currently set to 2 miles which is great for performance but stuff past this looks a little lo-res. Upping these numbers makes the mid distance must better but puts a lot more load on your system. 1000’s of textures and builsings becomes 10,000 etc.
hth.
fully agree - i alpha tested this as well and did not see trees popping up around me back when we alpha tested
very appreciate to explain. I got it what the LOD is. 
There needs to be an option that independently controls the quality of photogrammetry. Should not have an impact on high end rigs.