Blurry ground textures in MSFS 2024 - what are your experiences?

Yes the blurry texture even on Photogrammetry is bad, road markings and parked cars are very blurry. I know exactly whats causing it all, the pebbles, grass and new ground texture detail overlay. It is every where including if you go on roof tops etc. It needs to be exclued from photogrametry and other great detailed areas and not blanketed world wide. If anything it should only kick in if you are on the ground and not meshed over everything. If there was an option to turn this feature of it would be great. Go down to street level on a road you will see the pepbles and gravel mesh overlayed. As you go higher it blurs the Photogrametry underneath.

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There is one more aspect to this.

Atmosphere and haze blurs things more in 2024 than in 2020. This is realistic but it does soften textures if you are used to 2020.

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Correct sorry, yes

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That looks awful. Is that your common experience up there or was this uniquely bad?

If that were my system I would pause and see if more terrain data and better textures load when given enough time.

What is your TLOD? Is Dynamic Settings on or off?

I agree, a lot of the new plant life seems to add a fuzzy texture on top of textures, but I don’t think that is the only issue in this one photo’s case.

This is the first flight I did that wasn’t low ground VFR so I don’t have a lot for comparison points. It’s also northern Canada which doesn’t have the best imagery but 2020 definitely resolves clearer. I’ll have to spot check a few others. As pointed out by others I don’t think it’s just the texture resolution there’s definitely stuff like foliage cover, LOD, lighting differences making it look even worse

The way to test if it is textures loading too slowly is to pause, let the camera circle your plane, and look for tiles of high res textures loading in.

If that is the case, give them some time to load.

Otherwise it could be the other things you mentioned. I forget. Are you on Xbox or PC?

I can confirm this isn’t a texture loading issue, at least not in my experience. I can active pause and leave it for 20 minutes, and no higher resolution textures pop in.

I generally set TLOD to 200, and it looks terrible. If I increase it to 400, it looks something like TLOD 75-100 in MSFS.

All of this is with the dynamic setting off.

Also has nothing to do with settings for trees and bushes. Adjusting those settings make no difference to the textures underneath.

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The setting for grass, plants, and rocks are my prime suspects for some issues.

And atmospheric haze.

It’s St Marks, with the (now copies) of the Roman quadriga chariot horses that the venetians stole from the hippodrome, during the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the 4th Crusade.

Elsewhere, Rome has nasty PG in the new sim and missing buildings around the forum:

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PC. Gigabit internet, i7-13700k RTX 4080 64 GB DDR5. All settings Ultra

I’ll give it another try tomorrow and check if it’s a streaming or loading issue but my gut tells me that’s just how these look

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And I will be sure to go up high next time I fly and see too.

Your system is better than mine but I can test running similar settings.

I really don’t know for sure what your issue might be until I can or can’t replicate the issues. Then I might have some hunches.

Half of my family is from Alberta, I flew there often enough in 2020 to get a decent sense of what I should expect.

They don’t affect the texture resolution. Ground clutter, be it buildings, trees, grasss, rocks etc, sit on top of the terrain as 3D elements. Haze is just a particle effect sitting between the ground textures and the camera, again it doesn’t interact with textures.

The issue relates to the texture resolution of ground textures, the detail of photogrammetry, and the topology of terrain. All these items are generally controlled by the TLOD system.

I don’t know the cause but the issue is a TLOD issue, either with data not being streamed at all, or incorrectly, or a bug within the graphics settings that don’t allow appropriate TLOD.

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I definitely witnessed this tonight, but it is late. Will write my thoughts tomorrow. Definitely a bit blurrier.

That is what i see with my PC as well. I Have it sometimes with FS2020 as well but there it is much better. It is so annoying…

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For me, it takes at least a minute, if not longer, before I actually load into my selected position. Once I’m there, the ground textures are extremely blurry at first. Things only start to improve, if at all, after flying around for 5 minutes or even longer, as the textures gradually load in and become less blurry.

So much for the “shorter loading times” promise in FS2024, where you’re supposed to be ready to fly directly after selecting your position on the globe. Honestly, I’d rather watch a 2-3 minute loading screen and have everything load properly from the start.


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Okay I rechecked it with drone cam and let it sit - this is just how the textures look.
Here’s 2024:

This is just east of CYRT.

2020:

Again I can’t tell if the texture is actually worse or some combination of factors makes it appear lousy

I’m also wondering if it may be newer, worse Bing imagery.

Here’s one more look.

MSFS 2020:

MSFS 2024:

Bing Satellite View:

You can see even in 2024, the bottom part looks pretty good. It’s that top half that has poor Bing images that looks worse. But I don’t know if 2020 was using the same image and cleaning or sharpening it up somehow and maybe that’s not being applied to 2024.

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honest assesment
status of my blurry textures: for now, hit and miss they do seem to be getting better overall, compared to the mayhem days

but still, sometimes i have to wait for it to load, i dont think that could be the intended way for this to work, i think its reasonable to expect 2020-like textures, or thereabouts

when flying a cessna, the textures are kind of ok at the time of writing
but flying a fast jet you can easily outrun the streaming, unless you are orbiting the same area

I completely agree with you—this can’t be what Microsoft envisioned as the perfect solution. If even the streamed aircraft models take several minutes to fully load with sharp textures, it’s no surprise that the same happens with the photorealistic ground textures.

The delay in texture streaming, especially when flying faster jets, is frustrating and feels like a step back compared to MSFS2020. Like you mentioned, it’s reasonable to expect at least MSFS2020-level texture quality and performance.

I’m also considering whether a fresh installation might be worth trying, even though it’s not something I really want to do. It would be great to hear if anyone else has had success resolving this through a reinstallation.

From my bug thread I linked above, but sharing it here too

Here’s the end of 25 in CYQT

2020:

2024:

Again you can see it looks like new satellite imagery, but it looks uniquely worse.

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I went up and tested last night, around Calgary and Edmonton and the farms around them.

Things definitely start to look worse than 2020 once around 15,000+ feet. Ground textures look more jagged and aliased than the same views in 2020. Gives them a slightly blurry appearance. I though it looked like aliasing a lot of the time.

Things like roads, farm boundaries and even houses look more jagged.

It isn’t terrible. If 2020 didn’t exist it might even be acceptable. But it is a slight regression compared to the sharpness of 2020.

That said, stuff below 10,000 looks quite good, and to my eyes, I prefer 2024 nine times out of ten to 2020 flying low level. More detail, small changes in elevation are more visible. The world seems less flat than the 2020 textures, shading, and mesh.

Honestly, flying it again last night, I was unimpressed by 2020 on the ground. The clouds looked terrible. But once above 15,000 feet things definitely started to look sharper than in 2024.

In my 2024 testing, I changed months and seasons several times, and it is kind of cool, as textures change with each month. The color of grasses and trees. It can be quite stunning.

But then I realize the world textures are all being processed and colored and unlike 2020, we never really see the textures as they were photographed. We only see them with added color and seasonal processing.

Like you, I can not quite tell if it is one thing or a combination of things that cause this jagged blurred look to textures but after last night I am wondering if it isn’t tied to seasons.

Also, just a warning to folks in this thread from experience. Testing for texture issues we can spend a LOT of time looking down, but when flying we rarely do this. Please make sure to also look at things from cockpit and 3rd person views, as that is how the graphic engine is optimized to be viewed.

We once spent days trying to figure out a glitch and finally realized it could only be triggered by a drone looking straight down in perfect conditions. And nobody in normal flight would ever notice.