Agree. I turned off photogrammetry for UK, except for landmarks and imp. buildings. 8-9 fps otherwise below 4,000 ft. With photogrammetry off I can fly low and fast at 35-40 fps. Smooooth. It IS the photogrammetry because when I fly outside of London, even with photogrammetry on I get the same 35-40 fps. Non-photogrammetry is just fine with me because I have never been to London anyway.
Jorg mentioned on the Dev Q&A that the London scenery was a lot more complex than previous Scenery Updates, hence itās pushing systems harder.
I do not have ORBX (or any other 3rd party scenery) and it still looks like c r a p. I think they mentioned it in the last dev Q&A and said they are working on fixing it
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From memory he actually said they were concerned the quality wasnāt up to the standard expected and theyāre going to revisit it when better data is available, but they were committed to release as they had set the release schedule and couldnāt delay yet further.
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I did some flying over London yesterday and observed that places did get better as I flew over more often but at the same time was astounded that MSFS did as good as it did in rendering the tens of thousands of photgrammetry buildings and landscape features that the city presents. Basically from what I can tell, there are 3 levels of LOD detail. The first is that whole melted building thing we experience. If you pause over one of those areas you can see the sim madly trying to go to the next two levels of detail. If you can imagine that all of that detail, unless you have it all cached, is coming from some distant server, itās an immense task. That basic lowest LOD info for some complex building is not much more than a bump on the ground and some very generic low res texture which looks ok from 2000 feet but not so good from close up. The second level of detail makes that building into an actual cube with perhaps some other cubes attached where there are large additions and units on the roof. The texture images are probably twice the resolution. Up close you can tell itās a building with doors, windows, etc but it still looks not so real. That final download to you is the object fully defined with a much more high res texture. Itās what we all want to see when weāre up close. Itās also a lot of data.
Now, hereās why London or Paris are such a task to get right. Modern buildings are much less complex than Victorian age ones. My house is so much easier to render than some older one. The object for a modern structure will have far fewer vertices than a true representation of a building adorned with all the trappings of older European ones. As I flew over London seeing the lag as giant neighborhoods with thousands of very complex buildings are rendered, it became pretty obvious what the slow down was all about. It wasnāt the speed of my processor or graphics card or even the programming that was the issue. It was the fact that weāre asking the internet to keep up with a nearly impossible task in giant cities if we want to fly low to the ground. Itās actually somewhat amusing that flying down the Thames in London is very smooth and rich since there are not a lot of structures actually on the river and many of them have been separately modeled. Where you notice the slowdown is getting out into other more densely populated regions. I notice the area around Hyde Park area is particularly troublesome and slow.
I think manual caching has the potential to help in areas like this but that system has never worked well at least as far as the input and maintenance side of the UI. Iāve asked Asobo to open up the architecture of that system to the outside world so maybe some programmers can tackle a better system.
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Thanks BiaxialToast7 I didnāt realise that we could turn off PG in our settings. I wondered if that also turned off real ground textures - and by coincidence we had a server outage just when I tried which did that. But next day I experimented and I prefer the autogen buildings. Not much PG outside cities anyway and with the ever growing set of archetypes it looks fine to me. London looks way better and as a bonus runs faster. I can wait now until PG is better. (I suspect that the spotlight of MSFS is making Bing up their game with 3d mapping).
Glad I could help. Are you saying you turned off photogrammetry in Graphics settings and are okay with it worldwide? I think I will try that too. What I did for London was to turn off photogrammetry just for London. Thing is with this significant fps problem since the March I update I can now just be sitting at a rather mundane airport parking spot and watch my fps quickly erode from 45 fps to 13 fps. As a test Iāve done this twice in the past two evenings, just idling waiting in external view for about 20 minutes while parked. Getting 45-47 fps at the start when about 20 minutes out the fps just crash to 9-13 fps and stay that way. Iām going to turn photogrammetry off for the world (in graphics) to see if this is part of the problem.
Yes well I think I will keep it off unless specific need to explore a city. But like I said, cities often are āalmost rightā with current extra autogen archetypes and esp with a few specially made 3d buildings*. And rural areas rarely have PG. My rig is powerful and frame rates arent an issue - but the look of a place is. I can also run the sim at goof FPS on āUltraā but my taste prefers āhighā with a couple of tweaks to that.
I didnāt know we could turn off PG just for certain areas though (how?)
- Because of the latest archetypes I see even non-specially made castles and stately homes etc looking just about perfect.
Profile, then Content Mgr, then left click on the aircraft or whatever that you would like to delete. Takes just seconds. For instance, I have deleted all training, London photogrammetry, and several Japanese and other foreign airports I never knew existed. If you want to add them again you will find them right there on Content Mgr. to load back up.
On mine the only option is UK cities photogrammetry so I have to delete them all or nothing.
I am having the same issue as described above (exactly the same images), not only in London. However it has not been always like this, I have already been flying around London and the scenery was fine. Has any one figured out why/when this issue occurs?
I was flying around the Thames in London, and I noticed that the buildings looked really awful.
Has anyone else experienced this, or knows what can be done to fix this?
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welcome, i dont have this problem anymore. lots of factors involved, settings, bandwidth, updates welcome to fs2020 you will do a lot of fun flying and learn so much along the way about your pc and how photogrammetry works. its a very educational tool. years ago it taught me so much about the registry, file management even learnt so much about graphics programs, and how to keep a pc lean and uncluttered. The more you get into it the more you learn,
This is the n-th thread on PG London, and my shots donāt look any better.
Obviously we canāt expect better right now. Look at the present simulator ātitle imageā of Paris with molten buildings. This is what Asobo can squeeze out ot the sim, and they certainly tried. London looks even a touch worse than Paris because of the many cranes and other slim 1D-structures which Paris is lacking.
Obviously, this is the state of the art, we may like it or not. Either we use it as is which works above a certain height (but not if you are going to land at EGLC) or just switch off PG and use autogen buildings.
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Just installed MSFS2020 along with the World Update III and the Orbx London Landmark pack. London looks terrible. Only buildings from the Orbx pack look nice.
From all your screenshots, at least for you all the Thames looks reasonably nice. The Thames for me has pits, ditches, water rising up, random bumps etc.
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The issue I have is that the āoriginalā photogrammetry looks great. NYC, the Bay area, Los Angeles, what seems like the whole of Florida etc. all look really very good.
Then you go to London, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris etc and they look like the aftermath of nuclear war. In addition the photogrammetry doesnāt sit the same in the surrounding area (it is clearly darker for a start) and you can often see the join(s) where the 2 come together.
Something has unquestionably changed for the worse in the way itās done since the game first came out. We know itās on the list to be fixed so lets hope London and the rest of the newer areas donāt simply get abandoned in that state.
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Thatās not a bug. Photogrammetry for London is just hella ugly lol
Iāve brought this up before but I firmly believe the reason for incredibly detailed cities such as London and Paris having issues is the fact that they are populated with so many Victorian buildings. If Bing data contains 3D photogrammetry of a Victorian building it is a much more complex object than most modern buildings which are largely simple cubes where the details can be fleshed out with just overlayed textures. When you have peaked roofs, gables, columns, cornices, chimneys, etc, the 3D object generated is far more complex. Watch as the various LOD levels load as you fly low and slow over London. Eventually you do get much more detail but you can see the sim struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of complex buildings. Sounds like the people demanding the instant realism should start bettering their modeling skills and start replacing buildings with their custom built objects. They get a very fast lesson on the immense task.
All of Bing imagery is not equal. ā¦ older satellite photography and 3D rendering techniques in some places and newer in others but it is a continuing process including the launching of new satellites.
Apart from having hand sculpted objects or A.I. guesswork thereās very little that can be done except wait.