Comparison between release vs 1.14.6.0

If there’s any difference, 1.14.6.0 has slightly more trees at a greater distance than the release version. Is that what you mean by “obvious”?

[Looking at the zoom-ins, it’s unclear whether this is additional trees at greater distance or just greater sharpening. Either way, the current version looks ever so slightly better in my opinion. There has been no degradation of quality.]

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I think the point is now (with the unmodded comparisons) clear: They look about the same, when comparing unmodded games. Ofc the terrain spikes in the first post were nasty, but that’s another issue.

This tree distance thing goes against the downgrading accusations - broken mod compatibility is not fun, but it is not a downgrade to the visuals of the original product, which seems a common claim around here. As such this is a very good point to establish (esp. now that this comparison is done without mods, thanks to @PorcoRosse for that!) to cut to the meat of the argument: were the visuals actually downgraded? And it seems…maybe slightly improved, actually!

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Confirmation bias comes to mind.

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I may be mistaken. Behind the first ridge, the trees look more abundant - better sharpening? But behind that, one ridge further… yes, maybe there are more trees further out, as this sort of a green noise on top of the slopes. (Optimized implementation of far trees → noise? :smiley:)

It’s pretty smudgy at that distance due to JPEG artefacts, though - please use lossless formats like PNG for these, so we don’t need to guess if we are looking at existing things!

I found a way to do this because I myself was prone to say that there was more degradation going on than there really was, it seems. This while still being amazed at how it looked during some of my flights. It was then difficult to say whether it was me overreacting (due to performance frustration or broken functionalities for example) or whether it really was that degraded as a lot of people would say.

Since I made the mistake of deleting my old screenshots, I had to find a way to find out, once and for all, and also as a meaning to pinpoint very precisely any particular problems should I found some (so no one could evade the problem).

Now there are still some things that may not be tested anymore and mislead our judgement: things that may happens entirely on Microsoft servers side. Maybe ground textures and their LOD could be restricted entirely during the streaming but I believe few if any of that is likely to be possible.

Truth is, I’m “afraid” that aside a litlle less tree range, a lot if you modded it, the game is even slightly better than on release (I’ll have to test water though, I think it used to be more impressive but then again that may just be me again lol). As a matter of fact, although you can’t see it much on my last 1.7.12.0 LOWI screenshot, you wouldn’t want that horrendous built-in sharpening filter from release to be back instead of the AMD FidelityFX they implemented later on. Makes the textures and overall scenery so much more blurry under a lot of circonstances (remember that for all the other shots, I deactivated built-in sharpen filter through UserCfg.opt for both version and used DELC_Sharpen through Reshade. If I did not do that, 1.14.6.0 would have win hands down in a lot of cases. But if you use the same sharpen filter, you’ll see the textures are in fact about the same resolution and uses the same LOD more or less.

In fact, MSFS works by streaming pretty low-res textures and artificially “upscale” their resolution by cleverly using sharpening filters. This is why you often see quite a lot of graininess in the ground textures, this is the side effect. Another side effect is that it can’t discriminate what to sharpen or not and thus affects everything on screen which is why some clouds, especially when they’re gray are equally sharpen thus producing grains on their edges or grayish areas. If you entirely remove sharpen filter and not use another one, the grains will be mostly gone on clouds (and they will look less defined though). This is one of the reason I use Reshade by the way, to have control over the sharpening filter on the fly controlling its intensity and to be able to turn it off when I’m flying IFR above overcast when there is no need for sharpening the ground anymore.

So to sums it up, turns out the game has been very slightly downgraded on trees it seems but is actually better than it used to be on release unmodded (slightly greater lod for buildings for example) even without taking the initial sharpening filter on release.

With that being said, if you want me to test some place in particular, or something (close up buildings details, or at what distance LODs are switched, or anything else) and compare with your MSFS, feel free to ask.

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Hi all! There are many topics on Trees & LOD in the #bugs-and-issues categories where some have been tagged and brought forward to the team.

Search results for ‘lod trees category:200’ - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

To prevent duplicate votes on those topics from this new one, I am moving this discussion into General. Feel free to continue the side-by-side comparisons through out the versions.

I use png but apparently the forum convert them to jpg when you upload them no matter what :confused:

That being said, I think it’s more due to the sharpening filter maybe

Thanks for doing all that, was very nice to see that the visuals have actually improved over time.

The tree distance in the old version looked a little further out because of the odd large tree that rendered past the main lod ring. It’s the same reason the tree lod hack worked in the first place.

Asobo probably had a good reason to fix this oversight. Maybe memory / code optimisation? Or maybe it got fixed inadvertently while fixing something else.

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For the first set of comparison, if you look near the top (those light spots), you can see the release version has trees drawn farther out but the current version does not.

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Now that there’s evidence for the reduced tree distance it’s being hailed as an improvement? I don’t understand anymore. I also feel there is some deception behind these shots like using tree mods, filters and washing out the colours making it difficult for a fair comparison.

mmmm don’t think I agree - I think the shift from rendered trees to textures is clearly closer on the release version

My problem is not so much the actual draw distance or fps, it’s the sim not being able to keep up while flying. Before SU3 I could run at terrain 200, now when I try it soon starts falling behind and trees fade in closer and closer. Then memory starts going up and up and everything grinds to a halt after a while.

It’s doing more work now or straining the CPU more (One logical processor that is) which results in the draw distance getting closer over time until I literally see a checkerboard pattern where the trees have been generated and where they still need to appear. It’s the same with terrain texture, but more noticeable wit tiles with lots of trees.

I don’t use any sharpening or film grain or any enhancements. But do render at 150 render scale to get a less blurry picture (TAA…) since there is no difference in fps between 100 and 150 (cpu limited)

For a fair comparison for lod ranges, turn all enhancements off, but do render at max render scale to see the actual differences. I did a test once for LOD ranges in Stockholm
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/trees-lod-drawing-distance-too-low-degraded/240647/83?u=svenz
Snapshot of November 20, pre World Update 3. I can now only run at terrain 100, had no problems before with the oceans of trees flying low over Sweden at 200.

I tried LOD 4.0 after but ran into problems and set it back to 2.0. However the problem was location specific so perhaps 4.0 would have still been fine, currently 1.0 barely survives even after I upgraded to 32GB ram.

Compare Pic1 and Pic2 in full screen to see the huge difference.

Pic1: Trees Draw Distance Fix in use before Sim Update 3

Pic2: Default trees draw distance without the Fix

Fix: https://www.flightsimulator.blog/2021/03/19/trees-draw-distance-fix/

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Okay, so here we are looking at some serious JPEG compression artifact mess. Now in which picture do you want me to “see more trees”?

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Just for us that do not have time to investigate MFS issues for hours, can you draw a conclusion?

Is tree draw distance better in 1.4.16.0 compared to release?

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What might be the reason for such a discrepancy in LOD between Africa and Northern Europe ? Latitude ?

It’s mystery why. Maybe it’s a different terrain mesh resolution that affects LOD.

I made the trees red on purpose to see how far each goes.

Here is a comparison:

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I hope this is not what I think… COS(Lat) ?

If this is the case, this would mean:

  • Earth is divided in grids, each grids size gets smaller as you get closer to the poles
  • LOD rings depends on grid size, not distances…
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Could also be related to tree size

I am doing further test to confirm if that is the case.
But it wasn’t like this before the update.