I have visually checked (after hours of waiting) some locations in Greece and cannot see any improvement in scenery quality over FS2020. On several locations scenery details are clearly worse than in FS2020. I feel, I have my money wasted.
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I agree, especially the coastlines are very disappointing
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I have you tried changing the seasons? Its late autumn in Europe so all the fields are bare. If you change it to June or July you’ll see the fields all grow wild flowers and crops.
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if its worse than 2020 you aren’t getting the updated map data streamed. Still server issues even here going on day 3
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If a ground scenery is clear and crisp, but of lower detail quality than in FS2020, why does this belong to server issues?? This is a issue of map quality.
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FS24 has clearly lower quality overall graphics than FS20. I cant understand people talking about “improved” graphics 
…terrain textures, autogen, clouds, lighting, etc. Way lower quality while running considerably worse (at the same settings).
It really feels like some of us have a different version of the sim or something like that.
For instance, I see people talking about improved night lighting, WOW, this is what Im getting (maxed settings):
I though we already managed to get rid of this ■■■■texture lighting long ago, now it is present in a “new” FS version…what a joke!!! 
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Now that I’ve finally managed to break into FS2024 and get things loaded up in good time, I was able to do a free flight to compare visuals and to be honest I was quite shocked. Compare the two images below, at roughly the same location and on the same in-game day (early June). The washed-out colours of the fields and the flat textures in 2024 are a major downgrade from the 2020 image in my view. The atmospheric effect also seems less convincing and the trees are dreadful. The only improvement in 2024 here is to the sharpness/detail in the mountains. Overall 2020 clearly looks better. Where are the next-generation graphics we were promised?
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To get the amazing scenery quality shown in the FS2024 adverts, I think you have to have a computer with an NVidea top-of-the-line GPU. And I mean 2024 top of the line, not last year’s top of the line. The AMD Radeon RX-6800-XT in my PC was top of the line 2 years ago, and it struggles to maintain 30 FPS in High-End mode while the plane is below about 500’ AGL. When I briefly tried Ultra graphics mode, the GPU fans went to 3,000 rpm, and the GPU power consumption hit 174 watts, the most I’ve ever seen it pull, and the temperature was creeping up to 60°C. And this was with the plane sitting still at the end of the runway! I agree that from altitudes above about 1000’ AGL, the scenery colors look washed-out. It’s part of the reason that I rarely used the Bing graphics in FS2020; I thought the built-in scenery looked crisper. Of course, I’ve only made 1 long flight over eastern Utah and western Colorado in FS2024, today. The terrain is all mountains and sagebrush desert in the Basin and Range region of the western US, so I wasn’t expecting glorious colors, but somehow FS2024’s ground textures just don’t look as nice as the Bing real world graphics in FS2020.
The new lighting engine is the culprit here. 2020 already overbrightened scenery and aircraft in conditions with clear skies. In 2024 this has been taken to the extreme, resulting in bleached out colours. This further highlights the differences in colour between the underlying texture and the trees, that 2020 blended together so well. I think the new lighting engine was just a new toy they wanted to use. It’s not obvious what improvements it brought, but the problems it created are very clear in your screenshots. But it’s very early days yet, and I expect they will fine tune this to restore the realism while still having the benefits the new lighting engine brings. We just have to wait.
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Yes the lighting is a bit bright, but that can be tuned.
See my post about the Grand Canyon, the sun shadows are accurate so the lighting engine is doing well. The fact that the shadows follow a real life web cam means that Asobo can tune the lighting levels.
I’ve also noticed that trees in the Northern hemisphere are a bit too green considering its late November and many leaves have turned brown and fallen.
But its early days and they have made a great start:
So I don’t think the scenery is worse overall.
In a sense this tallies with my concern, which is that their focus is exclusively on the big destinations at the expense of the rest of the world. They have had plenty of time to turn the excessive brightness down, but have chosen not to. I wonder if it’s because it works well in places the Grand Canyon - and I agree that image looks great - and they’re going for the big marketing shots at those places? Meanwhile, you need sunglasses to look at ordinary farms and fields, which are a major step back in terms of realism or visual texture.
Maybe this is why some of us feel like we’re playing a different game to others of you, when we read reports of the stunningly improved graphics and yet we see comparisons like the one I posted above. It seems like some people are viewing carefully crafted locations with fine textures and calibrated lighting vs others flying in more obscure places on the map.
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I’ve got a RTX 4090 and running settings on “ultra”. The ground looks like low resolution maps… It’s really really disappointing after the promised “new high resolution Bing maps”.
It was either a lie or either there is a problem they should quickly solve.
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5 million people visit the Grand Canyon every year. So putting effort into rendering it accurately is the right thing to do. Users would complain if Asobo didn’t do it justice!
As for sunglasses I hear you. But come and look at the UK under dark, rainy clouds - and bring an umbrella ha ha.
And yes the night lights are far too bright. A slider for night brightness would be cool. Then we could adjust it for what our eyes perceive and night vision etc.
Definitely not in Grand canyon. That looks amazing. 95% of the res tof the world looks like hot garbage.
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There’s an flightsim.to app to alleviate this. Poke around.
There are serious terrain streaming and caching issues at the moment. Thats having a real impact on how good looking the terrain is. I agree that in some situations they really need to tweak and lighting and the seasonal colour cast thats put over the terrain.
I find the new lighting system is at its best at dusk, which was the big weak area of 2020. Generally though when everything works, especially the data streaming component, its incredible. The ambient lighting is a real step up over 2020.
One thing Asobo really need to work on is the over abundance of trees at higher altitudes and even in instances on cliff walls. It was a fly in the ointment in FS2020 and it appears there’s been no improvement in it in 2024. Thankfully there are plenty of mods over on flightsim.to to remove tree lines but we shouldn’t need those, and of course Xbox users don’t have access to them.
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This is probably just one area that has been updated with new satellite. Satellite imagery will always vary in color and quality depending on what time of year the image was taken and also the lightning conditions it was taken in. Do you understand how difficult it is to make the whole world uniform in that sense? 2020 has so many areas that look horrible that are much better in 2024. You win some, you lose some. That’s just the limitation of this technology.
PS, I wouldn’t even go as far as saying that the example you posted from 2024 looks bad. It just looks different. In my opinion it looked too saturated and cartoonish in 2020. The 2024 version looks more realistic.
It isn’t just one area; it is most areas and as someone has commented above, it is due to the new lighting model which has not yet been properly calibrated for individual areas.
We will have to agree to differ on those two images; I think the 2020 one looks much better and more realistic, but YMMV.
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the autogen scenery looks worse than 2020
folks are focusing only on pois and photogrammetry, and those are fine
but the autogen countryside is worse
If its worse then its probably not loading properly. Its much better when its working. There’s detailing on the ground and trees actually look like proper 3D objects that move in the wind. Its on a whole other level of detail.
I agree. The 2024 shot posted above actually looks closer to how it would look in real life. Some people may prefer the more colour saturated style of 2020 though.