Disappointed in Sim Update 5

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1792

That’s all as far as I’m concerned. For whatever reason Asobo stopped the in-game sliders at 200. Why is anyone’s guess but it is what it is. Just treat those values like you’re sliding those LODs past 200 :grin: To be fair they have said they’re going to provide options to go beyond ‘Ultra’ so this is just a stopgap.

@TomL7753,

If we’re talking about a graphics ‘issue’ since SU5 then I would totally agree. It looks to me like they changed some things in the rendering because I’ve seen some brilliant depictions of distant showers and rainbows that I don’t recall being as noticeable previously. The flip side of that is it seems to have made certain aspects of the lighting a bit whacky, particularly where sunlight shines through cloud. Again, I’m sure they will tweak that going forward. It may be something they’ve done in preparation for DX12 and raytracing. Who knows?

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m getting a bit tired of reading all of these conspiracy theories about huge and deliberate graphical downgrades to accommodate the XBOX. There are countless threads now where certain people just keep chucking these same statements out there without backing it up, just because they want to hate on consoles. Yes 200 LOD looks rubbish. So what? It takes seconds to change it in the user.cfg file except now the performance is way better.

Then there are the people who perceive there to be an issue, but the cause is the settings bug where even though the settings say ‘Ultra’ it’s actually set to ‘low’. Finally there are the people with genuine issues. I’m just making the point that I firmly believe those genuine cases are not a consequence of Asobo deliberately screwing the PC version so kids can divebomb Tower Bridge on their consoles. SU5 brought a lot of good things to the party but also brought a ton of bugs too. I’m sure once WU6 is with us many of these issues will be consigned to history.

FWIW this video aptly demonstrates the settings bug…

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1793

It has been debunked already a lot if times with proof it’s not the case. To be honest, to me it looks like the graphics engine got a massive upgrade. There has been no cutting corners.

The color fringing/banding looks like an output error just like looking at a 32bit image on a 24/16bit output. Its outputting more colors then that can be handled. Looks like possibly because of HDR to SDR post process to maybe 24bit instead of for example 32bit hence the gradients in the sky. Same as for the purplish and greenish colors because of the lighting as gamma and intensity is different between hd and sd. But, I’m not 100% sure, it kind of looks like this.

“Yeah, but the culling is…” Full stop, That’s just a config, has nothing to do with the engine.

“But the memory is not fully utilized, it does not use more then xbox…”. Again, full stop, we have seen >=17GB commit requests by the sim and total memory usages both RAM+VRAM accumulated in total above 16GB.

But, in all fairness we have also seen some possible programming errors, causing ctd’s these probably introduced due to the multithreading (receiving and reading non ready or maybe unloaded assets) and mods (coherent::view::inputgroup while there possibly is no inputgroup yet). But also self inflicted ones. Like i created ctd’s by exhausting the windows graphics pipeline because sometimes, I’m an idiot.

Yes, there are bugs, yes, the api communication could be better.

Am i dissapointed in SU5? Hell no, the improvements done will give the possibilites to add more. If the cpu and gpu are less busy, you can add things because there is room for it to do so.

Really, the dumbing down thing. It’s bashing, people do not understanding, or are just rioting (boredom?, attention?, sheeping?, etc…)

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1794

We can only hope to get back what we used to have.
I also struggle a lot to enjoy the sim in the current state.

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1796

Tell us how to change that config then, or be a little clearer in what exactly you mean. ‘Full stop’ is not a clear description and even less of an argument, I think.

Even with LOD set to 9.0, the terrain is changing in (at least) four very visible stages over a distance of less than one mile. Not subtly, but grossly different shapes and colouring, sometimes.

If you want to (try to) reproduce what I’ve been seeing, fly with the drone camera just off the cliffs of the southern coast of Ireland (more specifically: the cliffs just to the west of Cork harbour), hover over the water surface. Or a little higher, it does not really matter.
Go back and forth to the cliffs, back and forth, there is no denying it. Changing graphics settings or LOD does not change it, at least not by much. It is most definitely more than just ‘a config’. I would find it interesting if anyone else does not see this issue at that location, it is very clearly present for me.

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1797

Well, there is my background speaking, in my app i set
for example clipping distance. It’s just a number. In relation to culling. This config is partly public, the configuration file, and partly internal as a parameter. It has nothing to do with the graphics engine. It’s just a configurable parameter (better said, a combination of). If this is not the case, i would be be, let’s call it surprised.

I think i should have made myself more clear. I thought i was by saying that it has nothing to do with the graphics engine because the engine is capable, otherwise your config file change would have done absolutely nothing, which appears not the case. Hence we get a slider, just one single number setting a configuration value.

It was a response in dumbing down, which in my opinion has been the exact opposite. Especially after watching the interview with digital foundry with the tech lead (the tech lead was it, right?)

This is where the big misunderstanding exists in IT between developers and it’s users. what you see does not tell what is happening in what you don’t see. It’s like an iceberg you only see the top part.

@Kriebie8731 i hope to be more clear now, cheers!

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1798

Absolutely nothing has changed on my end and I’ve checked this many times. In some of the videos I have posted I have shown my settings in them which indeed show that I’m on full blast aside from resolution scale at 100. As someone who flies on VATSIM a ton and references TAC and sectional charts and makes good use of TrackIR it’s very evident that something is different. Sometimes a controller would tell me to proceed to or report a specific VRP and it’s hard for me to find them now in some cases and overall the popping issue really leads to a very bad experience as a TrackIR user and I can’t wait till this is fixed.

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1799

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Settings on high/ultra.

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1800

But as I’ve clearly demonstrated the game is just fine. Did you watch the video I linked by any chance? That has to be your first port of call.

If your settings are ok, then you’ve very clearly got something else going on and it looks data related. It looks very much like you have no internet connection, have some data issue or are offline. Look at my screenshots (which are a mixture of Medium/High/Ultra) and look at yours.

Something is clearly wrong, but it is absolutely not ASOBO downgrading the graphics!

1801

Here is a video which shows the graphical downgrade, compares to before SU5 and after SU5.
Voice is german, sorry.

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1802

Again, over the town/city that is clearly a data problem. It looks like it’s offline to me (I’m assuming the grey cub is SU5?).

1803

If so then why are so many people bringing this up all of a sudden?

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1804

They’re not are they? It’s just gone on non-stop since SU5.

SU5 has plenty of other issues - the two I’m experiencing at the moment are pretty relentless CTDs and, oddly, poor performance -‘ Limited by Main Thread’ on a 5900X which is totally wrong when paired with a 2080ti. When SU5 first came out the performance was amazing but it has steadily got worse. I was getting a comfortable 60fps and was limited by my GPU all of the time, as it should be. I then capped it at 50 purely to lower the GPU temps.

Now, it’s not even maintaining that. Last night flying the 320 I had a constant capped 50fps. Today I’m watching the fps slowly but surely drop…hovering around 40 just now. It’s now dipping into the 30’s. For comparisons sake, in SU4 I was getting a very easy capped 60fps in the cruise.

Again, I’m inclined to think all of this stuff is related to data streaming from the MS servers. Last night was fine, today it’s rubbish. My big fear when they brought the XBOX on board was that the servers wouldn’t cope, because they were already struggling under just the PC load with numerous outages and problems. I think what we’re seeing is probably just that. I firmly believe that deliberately downgrading the graphics is not the culprit, there is obviously something else going on.

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1805

Just thinking, if this has suddenly got worse and more people are bringing it up I’d suggest it supports my hypothesis that there are data problems.

Whilst I’ve been typing my fps is now 34-36 and my system is effectively sat with its feet up. Something is clearly not playing properly on the MS side.

Edited to add….it’s now at 23fps. WTAF?!

1806

It’s gone non-stop for a reason, it’s indeed an issue. As I mentioned above referencing VFR charts and flying on MSFS just isn’t the same post SU5. I use P3D, XP and MSFS and one of the reasons I absolutely love MSFS is how much of a gold mine it is for flying under VFR without doing much on your end to make it happen.

Oh I have heard about the crashing issues left and right and thankfully I’ve been dodging that bullet. I run an i9-10900KF / RTX 3070 / 32 GB DDR4 RAM @ 3200 / SSD and haven’t had a single crash that I recall post SU5 and I’m maxed out aside from resolution scale at 100. However I do acknowledge that crashing is an issue and do try to help those with this problem (not on this forum though, on Steam).

I don’t think it’s fair to blame the end-user for the graphics downgrade issue (sorry if you were not implying this but if came across as if you are). Overall they do seem to have taken a nosedive and thankfully Asobo will start to address this in SU6.

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1807

You’re not understanding what I’m saying.

This game is almost entirely reliant on data streaming. The graphics are just fine, as I’ve demonstrated. I’m not blaming the end user…I’m blaming bugs and/or data problems.

It’s very obvious that when it works it looks great. Right now it’s now working.

1808

I’m aware it does and yes, photogrammetry does work however when you look at the big picture regarding graphics it’s just not the same anymore.

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1809

You are wrong!
There is a massiv graphical downgrade.
That is sure.

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1810

Look at my screenshots. Are they a downgrade? No, they’re not.

Or are you suggesting I’m lying?

There is clearly a problem with the game and the way it is streaming data. In this game the graphics rely VERY HEAVILY on streamed data. I’m not talking about photogrammetry…the whole shooting match relies on stream data.

I’ve just proved it. I was down to 20fps. I turned off all data, waited a minute or so and turned it back on. I’m back to 50fps.

There is a bigger problem here. I’ve proved from my screenshots that the game looks better than it did in SU4. How are you still debating that? The evidence is there right in front of you!

1811

I wasn’t implying that however it’s deceitful to say they’re fine if one must go into ini files and mess around with stuff. I’m no stranger to messing around with this sort of stuff in flight sims but users shouldn’t have to be doing this stuff just to get their graphics back.

1812

That wasn’t directed at you :relaxed:

We’re on the same side here! I’m not being deceitful and I’ve explained why. All the change in the .cfg file is is to utilise the extra performance SU5 brought to push to LOD out even further and make that game look way better than it ever did in SU4.

I’ve proved with those shots that the game looks awesome. I’d say it’s disingenuous to suggest that there has been a deliberate attempt to dumb down the graphics, because there clearly hasn’t. There is something obviously wrong though which is causing people’s problems. At the risk of repeating myself, in my opinion it’s all about streaming data.