It’s Scampton (which pre SU15 looked fantastic).
The JU52, that’s not static…that’s actually a friend!! He’s maybe 100ft behind me if that, and that’s what he looks like.
All thanks to SU15.
No only on XBOX, also on PC there is degraded quality, but it was started about SU10.
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Series X just a little VFR flying in the basic default Cirrus SR22, around the East coast of UK it looks so rubbish, compared to what it used to look like, clouds were even poor with this banding in them.
Rolling cache off, all live services enabled.
I have not much desire to play this until it’s fixed?
It looks so ugly, what have you done!
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Many folks blame Xbox for the PC degradation (not that you are). Hard to say but it’s still hard to make that connection. Generally doesn’t happen with other PC to console crossovers. I just remember when the sim first came out on Xbox I was amazed at the graphics, couldn’t believe it. Then a few WUs and SUs later it’s terrible (WU Oceania for me is when the switch flipped, not sure why). Before that I remember thinking it was a bit unrealistic how far I could see runways at night. Seemed like 40 miles away you could see the lights. Now it’s about 15 miles.
The graphics look horrible, super blurry, the textures in the airport are now garbage!
Playing on Xbox X, the entire game environment at 0 and still, it runs badly
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Same here. Not sure if it had anything to do with that 500mg update but since then everything has gone downhill, again, and that’s even after the horrendous update 15. Can things get any worse.
Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
Yes
Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:
Since SU15, i had multiple issues. Mouse not working and LOD issues around 6nm out. Lots of pop in too. However after multiple restarts and ensuring i dont use quick resume, it does seem to have settled recently.
Also, i would like to say, the sim on xbox is still capable of looking just as beautiful as it did on SU14. Which to me means server / internet traffic impact perhaps? (By this i mean, ive seen it perform to previous levels with SU15, meaning th code itself must still be ok, unless its an intermittent bug)
Using PMDG 737 its better. With the Ini A320 V2 it seems worse.
Coming out of Innsbruck in the A320 soon after SU15 launch, you looked behind the plane in external view, and it was like Doom graphics.
However, like i say, the sim still seems to be able to acheive the previous performance. Flight from Santander to Birmingham last night in the PMDG 737, and it was gorgeous. 36,0000 and lod was sharp for miles out with loads of interesting weather too. (Sunset, clouds, bit o wind etc.)
If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:
rolling cache off, live weather on, live traffic on, no addons removed. Addons = BHX, STN from ini, ATR72, PMDG 737-800, LVFR static traffic liveries.
Just to reiterate, I do still get the OP’s issue, but not as often, and not as bad as the first few weeks.
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Same here. It’s been okay-ish while flying around in a kitfox, commanche. Anything with a glass cockpit reduces texture quality to varying degrees- together with clouds, etc. I do hope this gets fixed
Thank you for this post. I was wondering in the DA42 thread about the hit this thing would cause on the XBOX, and now I know.
What I’m wondering though is, why is flying in a KitFox okay but not this? The KitFox is also glass cockpit, isn’t it? I wonder if different glass panels have different memory usage? I think on the last livestream they said glass cockpits cost 1 GB. I wonder if that’s all of them or it’s airliners and the rest scale down from there.
I have no idea regarding the kitfox, there must be other factors in play- textures, wasm…
The Sting S4 also causes a lot of blurry textures, especially if gtn750 version is used.
Yeah makes sense. I found that the 414 is bad for me, even though it only uses a GNS530. I wonder if it takes more memory to simulate two engines than one. I imagine it would, which might explain, for example, why I don’t really notice LOD problems with the Kodiak, even though it is glass.
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True! 
The Kodiak performs very well on xbox.
You know the GTN750 is available on Xbox for the c414 and the Learjet 35a right? Its been super smooth for me.
I did try the 750 but was so busy with the 750 itself I didn’t notice if my LOD was positively impacted. Will try again, thanks for the tip!
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This isn’t scientific or anything, but I found it interesting and thought I’d share.
I went out for a few flights tonight using the same settings (time/weather/traffic) at the same real world time (all flights were within maybe 10 minutes of each other) to reduce the chance of the servers getting better or worse. I took off from a Boundary Bay airport (CZBB) and made a right turn towards downtown Vancouver, crossing the south arm of the Fraser river at around 1800 feet.
In the Cessna 152, you can see the skyline of downtown Vancouver clearly.
In the Cessna 414, everything from the north arm of the Fraser forward is one flat texture with no trees or buildings on it.
In the Comanche, there’s trees all the way to where downtown Vancouver would be, but no skyline (it popped in about 2-3 seconds after this picture).
The Kitfox was about where the Comanche was, acceptable (to me) but not perfect.
Surprisingly, the Kodiak was about level with the stock Cessna 152.
Anyway, I thought it was kind of cool to see the dynamic LOD in action, and to see how the RAM requirements of different planes can cause a different graphical experience. I don’t really know how to get an airliner off the ground, but if I ever figure that out it might be interesting to do the same thing with a A320 V2 or something, assuming CZBB is big enough to accommodate it.
5 Likes
The airliners are the more complex and most people fly them, so that’s also why they see the huge degradation.
For me the bigger issue is at night. I fly around NYC a lot and while I know I have many addons installed, the lights go missing in the medium distance. It’s really weird because near is fine, far out also shows lights, but everything in the medium distance goes dark.
I think the LOD just needs to have a middle ground for those textures/lights where it doesn’t totally dumb it down, but isn’t necessarily super drawn out either.
I just did a bunch more of these, and I just wanted to say that for the most part most VFR planes are really good and IFR planes are not as good. Which is great because that’s exactly what you want.
I also don’t want to single out the 414, because a bunch of planes performed similar to it (Vision Jet, TBM 930). I just used it as an example.
And I did manage to get an A320neo up in the air, and it was pretty horrible compared to all the others. But luckily most of those planes fly high, high up so LOD isn’t as big an issue as it would be.
Two big surprises were the P-38 Lightning and the Islander. Both twin engines, both great LOD in this test. The P-38 was in line with the Comanche and other single engine pistons, while the Islander was the only plane I tested that was even better than the 152. So to anyone who ever cursed out the low textures in the Islander’s cockpit, they really pay off.
Finally, I know it’s not really directly about this bug report, but I wanted to say that flying all of these different planes made me feel really lucky to be able to fly all these amazing models wherever and whenever I’d like. Sometimes you put something away in a hanger for a long time and kind of forget about it, and then you pull it out for something like this and it reminds you why you loved it in the first place. Yes LOD can always be improved, but I do feel it’s an amazing treat to be able to have this sim on my XBOX.
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Try this again but fly at 6000 and you’ll start to see the difference in LOD. Where ever you fly at 1800 with a slow prop it’s never going to be a problem.
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Server load has a big part to play in the issue. Remember that all the scenery you are looking at is being streamed by thousands of people on these servers and that creates a bottleneck. People reminisce about how good the sim looked several years ago but there were far less users back then and so much less of a bottleneck.
There have also been much more complexities added with an ever-growing number of 3rd party aircraft and scenery and more complex avionics. Uninstall everything back to vanilla and you will notice a difference in terrain loading distance compared to if you have every world update installed. Some aircraft are also better optimised than others
In terms of my feedback on this ‘bug’, unfortunately there has been a marked difference in the sim since I joined it almost 2 years ago. A year ago we were on sim update 12 and I was flying the A310 having never had any stuttering, black screens or CTDs and taxiway signs were visible from the other side of the airport. SU13 & 14 brought stuttering and CTDs for me and black screens for others. Now with SU15 there’s less of that (though still plenty of stuttering at big default airports) but taxiway signs load in only after you’ve already past them and airport vehicles and other aircraft look like something out of FS95 until you are right up close to them. I had been under the impression that SU15 would slow the loading of objects to allow avionics to load without going black. But the same as how the black screens were supposed to return once the scenery had loaded but didn’t, the scenery doesn’t load once the black screens have been avoided. It has simply been throttled to not load detail that is more than 20(?) meters away from you
The sim is still amazing to fly on and has come so far from where I started on FS5.1 but it has definitely outgrown itself and I have high hopes for MSFS2024 in November
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Oh don’t get me wrong, I understand that it’s a problem. It’s a problem for me even at 1,800 feet. I would prefer not to see a sea of flat textures no matter how high or low I’m flying.
All I’m trying to show is what they’ve already told us - We have a set amount of memory that needs to be allocated to both RAM and VRAM. The more complicated the plane (either in systems or in textures or in screens), the more sacrifices we’re going to have to make in terms of LOD or texture quality. Clearly for many the current state is not good enough. I would like more LOD and less pop-in too, like we used to have.
But it’s a good idea to do it at a higher altitude. It may make the differences even more apparent. I will try again when I next get a chance to fly.
1 Like