Good luck guys batling against windmills (asobo). After their lack of interest, half broken product and their attitude i give up and im affraid we lost this fight and graphics wise the game will only worsen.
LOD thing - todays PCs cant handle better LOD flying over dense photogrammetry areas, whether its because of lack of optimizations or not and the more performance complaints there are, dev will quietly downgrade graphics even more.
Low res thing - too few upvotes leaving our issue unnoticed so hurray that 8 old years xplane looks better than next gen sim
Good luck. I wish you success for my own sake too.
Textures above FL200 look like FS9 at low texture res. Don’t you guys care about this?
Please upvote this. We don’t want ZL19 over 8000 feet, but this is way blurry and low res.
My thought is downloading that much of data when with airliners as they move very faster is very demanding, that’s why we have very low res textures at high altitudes, Asobo should add an option where we can cache any area we want, not just only photogrammetry areas. And make the caching easier, right now it takes a lot of time to manually cache an area with high quality.
People who do Ortho4XP have known this since Microsoft flight sim was released.
A 1 degree ZL16 tile requires 2.7 GByte and with a 50 MBit connection takes at least 8 minutes to download. Depending on your height you could see 4 up to 7 such tiles at a time. How is this amount of data supposed to be streamed in realtime? It’s not possible, even if you have clever algorithms to adjust the resolution depending on your height, it would still not be able to provide the data in realtime.
That’s why had to make some shortcuts so that everyone can play, and I am not surprised by this at all. It’s not possible to stream the maximum quality that your computer can render unless you have a 500 or 1000 MBit internet connection.
The good thing is that it still looks good, and the fantastic buildings and trees make up for it. Also the fact that I no longer have to do the ridiculous amounts of work required for Ortho4XP (dozens of nights of downloading data) I am absolutely content. But - unless you predownload the textures a day in advance and have copious amounts of Terabytes to store them - you’ll have to lower your expectations somewhat.
I have 600mb/s connection, soon will have 1gb. Why not giving the option to fully use our connections to make terrain textures look sharp at high altitudes?. If my connection and/or my system can’t handle it then, I will turn it down, but having the option would be great imo.
I saw both side within 6months not related to bandwidth, offline same result, it’s tweaking and adding fader more then anything else. P3D when they started it has similar effect, until they tweak it and added individual fader option.
I’m currently flying a lot in places where I’ve never been, and have never seen more than 2.5 Mbps (of 100) used. The internet bandwidth is not the problem currently.
And Bing Maps is able to load a maximized browser window’s worth of satellite data in the resolution I’d like to have within less than half a second. For MSFS you’d need more area but we’re still talking about a second or two, not 8 minutes.
If you fly higher, while you’d need more area still, the sim could reduce the resolution accordingly. Also, the higher you fly, the more likely the sim can tell minutes in advance which ground are you’re likely to fly over next (knowing your heading & your flight plan) and could preload that.
Think before you post any calculations. You dont need to load whole 4 tiles at once. And thats where LOD come to place and highest ZL is first loaded near aircraft.
Plese be so kind and dont tell others what should they do.
Feel free to not post anything here. Your opinion is noted
Suppose you’re right and that amount of stream is impossible, we should have the ability to cache and download tiles like Ortho, not the broken way Asobo has implemented into the sim. We have to zoom in to download high quality cache, like, why? just let us click on high quality and be done with it takes ages to download tiles this way.
Perhaps some people do not understand how textures are handled in 3d games. They have to be texture mapped to triangles on the client computer, and do not arrive perfectly prerendered on the server.
You could of course download the textures in the exact resolution that is needed to render them on your monitor. But that requires computation and that computation would have to run on Asobos servers. I don’t think that was the plan, so we have no choice but download textures in higher resolutions than we need before they are scaled on our computer.
A ZL16 tile requires ca 2.7 Gbyte of uncompressed textures. Of course you can reduce that by LODs and compression but even with the cleverest algorithm I dont see how it can be reduced to a degree that can be streamed with 2 Mbyte/sec or less.
Of course the people with much faster internet could download a lot more but the size grows quadratically, so 4 times higher resolution means 16 times more data. Keeps that in mind when you speak about very much higher resolution.
The fact that Bing Maps flickers for most people when they move around should be an indication to the actual limits of their connection.
Tbh I have not even tried that because not having to “work” anymore as in Ortho4XP was my main reason to switch to MSFS. So far I assumed that you could specify the area and it would download the data overnight?? But yes, a country the size France in ZL16 would be ~150 GByte so that would indeed take forever (at least 1 night) to download, and you could quickly run out of disk space too.
Well give it a try, it took like 10 minutes just to highlight my own city in manual cache. 10 minutes just 1 city. You have to zoom in so much for high quality textures.
You dont have blank textures in the distance when you fly at low altitude and you still get max ZL as you go. The tiles are preloaded in lowest ZL at the distance the same way as they would be. No need to render 7 tiles in max zl. theres no point in that
Yes, my manual cache ui is currently running at 2 fps.
I tried selecting an area, and then zooming in to choose larger area with high quality, and the sim crashed. The whole manual cache is broken atm.
Been reading through all of this. Booted up the sim, and did some experimenting as well. I agree, the distant quality seems not great, until you are right up close.
Tried fooling around with all the settings, cant get anything any better. Manual cache or not. What’s weird, is that this seems to also depend on the location. For example where I live (Miami, FL) Looks UNREAL. It looks very accurate, and appears almost like a custom airport / city. I am BLOWN away with the detail here. But, then… if I go to another random city in the USA… it is hit or miss. Generally they are good, but man… sometimes they are not great at all.
For example, Lake Como Italy. I love this place and I shoot weddings here sometimes. I know the area, and used to fly this in X-plane 11 all the time. Granted I had to download a scenery pack for it to look nice, but it did. I was excited to see this location with the new MSFS. So, off I go looking for the famous landmarks there. I was very VERY disappointing! It looks bad. Very “auto gen” in nature… and have not had interest to even fly there again. Yet, the buildings in Miami fl are PERFECT. They look identical to the real things. It’s unreal.
But this maybe two different issues. There is the blurry aspect, and then there is the lack of detail aspect in some locations.
All I know is that on release day I just cranked everything to ultra, allocated 500GB off a brand new m.2 ssd for rolling cache and low or high-level everything was crisp. Winds worked and everything was alright. First weekend the premium deluxe disappeared, game uninstalled and tried to reinstall itself twice. Now I’m getting blurries, stuttering, random CTDs, buildings that come out of the ground like it’s mud. And this is after I nuked the system and did a fresh install of OS, drivers and the sim.
However look at any streamer with equivalent hardware and they’re getting 4k 60 fps butter smooth, crisp experiences (I mean, on the same bloody hardware) . Sounds to me like paying customers are getting less than people with press copies who actually make money out of this. Something is definitelywrong with the distribution of the sim. The experience and performance (on the same machine with no hardware change) has been downhill since day 1… . Can’t even imaginewhat will happen with more complex aircraft down the line.
This is a real life photo looking out of a jet window. Not sure I’m seeing a terrible difference from the sim pictures posted here vs real life but maybe some how this isn’t a fair comparison. Granted, my eyes are 70 years old.
i had the same issue and after i few flight i noticed that after 20GB of ram or 7GB of Vram the sim will CTD
i set my LOD to 100 and no CTD am going to send a Zendesk
Do I understand this right? We believe the CTDs near the end of long flights are due to the total RAM usage and I can skip the step of reinstalling everything?
Interesting, because yes, most crashes I recall were around the time when the game would have had to load all the assets for for the destination airport…
takes ages to download tiles this way.