That’s what I suspect just by default honestly, that Azure is often throttling and nobody had disclosed this yet.
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I’m going to try this too hmmm.
I could totally see Geforce Experience totally overriding what we should be setting Only In the Sim/Game itself.
In fact it did say “Oh you don’t have the horsepower to run this title optimally” - and for the record, every time I used its “Optimize” feature on other titles it would look and perform Worse.
Today it is much worse in my case too. I guess it really is a server issue.
The low LOD/drawing distance issue is especially worse for the photogrammetry area. The drawing distance of the most detailed photogrammetry model is too short, as short as about 1km: I cannot see a detailed modeled control tower even when I sat in the center of the runway at CYWG, this is too bad.
Just after airborne from CYWG, RWY 13, less than 1000ft AGL, when I look at the direction of downtown(which is only about 7km away), I can only see a very rough model(the lowest level of rendering) of tall buildings instead of a detailed bing map 3D model. When I climbed to about 2500-3000ft AGL and fly overhead those build-up areas, it’s still only showing the rough model instead of detailed ones unless I decent to less than about 2000ft. This made autogen mode looks better than photogrammetry, ironically.
Sometimes, when I fly lower than 2000ft and passed an area, I can see the detailed photogrammetry model; however when I fly away that area about 1-2km, and come back after serval minutes, the photogrammetry model I previously saw is gone, only rough model can be saw. Turning photogrammetry in the setting off and on again, the detailed model appears again.
And sometimes, when I switched the photogrammetry from OFF to ON, the autogen style building models weren’t replaced by the photogrammetry ones. Then when I switched the entire data/live function OFF, the building models were replaced by the photogrammetry ones this time, which should not be.
The above is tested under Terrian/Object LOD setting at 100-200, both without and with the highest level of manual cache.
It seems evident there’s some throttling at play, but I’m not so sure it’s on Azure side.
If you have a look, whenever you first load a flight, during loading screen, you’ll have access to download speeds that you who will never have access to ever again during the flight itself.
I have the fastest Internet one private individual can have in my country: 1Gbps ( roughly 110 MB/s).
- During flight loading screen, it could peak as high as ~300Mbps (around 40 MB/s), rarely more, most of the time 200 Mbps
- During flight, I rarely see the game streaming at more than some occasional 15-20Mbps peaks (around 2.5 MB/s)
- If you fly over certain area, mostly important cities, landmarks and even more specifically above photogrammetric cities then I’ll suddenly have more bandwith peaks like 70Mbps or slightly more. But whenever you fly in most “less important” areas who could be considered “in-between/transit”, I end up with a meager bandwith with occasional small peaks but more often than not, it’s not even reaching 1Mbps most of the time.
That is clearly not enough to stream decent textures, plain and simple. Clearly, Azure can deliver and unlock higher speeds if needed. The question is, as bandwith (like time) is money: do they really want to for the whole duration of your flights?
I see a lot of people saying things like the game doesn’t look as good as it used to be, especially those who were into Alpha and press release. This could be an indication why, and it could make sense as during those, you’d have way less people using the game, and during press release you’d want youtube people to be able to display the best quality to hype the game. That being said, without clear evidences, it’s hard to be 100% THAT sure if that is really the case and if it is everywhere, like you could pinpoint with a side by side comparison.
If that is the case, one possible explanation is that it could not even be on Azure servers side, but a throttling implemented in the game through last update, or even a very small unnoticed and unofficial “update” so to speak. And that would make sense if Microsoft asked Asobo to do something to reduce Azure servers strain without having to have their Azure team having to come up with some algorithm to specifically detect MSFS users, what they’re streaming and where their planes are and restrain them accordingly. That while it’s not their job to do so.
That may even explain why some people are seeing virtually no differences if they manually cache a place: Asobo’s algorithm to reduce Azure strain, if it exists, might still be at play downgrading textures quality “on the fly” inside the sim in an effort to reduce downloads and if they forgot/overlooked, for example, to specifically shut it down over manually cached area, which could make sense if you want to be sure it kicks back whenever you cross the boundaries of your manually cached scenery (which won’t be that big, with no manually cached data appearing in the distance quicly above 3000ft or so.)
Just my two cents
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i dont know if this means anything but i found something yesterday on my system. im always getting low bandwidth warnings and seeing few users online. i fly for 10 minutes and my scenery goes to mush with maybe 5 users. i would always check my internet speed and it says i have my full 150m connection.
i started monitoring my nic card in task manager. when i fire up the sim it would show i was using 50 Mbps while loading up. i start at an airport get in the air and everything is fabulous. after about 10 minutes of flight my scenery starts looking like mush. i check my task manager and im using 5-10 Kbps.
so now im wondering whats up with that. luckily i have multiple network connections in my house so it was easier for me to trouble shoot. my pc is hard wired with a straight Ethernet cable to the 1gig router. i have 3 other wireless connection for various stuff like google and tablets. uno how u need the stupid expanders to cover the whole house. well they all still go to the same internet connection so why would i use that for my pc connection.
anyway, i started swapping my connections from cable to wireless. i used cable 1g, 2.4 wireless 54m and 5g 890m to my 150m internet router. i found my wireless connections worked better than my wired connection but not great. i guess i couldve bought a bad cable last month when i moved my pit.
so now im wondering why the usage is dropping so bad. i checked all my routers and they dont seem to be slowing the connection. i have 5Kbps from the sim while having 150Mbps from the browser during the speed test. im running w10 pro. im thinking that windows might be doing something. so what can i do about that. i couldnt find where to force the network connection, seems to me we used to be able to force the nic card speed back in w95. so i went after the sims priority settings. first i set priority to high, omg what a difference. it worked better than i could imagine. but one big flaw… nothing else worked on the internet. i could not browse or connect to discord. my 3rd party addons would not work but the sim was on fire.
Conclusion… i wrote a batch file to start the sim with priority set to AboveNormal. i flew all afternoon with ultra settings not missing a thing. the scenery was UHD quality and the sky was filled with user tags as far as i could see. although this still is not perfect. after a while i would see my connection drop to the Kbps range. i simply disabled and re-enabled the card and instantly back to 5-50Mbps streaming. another thing to keep in mind, i used 28gig yesterday flying for a few hours but boy did i have fun.
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Alright, I solved this on my own. I change the LOD by memory edit on the go as I fly according to need.
Terrain LOD2 (ingame 200) vs LOD6 - LZKZ airport from 36 000ft
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A “”low bandwidth” warning might not indicate any problems in your own home internet connection or at your ISP. It all depends on the particular route the incoming packets take while traveling between the Azure servers and your computer
Any bottlenecks at an intermediate router anywhere in the world could affect how fast data can stream. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
There seem to be a fair number of generalizations and some fairly sketchy guesswork regarding how the backend infrastructure for MSFS is organized.
For example, I’ve heard a lot of people making reference to “stressed servers on azure”. If you don’t know, then PLEASE, STOP SPECULATING.
Speculative statements like these add little value to the discussion, and pollute the conversation. If you have a theory, please help out the community and test your theory. If you find something and have data to back it, make a Zendesk ticket.
Typically distributed systems like this are built upon many layers of physical and virtual infrastructure, each with a specific job or jobs, often scaling and operating independently. The systems today are vastly more sophisticated and complex than even 5 or 10 years ago. With this can come fragility.
For example, for many systems, well before an individual node is brought to its knees, most systems will try and scale, either horizontally (“more trucks”) or vertically (“bigger trucks”), or both in an effort to meet demand. Sometimes this happens “on demand”, other times scale up and/or scale out is done preemptively and kept “warm” (“at the starting line”) or “cool” (“at the paddock”). Forward of the fleet might be one or more layers of load balancers, caches, and proxies. Any one of these layers can encounter a problem that might cause downstream issues for a customer/consumer.
The truth is, we have no idea how the backend infrastructure that is responsible for map data is structured. Some or all of it may be delivered to the end user mostly from edge networks operating outside of the azure boundary. It’s also possible all the infrastructure sits inside of azure datacenters. Some of that backplane might be shared, while other parts might be dedicated.
Among the list of MANY possible problems:
- Inability to scale fast enough to meet demand
- Capacity limits on shared network infrastructure
- Traffic routing problems
- Limits on physical or virtual infrastructure
- Problems with 3rd party providers (CloudFlare, etc.)
- Software bugs, either in the game, or on the backend causing undesirable behaviours
- Problems with clocks (yes, clocks)
- A million other possible things
Bottom line, these systems can be complex, and tricky to work on at the best of times.
So if you want to help:
- Collect screenshots (the problem, and your graphics settings in game)
- Save your dxdiag
- Note where you see the problem, your altitude, and the plane you were flying
- summarize the problem and explain how to re-create the problem, and submit it to Zendesk
If you’re extra crafty you can grab debug info from the game, network traffic info, etc.
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Its abundantly clear whats going on. Its the game design. Changing LoD unclears everything. Nothing wrong with bandwith and or azure servers
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I tend to agree with you. I read this entire thread and the thread amount mountains, and the evidence points pretty strongly at there being one or more problems with scaling and LOD.
I do also agree though with people who’ve shown the oddity of next to no network bandwidth being utilized, regardless of settings, despite what appears to be a pretty significant investment on the part of asobo to make the bandwidth management controls. Why allow a 500gb a month limit when nobody can even consistently get the game to utilize even 1/100th of that…
I suspect there are multiple issues and play here. This is why its important for as many people as possible to submit good quality Zendesk tickets.
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What you used to change the value directly from memory? I tried with some tool but the value keeps changing back
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Search for the „userconfig.opt“ and change terrain and maybe object LOD to 3 or higher. Easy fix. BUT your GPU VRAM and System RAM better be 8+ and 32GB or more…
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I use Cosmos by cheathappens now, but I dont even have to freeze the value, so I hope if you find the correct value, it should work with any tool (cheat engine, artmoney, etc)
Oh and . if you are looking for value 0-200 dont (thats only menu setting), 200 is 2.0
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yes but this kind of permanent solutions is not convenient exactly because of too much of a strain , mostly on VRAM. Thats why I use memory editing or whatever called that is
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Can you explain that a bit pleasr?
After “mostly” reading this post, I think the thread derailed a bit. I think we are talking about 2 different things here:
1- Ground T E X T U R E S looking blurry too close to the plane and/or at very low altitude, above 2k to 3k ft and up.
2- PHOTOGRAMETRY L O D too low even in ultra (200) setting.
Imo, out of the two, the number 1 is far more important right now, as ground textures will affect the whole world, with AND w/o photogrametry. On top of that, it is more important when flying high with airliners.
As the title of the thread says “texture”, Ithink it would be better if we separate this issues in 2 threads and let this one exclusively for the TEXTURE issue.
jm2c.
So basically you take any process editing software (I use cosmos) other like cheatengine should work too.
You select your running process (microsoft flight simulator - game must be running) then you search for specific value. If you have your Terrain LOD setting at 200 , you will search for 2.0 . Tool returns thousands of values at first. Then you have to change that LOD setting in menu from 200 to lets say 185. Then you have to filter out unwanted values and put 1.85 in tool. It filters out many results but you will have to repeat this process perhaps 15-20 times till you get only about 100 values. Then it will be easy to spot which one is responsible for this setting.
Another aspect:
Offline mode looks horrible. Blurry city textures and roads have too much width. This is also important as MSFS will revert to offline mode when the satellite imagery is of too bad quality.
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