I’d forgotten all about that. Didn’t it used to actually say “Ultra” at one point, then they changed it to a numeric setting instead? Perhaps I imagined that…
I think so
Yes, you set it to “Ultra”, and when you checked the “usercfg.opt” you would see it was 200. So people got curious, and tried setting it to higher numbers bypassing the GUI entirely. I tried out 1000 once. 
It looks like I misremembered it in more ways than one. Going back to some of the earliest imagery I can find, 200 used to be the maximum.
And there was no Object LOD slider at all. So 200 was labelled Ultra because it was as high as you could set it in the GUI. They then changed the maximum to 400, making 400 the new Ultra, and 200 no longer is. Going by the logic of naming 200 as Ultra.
That must have been before SU3 when I got the sim, I’ve only ever seen it in numbers.
1 Like
No, I just remembered it wrong. I knew it was lower than it is now. 200 was the maximum, and the users labelled it as “Ultra” but it was never officially so. It was just the end of the slider. 400 is now Ultra, using the same logic.
I bought it August 19th 2020, and I’m pretty sure it was like that image above, which was from September 2020.
200 now would be firmly Medium. 
1 Like
Yet Sepp said they ‘extended’ ultra to 400. I think increasing tree line distances was a much hyped feature.
1 Like
I suspect that was shortly before everyone started complaining about giant trees. So Asobo shrank the size of them (which are still too big), but to get the same coverage with smaller trees you need more of them, which lowers performance, so no doubt they also reduced the range at which they are drawn…unless you overcrank terrain detail.
When UK came out, FS’s LOD settings were very different. Back then, the single cars rendered as cars from relatively far away. Now they render as blobs when you’re just 1/4 mile away. Car groups interestingly render in detail from quite a distance still. Point being, I think around SU9(? I forget), they completely rewrote the LOD and display logic (e.g. now they turn off stuff behind you, so if you turn around quickly you see it pop up). With these changes flying performance improved greatly. Sadly, visual quality suffered quite a bit if you’re up there to look around.
Hopefully they improve all this a lot in 2024. Seems like we might be getting some improved visual performance / quality coming. Don’t know if they’ll put it in 2020, too? From discussion it sounds like they’re saying they’ve improved visual performance and quality in 2024, though no details yet. It might only be improvements in visual effects quality (like smoke… hopefully boat wakes etc), or there might be some other improvements, too. We’ll likely find out on Friday.
See, now where I live, trees aren’t big enough, lol. They easily get to 60 ft tall around here.
I noticed on a couple of YT videos I uploaded in 2020/2021 that there are trees visible when starting up, very close to the ramp start I chose.
I’ve been meaning to go back to those locations to see if there is a noticeable difference in tree size.
If you hate a particular atrocious area the only method I know to get rid of it is to place a polygon in editor to remove buildings inside that area. That works for autogen buildings at least but to be honest I didn´t test it with PG as I don´t normally use it. Just export it as addon and load it in game as any other.
You can also remove other things like some street lights (all types are not possible) or vegetation as well. For vegetation you would need to either replace it with a different biome type if you don´t like the original trees or just set vegetation density to 0 in that area to remove it completely.
The last panic option is to use an exclusion rectangle. That would remove everything inside it. I think the only thing you can´t really remove are the roads.
Cheers