Seriously considering re-installing 2020 right now. I spent alot of time defending this release this release In the last couple of days on social media / YouTube. But the longer I spend playing this game the more disappointed I am with the quality of the non-lidar areas In the game. Sure the Grand canyon looks amazing but a number of small towns I know personally in Australia, Italy and Germany look jarringly poorly rendered. The way the low resolution Bing maps interact with procedural assets is absolutely trash.
My home town of Bundaberg Australia looks objectively no better than msfs X. And so do a number of other general areas.
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My answer to the subject line: it doesn’t.
Now if you want to nitpick individual areas that’s your prerogative, but everywhere I’ve flown so far in 2024 looks at least as good as 2020 and in most cases looks noticeably better.
This sim has many MANY issues ATM but visual fidelity is NOT one of them IMO…
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I don’t agree.
Sure the hand crafted/lidar / announcement trailer areas like Grand canyon look much better. But other areas like for instance , my home town and many other areas personally known to me in Queensland Australia, look much worse.
Every street and building has trees growing out of. Every creek , farm, lake and intersection is deformed.
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The game doesn’t look worse than 2020, but it is plausible your home town textures might look worse (for at least one season of the year) than it did in 2020. Australia in general is quite flat, so the improved dimensions of hills, foothills, mountains… etc, giving the world added depth and dimension might be lost on your home town.
Your system and settings could also be impacting your experience.
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I have an upper mid system , 4070s,5700x3d, 32ram and a 100mbps connection I also set the rolling cache to 120gb.
I have tried lots of different settings, and normally run the game high/ultra. It’s not system or settings. It’s the way the procedural generation interacts with the satellite carpets.
I do agree the terrain elevation data is mostly better. But the urban areas are so bad it’s not funny. I have literally spent hours flying around on the drone bike and walking around many areas. It took me a couple of days to realize just how bad the issues are, because at first I was impressed with the special areas ,lighting and new modes. But when you start looking closely and comparing the general /PG areas, it’s not ok.
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Ahhhh, yeah. I get what you are saying.
Yeah, procedural generation working with the satellite imagery is a mixed bag.
On the one hand, I love the diversity of detail and plant life it brings. But it definitely looks less photorealistic and more like CGI/graphics than I imagined it would.
It looks more detailed, but that extra detail can often look a bit more unreal than if the detail was missing (like in 2020).
Sorry, I didn’t grasp that point the first time you made it.
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I was actually defending this game online for the first 3 days and today it’s dawned on me what a regression this is in large parts of the world.
Calling it fallacious that saying that one small area is worse is a bit of stretch. I’m not saying it’s not the improvement I was hoping for, I am saying it looks considerably worse. I will redownload the 600gb of 2020 (that I was happy to have off my SSD after uninstalled on friday) and I will post some comparisons.
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I agree the new variety in the tree modeling is great. Shame the suburbs look like rainforests now though
Ooooooof. I am so sorry you uninstalled.
Yeah, my golden rule is to always have two sims on the system at all times, one mature and set up for all your gear. And a new one to slowly test, and configure. It can take months, to like a half year for me to fully switch over, and have all my gear configured and working to my liking.
It is so much more tolerable playing with a new sim when you can always jump into a stable sim for a while.
2020 on day one was the same mess, different bugs.
It is kinda fun to stumble upon those old threads full of folks complaining about those early bugs, so many of them long since patched and forgotten.
I imagine it will take another 6-12 months for Asobo to patch and build 2024 into the sim it clearly wants to be. It took 12-18 months to get there with 2020, but that was their first attempt at a MSFS. Now they have more experience.
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Another example,
I showed my Italian friend the game last night. We had played some hours of 2020 together and I was excited to show him just how good it looks.
He comes from the town of Campo basso and we took the drone-bike-coptor for a fly around it for 30mins. At first he was saying" wow it looks fantastic " then as we slowly flew around to see his brother’s house and some areas that he knew well that we had also flown around multiple times in 2020, He started saying, “Why are the buildings all wrong now”, “why did 2020 look much more accurate?”. His brother’s house turned from a small apartment into a warehouse, His street was at 45 degree incline like a ski ramp, a river near his school had water 10m to the north of the obvious depression in the land scape it was suppose to run through, There were trees all over his highschool soccer field, The highways were all at jagged, weird angles Etc etc etc. but wow the lighting in the hazy morning looked lovely.
I hope you are right. I have a 2tb m.2 SSD and the 600gb was a big hog so I pulled the pin.
I understand they changed fundamentally some of the ways the satellite carpets interact with the PG assets which has had so very negative effects. Im just disappointed it wasn’t, at a minimum, at the same quality of non speciality areas as 2020. It’s almost like the world updates haven’t been applied or are not streaming.
It’s also true I did t start playing 2020 until about 18months after release. So I missed that teething period.
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Yeah, 2020 was also a mess… and frankly, more of the bugs effected the CORE sim, rather than certain airplanes, instruments, or whatever.
2024 is full of bugs, but the core sim underneath them is more solid. That gives me hope it will take less time to get this patched to a point where it feels more mature.
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Yes, i’ve also discovered less popular places to be more accurate in 2020. Some buildings are completely missing, but it’s obvious the scenery will be improved. Some vegetation transitions aren’t correct too. With time it’ll get better, same as was the case with 2020.
The “world updates” we received in 2020 are not implemented for 2024 yet.
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I completely agree. Just done the same flight in 2020 and 2024, and honestly, 2020 looks way better and much more realistic. Granted I was using REX Atmos.
The clouds look way worse in 2024 to me.
The ground looks worse other then when you are right above it.
So many bugs.
Only poor default aircraft.
Just seems like more of a cartoon to me.
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Worth mentioning for those who do not know, this is a paid addon that improves visuals and you are comparing it to a vanilla sim that will likely have its own REX Atmos compatibility in due time.
I also recall four years ago when 2020 just released how several people with all the paid Orbx meshes and satalite data swore X-Plane looked better than MSFS! 
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But in the " my library" section it says the world updates are streamed? Are you telling they are not actually streamed yet? Is that why all those European and Australian areas I’m talking about look structurally like (not lighting and engine effects) fsx?
To the best of my knowledge, all the world and city updates are built into the streamed world now.
So Las Vegas is the new version with the animated Sphere and fountains, you just don’t have to download the city update.
I flew out of KORD and flew over the old Meigs field…except it is still a airport you can land at. Not a park like it is now.
I landed there and there are AC on the field.
So are they are streaming from 2003 data?
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Yes, my best guess is they’ve temporarily limited the bandwith at which people can download data from their servers, to ensure everyone can play normally. That means if you’re flying in an area where many others are flying too, everyone’s trying to download a specific set of data, limiting the upload speeds to ensure everyone can still play. I’m sure it’s a temporary solution and they’ll work it out over the next weeks.
