Investigating bandwidth causing scenery issues shows bandwidth cut and scenery not loading above 1000-2000 feet

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1

I’ve been/having huge issues with scenery pop-up/culling since SU5 release and textures on buildings not loading until I’m right on them, leading to the bombed out apocalypse look many have referred to and large areas being filled by featureless polygons.

I’ve been experimenting on the London discovery flight, looking at my network use on task manager as I fly to see how much of the issue could be down to bandwidth, looking at it with/without VPN, different LOD settings etc.I’ve found bandwidth is severely restricted at anything above extremely low level flight which would explain many of the issues - any suggestions if there is a work-around for this?

What I’m consistently seeing is the same pattern whatever my network settings, it only pulls significant bandwidth and reaches decent download speeds above 50mbps if I buzz along at extremely low level, below 500 feet. As soon as I am any higher (and we’re only talking 1000 - 2000 feet) download speeds don’t rise above 5mbps, are often 0, 0.1. 03 mbps, and the scenery popping and shapeless polygons without textures appear everywhere. This is with LOD settings of 200+

This suggests:

  • it’s not my network, it can pull decent speeds when it wants to. It happens whether my vpn is connected or not, no issues on any other streaming service or downloads.
  • it’s not the servers either if it can pull bandwidth at ground level?
  • it seems something is broken that means it stops downloading photogrammetery/textures beyond the immediate vicinity as soon as I fly above a couple of thousand feet, perhaps this is the bug they refer to for the hotfix?
  • It’s not rolling cache or pre-loaded scenery causing bandwidth use to fall further into flight, it always rises to the speeds it should be at at low level, and is pulled right back as soon as I climb, even though scenery still isn’t loaded and I still suffer popping and poor/no textures.

Yes, my community folder is empty.

2

I think you might be conflating available bandwidth with you current download rate.

When you are flying at high altitude, the LOD of the terrain below is lower. We may argue over whether that is correct, and which altitude it should change from LOD level to another, but it is what it is.

When you are at a higher altitude the terrain you are streaming is of a lower quality, lower resolution, and therefore lower amount of data. That’s why you see your download rates drop as you climb, and increase as you descend, when your sim then streams in higher quality textures.

For example, I have have 550Mbps broadband, and I’ve never seen it touch that. I think the best I’ve seen when downloading updates is around 200-240Mbps.

So your bandwidth isn’t cut, as MS can’t touch that, and only your ISP could, but the amount of data you are streaming from moment to moment will change as you change altitude.

Let’s think of a ludicrous example. Lets say you hack your altitude to be 250,000ft. You are going to see a lot of the Earths surface. There is no way the sim can stream the data to you at the same LOD level as when you are at 2000ft. Yet the sim can generate those views, at least I think it can, as some people have posted amusing images of their planes in low orbit. You wouldn’t see very high data usage at that altitude as well.

You may see higher data rates if you tinker with the text file that contains your current settings rather than the GUI, and you should see a change then though I don’t know how high that will carry to.

Assuming you currently have your sliders set to 200, you will likely see this in the following file:

"C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\UserCfg.opt"

{Terrain
	LoDFactor 2.000000
}
{ObjectsLoD
	LoDFactor 2.000000
}

Shut the sim down, edit that file so that it reads as below:

{Terrain
	LoDFactor 4.000000
}
{ObjectsLoD
	LoDFactor 4.000000
}

Relaunch the sim, but don’t go into the graphics options. See what happens then?

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As I said, this is with LOD settings of 200+, I’ve tried it with changes in the config file, 3.00, 4.00, still happens.

As I also said, it isn’t happening at high altitude, it’s as soon as I get above buzzing the trees. Of course I know that at 250,000 feet textures will be lower. I’m talking about 2000 feet. Even at 1500 feet, and when it hasn’t loaded the textures for the buildings immediately around me. Should I be seeing 0.3 - 5 mbps at 2000 feet over London and seeing textures not loaded when I’m getting 100mbps at low level? I think not.

This didn’t happen before SU5, something is broken.

4

If anything over London I would guess you should see higher data usage as it also has to download the PG data.

5

I think it just doesn’t download scenery sometimes and sometimes it does it seems random to me and not to do with the local connection at all.

6

Are you using the rolling cache? That can upset your data as well as it won’t need to stream data already on disk. If you keep flying over the same region it will affect your results. You state its not that, and your explanation makes me think you perhaps have that turned off.

7

I have sometimes somethings that is looking like this. Last time was in Norway, so without dense urban areas, ground textures doesn’t load in some squared areas or load at very poor quality, like an old satellite photo.
I don’t use photogrammetry most of the time, especially over London, because it’s look awful, but it’s since the beginning of MSFS for me. I have a high debit optic fiber connection .

8

Rolling cache is turned on, but the scenery still isn’t there. We know this is affecting many people with PG and textures not loading even at low level and I think rolling cahe has been ruled out by now. The question is why is it stopping the sim downloading scenery at low level?

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If it’s purely a data speed issue, if you wait long enough it would populate. Eventually, no matter how slow your download rates are it would finish. If it doesn’t then its not a data rate issue.

10

Well no because we know in the new version it loads scenery every time you look in a new direction and wipes it when you look away, so unless you stare directly ahead at the same point for the hour it takes to load, there will never be time for it to load the scenery with slow data.

I don’t see why you are so determined to say this isn’t a date issue? I’ve explained what is happening in the sim, I fly down - download speed increases, fly ‘up’ to 2000 feet, download speed dives dramatically even though scenery isn’t loaded. There’s clearly a data issue.

I cleaned rolling cache before doing any of this before that’s the next gotcha thrown at me.

11

That’s an entirely separate issue due to too aggressive culling. I’m not denying anything, just pointing our flaws in your analysis.

I did point out you confusing bandwidth with you current download rate, which are not the same thing. Your response indicates you aren’t interested in opinions that don’t match your current thinking. I don’t see how anyone can help you in that case as you’ve already determined what the issue is.

12

I wouldn’t worry about it until after the next update. In the next hotfix notes it mentions the scenery resolution/photogrammetry issue and it will fix it. Hopefully, this will be a non-issue starting tomorrow.

1 Like
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I’m interested in opinions that genuinely want to help, rather than just pick flaws in what I’ve said, whether it’s called bandwidth or download rate doesn’t matter to the point being made does it? Something is cutting the rate of scenery being downloaded to the sim at anything above extremely low level.

I said this happened at 1000 feet and causes PG not to load at low level, you advised I should expect scenery downloading to fall as I climb and for some reason bringing 250,000 feet into it to dismiss what I have seen as perfectly normal. Strange thing to do if you ask me. I also said it happened at LOD 200+, and you helpfully advised I turn up my LOD to 200+ so I wouldn’t start questioning others language comprehension if I were you. I still don’t really understand your point about how if you wait long enough it will load, but as I said it is only loading PG and building textures in my immediate vicinity, so the question is why isn’t it trying to download more data given that it is clearly capable - it does when I am flying lower down.

If anyone has an actual theory or explanation for why download rate take such a hit like this I will be very grateful, seems to be happening to a lot of people.

14

It’s quite simple. You stated you seemed to be getting lower amount of data transfer at 2000 feet. If it were simply a case of you not downloading scenery fast enough, lingering in that spot with the drone camera for example, would allow time for the scenery to load. If indeed you have an issue unrelated to that then it wouldn’t matter how long you waited.

It sounds like what you need to do is sit on your hands, and wait for the hotfix to be delivered in the next day or so, and see if that improves things for you. There will be further changes coming with WU6 that may allow you to tweak things further.

I make a habit of over explaining things, as its better to be accused of patronising someone than missing something out because the OP doesn’t know what they are talking about. Given the “bandwidth” thing I thought I was on solid ground on that front. I can see I was wrong.

15

So earlier today I flew over an area, no problems, just now same area and a lot of scenery doesn’t download. I’m not sure this will be fixed I think it’s a Microsoft server capacity issue.

16

I have the same issue Warp. I’ve seen a few others who have been having issues also. My guess is server capacity and it being overloaded. On Tuesday evening and Wednesday I didn’t have any issues though. After SU5 launched and through the weekend I did have the issues though and every flight I would end up with a bandwidth error telling me to turn off photogrammrtry.

17

Anyone investigating network download or data streaming issues should look into the various Windows network parameters that can be changed to improve network speeds. Windows automatically performs network optimization but the optimization is for the “average” user. In addition, the router should be checked for any needed updates. There may be router tuning that might help download speeds. A Google search should be done for specific hardware and possible performance improvements.

18

You don’t sound like an average user. I think you are referring to TCP/IP sliding window which can be adjusted with the following command:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=VALUE

“Normal” is the default value, and it can be set to “disabled”.

When I was running Windows 95 we spent a lot do time tweaking these values as we were on dial-up, and wanted to squeeze ever last drop of performance out that we could. Back then you didn’t set it to some arbitrary label like “Normal”, but set the values discretely, in KB if I remember right.

Before anyone messes with this, I urge them to run this command first to establish what they are running right now, rather than make some change that may not even be different to what you have, and suffer the placebo effect:

netsh interface tcp show global

Some documentation on this feature can be found here:

It also lists the various values that can applied to this attribute.

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