Regardless of these issues in the first picture, where apparently snow has decided to fall on an exact straight line… (decided to start like this because I started MSFS 2024 to capture screenshots for this post and this happened, and it is quite funny)
As you can see, now ground isn’t the smudgy blur it was. It has some life, has texture, has details. As I get close to the ground, I can see the graphics engine rendering ground details.
It has a threshold where it draws everything when you’re very close (to the point that it has to render so many things it didn’t render earlier, that they appear with delay), but before this threshold ground textures are smudged, blurry and lack any significant detals, akin 2020.
It is worse when you’re flying over mountains for example, because you have textures close to the airplane (top of a mountain or a hill) and other textures lower (hill sides). The high ones acquire details but the lower ones remain as a smudgy blur. Let me give you another example: the Andes, which is part of south america, and south america never had a WU, look equally awful from any reasonable distance in MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024. Now, if you fly VERY CLOSE to a mountain, the rendering detain in MSFS 2024 turns it much better. However, get a little far from a mountain and it’s the same rounded shape and flat texture.
Is there any way to increase this rendering distance, so it renders all the ground details (which are generated of course) a little bit earlier and not just when you’re 50ft above ground?
How come this level of detail disappears after just a few feet AGL? I’m not asking for full detail, but at least SOME volume and texture instead of those plain flat textures which come to life only when you step onto them.
That’s done on purpose by the sim as rendering all the detail you’re looking for at altitude is a HUGE undertaking by your PC, let alone a console that doesn’t have a lot of processing power.
I think it would help if you provided some details on your PC hardware (cpu, gpu, memory, motherboard, monitor, resolution) along with some screenshots of your graphics settings.
Hey there! I didn’t mention anything about my setup because it isn’t the significant link in the chain and it should run, but you’re right in asking.
CPU is AMD 5800X3D, 64GB RAM, MSFS installed on a dedicated solid state drive, 300MB connection, Radeon 7900XTX 24GB VRAM. While not top of the line, I’m pretty sure it isn’t affecting.
TLOD is at 255 and OLOD is at 200, rest is pretty much ultra, 300GB cache, sim running at 1440p. I’m happy with 30fps, it’s a sim, not a shooter. I tried moving TLOD to 400 with no changes.
I know, that’s why I said:
Also,
It’s not reasonable to not be able to use higher settings than a console and be tied to what a console can do. I’m asking for a setting that allows MSFS 2024 to have better textures than 2020 not only when your standing on ground. I could understand this if this was a purely airliner sim, but for a sim that pretends to represent the real world, and thinking GA and VFR, it’s somewhat disappointing, particularly for areas without photogrammetry.
that will be a hard no… at least at the time of writing
for reasons unknown to science, the devs policy is to keep that level of control away from the user and bundle many different graphics criteria into a single setting or slider
example:
the setting for the quality of trees controls: the visual quality of trees, the count of trees, and the drawing distance of trees, all bundled into one setting. And it is the same with everything… grass .. plants.. they dont believe in giving that level of granular control to the user.
i believe its a mistake
the drawing distance at which the ground “comes alive” is extremely short, it should be way longer, and it should be controllable by the user.
it will probably be a fraction longer if you set everything on ultra but im sure it won’t be nearly as long as you are thinking. It will be basically the same.
Agree with everything you said, and I’m thankful I’m not the only one finding these decisions as wrong decisions.
It doesn’t make sense to have everything tucked in a single slider
It doesn’t make sense to not be able to set a drawing distance, and of course, it doesn’t make sense at all to have them tied to what an Xbox can do.
It doesn’t make sense to have such a short ground details drawing distance, and not be able to change it! And if it comes with a frame drop, let me decide if I’m willing to exchange some FPS for more detail or not! Worse of all, I am running at ultra…
Thanks for your thoughts. I’ guess I’ll send a wishlist item, just for the record at least.
On the sim graphics settings screen you can only increase Tlod to 400 max. You can actually go into the UserCfg.opt file where the graphics parameters are stored and increase it further (at your own risk). Pls note in this file, a value of 2=200; 4=400; 6=600 etc. Also, You’ll need to change this BEFORE you start up the sim so it can read the updated Tlod value from the UserCFG.opt file. In addition, if you make changes to graphics parameters while in the sim, most likely you will wipe out your hand made changes. The UserCfg.opt file is 2 levels above your community folder in File Explorer (I recommend keeping a back up just in case however deleting it should cause the sim to create a new one upon start up).
I would also recommend that you untick the Dynamic setting (see below) as that parameter allows the sim to change the Tlod parameter on-the-fly to keep your fps no less than the fps specified. In other words, if you set Tlod to 900 (9), the dynamic setting with frame rate target=30 when turned on will decrease the Tlod as you’re flying as needed to maintain 30fps.
Dynamic settings are off since day 1. Imagine, if I’m bothered by not having a granular control, how could I let the graphics engine decide for me which level of detail I want at which altitude
Are you sure the increase in tlod will increase the drawing distance? Or will it be the same, but with more detail? Because what I’m pointing out is not that there isn’t enough detail. Instead, I’m questioning at which distance those details become visible.
Currently, the drawing distance is extremely short, and you only see those details I pointed out when you’re extremely close to the ground, but just a few feet above they disappear and ground textures become extremely flat.
At least a few releases ago, increasing Tlod increased the drawing distance. The object level of detail (Olod) parameter determined the level of detail within the drawing distance.
As you know this sim is always evolving and parameters are being tweaked by the developers so things could be different today.
Dynamic will drop TLOD (and OLOD I believe) by up to half when TLOD / OLOD are preventing the minimum FPS selected (eg 30). So if you have TLOD 200, and you are at a busy airport where it can’t maintain 30 FPS, it will drop TLOD as low as 100 (50%) to try to maintain 30 FPS. This works because on the ground you don’t see very far, and when you take off, it rises back up so you can see more. At least that’s the idea.
Hey there! Well, finally able to test. Sadly, any changes in usercfg appear to be reset as soon as I open the sim, which is kinda weird. The graphic settings header indicate it’s a custom preset to it shouldn’t be reset I guess. I also not sure how the sim knows which was my previous setting, perhaps cloud syncing?
As a side note, there was one setting that called my attention, POMMaxDist and POMSubsplitsMaxDist. Couldn’t find much documentation, but a post here indicates it could be related to what we are discussing. However I’m not sure which is the setting in game interface that affect this, and also can’t try increasing it since, as I said, apparently as soon as I start the sim, options gets reset.
If can try on your side, would be great (both things, if the file gets overwritten and reverted back, and if something about those two settings increase textures).
Thanks for the heads up! Yeah I know how it works, I have it disabled since day 1.
I changed Tlod to 5.5 (550) before entering the sim (SU5 beta) and it did not reset (see below screenshot while flying in the sim). I even changed other values within the sim graphical settings screen and Tlod still did not reset. Note - even though I had Tlod set to 5.5 in the UserCfg.opt file it displayed 400 on the sims graphics settings screen which is normal.
It does appear these two additional settings are related to providing more detail and you should be able to increase these along with Tlod in the UserCfg.opt file and experiment with them.
Sadly it seems I can’t get those to take effect, as I mentioned the custom values are replaced by the previous values as soon as I start the sim. The only workaround I can think about is setting the file to read-only.
Imo it is in SU4 and beta SU5 not possible to increase OLod above 200
All above 200 wil be set back to this 200
For TLod it is possible to go above 400
But there is something else going on
Now if you fly and you create a crash report ( you can do this in the same page as where you activate dev mode and multiple Windows)
and open it scroll down few lines and you see some info on OLod and TLod which run at that moment and although you set OLod at 200 it is actually less 1.414213 so i guess that this option is either temporary locked or dumbed down for some reason that perhaps only Asobo knows why.
