Is this one the best version yet?

The best version was the one at release Imo.

4 Likes

I disagree. I understand that people were more tolerant at the time because it was the first version and it was new and groundbreaking (it still very much is). But saying the first release was better is objectivey false. The autopilot wasn’t working at all. The terrain mesh and photogrammetry was not as good as today in many places. The sensitivity of the controls was barely configurable. Many people couldn’t even launch the game, and what isn’t working today (the ATC) wasn’t working either at that time. The planes were more rough, there was less content, the marketplace wasn’t working, neither was the modules selector for most people, hundreds of bugs have been corrected, etc. There have been huge improvements in all areas since and this should be aknowledged.

12 Likes

Look at this comparison, then say this is the best version yet

It has been crashing less, however early on most crashes I had were due to low RAM (16GB) and too small of a pagefile on HDD. After I moved the pagefile to SSD and let windows make it as big as it wants, most crashes were gone. Then performance got more stable after I turned the rolling cache off.

Some things have improved, AP is less murderous (still gets into a fail state now and then), it doesn’t crash anymore when plugging anything into a USB port while the game is running, no more crashes while saving a flight plan, and a lot of introduced bugs have been fixed again.

Performance is still worse than before SU3 despite the fix. FPS went up, but the sim now falls behind updating the terrain. Perfromance degrades over time.

It’s a work in progress, some things got better, some got worse (especially graphics which is the main draw of FS2020)

Literally the only thing that is noticeably worse is the river, and the terrain artefact in the famous cessna screenshot. But it would have been easy to make screenshots that will look noticeably better in the latest version as well. For the water, it depends on the wind at the surface.

2 Likes

Personally since the hotfix I’ve had the best performance I have had throughout any of the patches previously. I can almost always consistently achieve 35-60 fps at (mostly) Ultra. Some settings are toned down to High as they offer better performance with little to no visual difference - other than that, even the more advanced aircrafts (FBW A320, CRJ) run great. I think some optimizations can be made in larger airports yet, but I have no major qualms.

2 Likes

Hmm you don’t see the tree LOD change, reflection change, water surface change, night lighting change, shoreline mess, tears in the mountain. Some things got better in the so called world updates, yet the world got worse overall…

I see the terrain tears and shoreline mess every day, but can manage to take screen shots around them and there’s always paint shop to clean it up here and there. In motion it’s worse though, still got flickering around the window edges, around the G1000 screen, grass patches flicker when landing on grass strips in the snow, there is a weird halo around the plane on snow.

Performance (short term) is better. But I can’t run at terrain detail 200 anymore, the sim can’t keep up and grinds to a halt after a while. (It runs fine initially and ran fine before SU3, now it falls behind, memory usage keeps going up, terrain turns into a mess and fps tanks) A slider to set priority to terrain updates would be helpful. Now I turn it to terrain detail 10, wait until the sim catches back up (and memory usage is back down to normal) and can increase draw distance again.

My fps was a bit lower pre SU3, but it could consistently maintain terrain detail 200. Now I run into problems at terrain detail 100 closer to the equator. (Recently introduced bug/feature decreases draw distance based on latitude… It’s running fine in Alaska the past few days!)

2 Likes

Is this really a known issue?
I noticed this too.
Recently flew the alaskan bushtrip with stable 60fps and now started the patagonian bushtrip but now with 15 frames less per second.
I’m not sure what is going on but if this is a known issue, I believe they will fix it at some point.

Is there a thread going on on this particular bug/issue you know of?

Yes, it has been merged into this thread

1 Like

Thanks for the link!:+1:t3:

I see changes, but apart from the tear, I don’t find that the ancient version looks better. It looks different.

The water didn’t look better, it’s just that it’s not the same conditions. One has more wind than the other. The state of the sea still looks awesome when one adds more wind close to the surface. The night photos didn’t look better either, they looked different. The old renderings aren’t more realistic than the new ones, for example the haze on the old ones depends entirely on the atmospheric conditions, in particular on the humidity level and distance visibility.
The shoreline looks different but to be sure what’s correct, one would have to compare with the map data. Also plenty of places look much better now: most mountains look much better now, for example, because they are no longer as rounded as they were.

And as for the LOD, I don’t see any meaningful change, but I’ve browsed through the thread dedicated to these before-after screenshots, and other people looking at that in detail can’t see any either.

Sure one can be suspicious that Asobo made these change in order to alleviate the performance problems. It would certainly help if Asobo explained each of their changes, but without comparison with real data, this pixel peeping is pretty much useless. One can also suspect that most people have a psychological bias due to :

  1. the novelty of the graphics that has already faded away in 6 months. People now take for granted what is still very much unique: no other sim has comparable level of ground details and atmospheric accuracy. But hey what was incredible 1 year ago is already run of the mill for gamers…

  2. the performance bias, which is a psychological effect due to marketing manipulation (decades of selling even more fps in the videogame press and hardware industries). People will whine that the sim doesn’t run run constantly at 50 or 60 fps in 4K despite the fact that having more than 35 fps has exactly zero effect in a flight simulation sim and more importantly 4K is utterly useless because the textures can’t be detailed enough to make a difference. The fps race is simply ruining their enjoyment. I for one run the sim on an Intel 4770 and a GT1070, and it runs at 25-28 fps in 2560x1440. Sure I’d be happier at 35 fps, but quite honestly, a constant 26 fps is enough to thoroughly enjoy the experience.

  3. irrational expectations due to the hardware arms race and the cost of it. People have spent thousands of $ in hardware for this sim and they inconsciously tend to think that fps should be proportional to the raw performance of the hardware, like in Call of Duty. But that’s not how it works. Unless there are some serious optimizations and brand new algorithms, more accurate renderings can have heavy impacts in terms of calculations. The example of the clouds is one of them, the aerodynamics simulation is another. The LOD increases the load like the square of the distance. Putting the LOD at 200 rather than say 120 will have pretty much no visible difference in game, but will increase the load on your CPU by almost 3. Putting everything in Ultra instead of High will have the same effect on your CPU. Asobo cannot optimize things to compensate for such factors without sacrificing quality. But gamers immediately assume that because they have the latest generation of graphic cards, they can automatically put everything at Ultra quality. If the maximum LOD slider was 400, they would complain that the sim is grinding to a halt at 400. If we tell them to simply adapt the settings to their situation, they get angry because they bought the latest Ryzen and the latest 3090 and therefore it should handle Ultra. That’s irrational.

That’s not to say that everything is rosy. The terrain artifacts introduced with the UK patch are more than annoying, and that indeed is a regression. The framerate drop around airports is hard to justify as well. There is also a probable memory leak that bogs down the game when it runs for several hours. But all things considered, the sim looks better, runs better and is overall in a much better state than it was.

5 Likes

Feel free to sift through the Bugs section as well.

The point being made here is that claiming that there are ‘a couple of bugs to sort out’ is, as you have already pointed out in regard to someone else’s opinion,

… objectivey false.

Practice what you preach is a good principle to follow, less it make whatever else you have to offer somewhat irrelevant in terms of objectivity and credibility.

1 Like

I have over 8,000 screenshots since August, I’ve seen every change happen in detail. It’s all here

The water did look better, the shorelines did look better, night lighting did look better, terrain tears were less prominent. (Btw I’m pretty sure who made those screenshots went at length to create the exact same conditions, there’s not more wind in one or the other)

The LOD has changed a lot but the discovery that it’s linked to latitude makes a lot of sense for what I’ve been seeing all over the world.

Anyway I play on a moderate gaming laptop, 1060 with 2.2 ghz cpu at 20 fps frame rate limit. It’s amazing what visuals Asobo can get out of my laptop. However flying at night over cities doesn’t compare to my early screenshots of that and I tend to avoid shorelines as they often look ugly. Water is always tricky to get screenshots at the right altitudes to avoid grid patterns and that ugly sun reflection is best avoided.

Mountains have indeed become a bit less rounded, at the cost of introducing tears (not sure if those are related but especially with low sun they stand out a lot) And I’m very glad TAA was fixed back to before WU2. There is a long period in Africa in my tour where everything is very soft and rather blurry due to TAA and sharpen debacle.

The lighting and clouds is where the magic happens. Those continue to amaze me, the effect doesn’t fade. And exploring the new landmarks and PG areas is great as well.

Definitely best version of London yet and looking forward to exploring Paris and Amsterdam in the next world update. Atm I’m in Northern Alaska, challenging to get clean views there. It’s better than it was at launch though, with all the river aquaducts and other mismatched height errors.

At lot of things got better, some got worse.

1 Like

In my experience release was better for me as for performance aside from an occasional hiccup which I naively thought would get better, not worse, with time. They have fixed some things, but broke many others, performance and logbook constantly popping up being the ones I hate. The logbook always popped up during shutdown, but at least you could work around it by not parking where ATC wanted you to. Speaking of ATC, it has never worked and still doesn’t, nothing new there since it’s just FSX ATC and isn’t really worth using.

Terrain mesh/photogrammetry didn’t change at all in the area I fly in Washington, so that also wasn’t an improvement, in fact it’s worse now that the Columbia river has “water mountains” everywhere
and water creeping up the side of the banks.

I never really had issues with the autopilot, but I realize many did. However I don’t use autopilot much, I want to fly not let the computer fly for me.

The sensitivity adjustment isn’t any better now, it just has 2 sliders for no good reason and a couple extra ones that are useless. It is better in the sense that it isn’t gone completely like that old patch that broke it.

So all in all for me there have been less improvements than downgrades, like LOD/drawing distance and things like that. But hey at least it’s somewhat flyable.

#1 is addressed by working title and they are now officially working with Asobo
#2 has been addressed
#3 is still existing, but it doesn’t prevent to fly like say the faulty AP. But I expect it to be corrected soon now.
#4 no idea what this one is about
#5 CTD are far less frequent than they used to be
#6 not sure what this one is about
#7 not really a problem
#8 is a bit annoying (though can be turned off). Needs to be addressed indeed
#9 the ATC needs to be overhauled, the phraseology is the least of its problems

In this list, I think 3 are really annoying: 3, 8 and 9, and of course all the CTDs. The others can be addressed later and are definitely not of the same magnitude as the ones I’ve mentionned in my second post.

Terrain LOD has become the #1 pain in my ■■■■ when it comes to performance since SU3. The “hotfix” did restore performance, but that 1 setting is the ball and chain for me now.

I used to be able to put both LOD sliders to 200 with no real perceivable performance degradation. Object LOD is still like that, but Terrain LOD now kills my performance. After some tweaking of other settinga, 100 is the highest I can go (80 was the max before other tweaks). Anything above that and my frame rate tanks hardcore and there are no setting changes that can help it.

If I put it to 200, I’m basically looking at single digit frame rates. At 100, I’m able to hold 30-35 fps most of the time.

From quality and stability perspective, after the latest patch 1.14.6 I am seeing the most “flyable” and “stable” version we have so far. Less stutters, less CTD, less unrecoverable FPS drops (some areas still suffer from this bug like London, UK, Atlanta, GA and Denver, CO for example). Overall, it is the best thing we had so far.

The main degradation between release and now that I have seen so far is water quality. At release when flying over water it always looked realistic to me in any condition and any place - it was very impressive. Updates over the last 4-6 months make it look more less realistic and fake after seeing what we had before. It was one of the first things I noticed when we had the beta versions and the realistic looking water and sky that we had compared to other sims.

1 Like

And many are seeing more CTDs than they have in months, myself included. I had a few with WU3 initially, but I think that was server related and those subsided. Never saw another CTD until 1.14.6. Of my first 6 flights, 4 ended with CTDs. And I’ve had multiple others since as well, although not quite as frequent.

Once more I say this : The most consistent thing about MSFS is how inconsistent the experience is from user to user.

What kind of plane do you fly ? I almost never fly airliners (I haven’t learned them yet), and I favor relatively short flights, less than 2 hours long. Perhaps my experience is different from those who fly 3 hours or more at a time in an airliner.

Also I limit my mods to the most reputable ones, like the A32NX (although I don’t fly it), the WT Garmins and a few planes, like the WT CJ4 and the Bush League Legend XCUB. With those, I experience realtively few major bugs.

I’m all GA. Mostly the C172 Classic, Mooney M20R, Bonanza and TBM. Occasionally the Baron and Grand Caravan as well. Typically my flights are less than 1 hour as well. I do a lot of hopping around Florida, the Keys and Bahamas.

Ditto for mods - WT mods, GNS530 mod, TBM mod, Turbo Bonanza. I have no issues with any of those mods that aren’t core sim bugs that are already known (nav issues, turboprop logic, etc).

And mods make no difference. Those first 4 crashes were running 100% vanilla with no mods at all.

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.