I’m in the beta of Sim Update 3 on Xbox Series X, using a wired connection with speeds around 600 Mbps.
I decided to use the new feature of downloading add-ons directly to the console instead of relying on real-time streaming. I downloaded the 737 Max and WU XIX Brazil.
I decided to try and check differences between locally downloading vs streaming:
I departed from SBKP (Viracopos - Campinas - Brazil) direct to SBSP (Congonhas - São Paulo - Brazil). In the image below, the city of São Paulo is circled in green — it has photogrammetry and is part of the WU, therefore it was downloaded to the console. Meanwhile, the region circled in red, however, is default scenery being streamed in real time. The poor quality of the terrain is clearly evident in the red-circled area, which, despite being closer to the aircraft, looks absolutely awful with no level of detail at all. Meanwhile, the region downloaded to the console (green) shows a high level of detail, even from a greater distance.
Note: To confirm what I’m saying, download the image and zoom in to see what actually appears on screen, since I used the console’s native screenshot feature.
Conclusion: LOD terrain issues severely affect the immersion of the simulation. I always had doubts whether such problems were solely related to the console’s graphical processing, or if they were also due to Microsoft’s servers. This test has proven to me that a large part of it is indeed caused by the servers. Therefore, I feel it is necessary to have a significant improvement in both the capacity and overall performance of the servers.
Would be better without clouds, but assuming what you are saying is correct and repeatable it is still possible TIN has different LOD for some reason rather than it being a bandwidth issue.
Only the devs can answer that but it could be an interesting observation if others can repeat it.
That must not be the case as Xbox has automatic LOD quality reduction in place and always active to keep up the performance. So whenever you enter a pretty demanding place the TLOD and OLOD quality might get reduced by a factor to keep a target FPS. On your screenshot you enter a photogrammetry area which is somewhat demanding.
Another thing is that tile quality differs in areas like Southern America, Africa or Asia. Some tiles on normally higher quality levels may be blurry as data is quite old of that single tile.
This has to be taken into consideration, as well as that there are currently server side issues affecting the Beta since at least half an hour.
I agree the console reduces overall quality to keep target FPS, but the degradation goes beyond that. Before I download the WU (which brings the photogrammetry area) the further terrain looked worse than nearest. After downloading, the photogrammetry area looks pretty good, besides that, the nearest area still looks awful, which is being streamed.
So, my conclusion compares two distinct scenarios, a “piece of the earth” can look great besides hardware limitation when I download it.
In fact, we have LOD reduction due to hardware limitation, but is noticeable that LOD reduction is much more evident on streamed area.
So, it really seems that we are facing a big server issue here.
When you install the WU (Brasil in this case), you are installing airports, discovery flights, points of interest and yes, PG. But is only a small file of 68.85kB.
I don’t think the PG for all Sao Paulo “can fit” in 68.85kB.
I think your conclusion is based on a flawed analysis.
You’re comparing the photogrammetry vs. the default scenery (probably a low-quality satellite image).
And you’re assuming the problem is because the default scenery is streamed and the photogrammetry is downloaded.
PG looks good because it has more quality compared to the default scenery.
It’s not a small file, it is about GBs… And the same region didn’t look good when I was streaming it instead of downloading it. And the default image is not a low quality as it seems when LOD does not load properly. Rarely it loads as it should and is not a Minecraft scenario as the situation I showed here.
Before anyone says I’m wrong. Do the same flight, first, do not download the WU (Activate it, but don’t download). The photogrammetry region will have same LOD issue than default.
Later, download WU and repeat: You will see the photogrammetry region looking much better than default streamed region around.
Please, go to “My Library”, look for the WU Brazil and click on the arrow pointing down to expand the content.
Now tell me what size the file indicates: Brazil - 3D Photogrammetry cities.
What takes up several GB are airports, discovery flights, etc. Just like I said.
I just tried it and it looks exactly the same (that’s why I can tell you the exact size of the WU Brazil PG file). Actually I have tried this a few times since the first patch allowing downloads.
I had tested if there is any improvement downloading: aircraft, airports, WU. And so far, downloading don’t have any improvements vs streamed (unless you have a very bad connection).
Yes, the photogrammetry is allways streamed, even in 2020, have you downloaded a world update or not, the most of the size of a world update is poi’s and other stuff excluding photogrammetry.
Absolutely! The servers were and are the no.1 cause of the graphical issues people are seeing around the world, irrespective of how fast their internet is or how much free space they have on their Series X console.
I recently reverted to SU2 and it’s actually more consistent visually and performance-wise. I hate how things are turning out for MSFS 2024 - so far, anyway, Could be a different story a year or two later.
2020’s PG is practically flawless on my system with great draw distances. I just have the base game plus ALL world and city updates installed along with a small handful of 3rd party planes. Rolling cache is off and internet is around 80MB fiber. It’s fantastic. 2024 is the problem child right now.
I have tested this extensively myself ending up sacrificing over 600GB of SSD space! I even got a fatter bill from my ISP for that month due to all the additional downloading. After deleting the game, it wouldn’t release space correctly, so I ended up factory resetting my console and deleting everything just to get the correct “free” SSD space back. What an ordeal!
Nope, did not make a noticeable difference at all, graphics still looked blurry with detail loading in late and PG scenery popping in really late around my aircraft in tiles or sections. It’s a useless feature to be honest - the game still has to stream the scenery as it’s petabytes of data. They need to optimise their servers ASAP. Microsoft: release the funding!
Love photogrammetry and i think the download of photogrammetry file about 85 kb this file is just put on our pc if downloaded and contained a handshake with permission to acces photogrammetry from the server.
In 2020 i have Cached EHRD and surrounding the file of this area on high was around 18.5 Gb large while Amsterdam was about 4 Gb which was nothing compared to the 1st
This photo shows the north east of the Hague in the Netherlands
photogrammetry near with generic housing in the distance and clear boundaries
If i fly over photogrammetry i switch my setting to full so i turn dynamic setting off to use the full 800 Tlod
By the way the houses where no photogrammetry is i absolutely do not like and i absolute would not mind if the whole Netherlands or world would be photogrammetry on my pc
Which contains a MSI Mobo Z890 wifi-p and a intel ultra i9 285K processor
96Gb 6000 MT Ram and Arc Phantom 770 16gb asrock graphicscard on lan with 1Gb fibre connection
Almost forgot to mention in photogrammetry i turn trees as low as possible for i think this is huge in eating memory, but buildings i set to ultra outside photogrammetry area otherwise building looking worse, and my Olod is 400 for if building use basic hand texture to load it in from distance before i reach these houses or buildings when closing in.
I agree. I can see no other explanation as to why the same flight at two different times can differ so much with all other variables remaining unchanging unless it’s a bottleneck at the server side.
I wish they’d go ahead and release SU 3, as I suspect most users will immediately download almost everything to local storage. This will suck for the first few days, but after that it should do a lot to lower the overall load on the network, as all those assets will no longer be streamed.
SU3 is a streaming disaster in 1 hour of play the terrain became blurry everywhere, I’m going to download everything locally, hoping that I won’t have this problem, even SU2 had never destroyed the game to this extent
Downloading won’t help at all, really. It’s their servers and the game’s VRAM issues. Basically, it breaks after a while and you have to relaunch the game. Also, it’s a roll of the dice every time - if their servers are not misbehaving you’ll generally have an okay experience. If they are, it’s the Grief Express from start to finish!
I am honestly just getting my sessions in on MSFS ‘20 mostly. 2024 is a trainwreck of a product.
Yes, you are right… I’m aware of console limitation, I’m on Series X. I know we will have some LOD textures issues, but I’m almost convinced that more than 50% of LOD issue is due to the server. If the server were working well, the LOD issue would be less representative. Why I believe that? The promise of FS2024 was to improve performance reducing local processing in streaming beyond what FS2020 already streams. But I still see that FS2020 LOD issues are much less expressive than FS2024.
In addition, if all that was only related to console limitation, I can’t even imagine how Series S could run that, since I’m on the more powerful of both, the Series X.
