My 2070 SUPER 4K settings and suggestions - episode 2

Not at the right computer at the moment but if you review CptLucky8’s post he directs you to find the file. Once you have found it, just open it with NOTEPAD and you will see the LOD entries. They are a multiplier and so do not appear as a percentage like in your settings screen. So if you are currently set to 200 it will appear in usrcfg as 2. I would start with a setting of 4 and check your frame rate impact. Dial it back as needed until you find your sweet spot.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT change anything else at this point. If you change more than one setting at a time it is impossible to determine what is affecting what.

1 Like

when we talk about LOD’s can we please specify which ones we are referring to?
Terrain LOD or Object LOD.

Ive been a little curious why they chose to use the LOD term if in fact these sliders controls the view distance that you will see terrain and objects at all.
LOD is Level Of Detail, meaning different mesh complexities at different ranges. (They use 0 to 6 in FS2020)

I guess you can argue and say that “well LOD 0 is invisible/disabled”, and sure - but not why just have a view distance slider?

So basically you have these rings around you where these LOD changes around you, and I think these are the one you expand when you increase the LOD’s.

So does anybody have a clear explanation of the differences between Terrain LOD, Object LOD, Building Quality and Trees Quality, and even Terrain Vector Data?

I have some experience with game development and 3d modelling, and the options and sliders in this game can be confusing to say the least, at least how they actually work vs whats described.

:sweat_smile:

So if I want to try to make sense of it all this is what I would guess be the case:

Terrain LOD - radius rings around you telling at what distances you will see different details of the terrain.
Objects LOD - radius rings around you telling at what distances you will see different details of objects (not sure what objects this is?)
Building Quality - Here is where I would assume this is telling what the maximum detail quality of buildings can be (?)
Trees Quality - Here is where I would assume this is telling what the maximum detail quality of trees can be (?)
Terrain Vector Data - Really no clue, and the description doesnt make me any smarter - if in fact Terrain LOD decides the different quality and at what radius around you will see it. (?)

I set both terrain and object. My experience is that with low terrain LOD you get rivers and ridges changing as you get closer. It’s definitely not just about the ‘level of detail’. It seems to be more a case of flat terrain mesh that morphs into realistic terrain mesh at a certain distance.

Yeah, one way to interpret it is the LOD settings are changing how far away you can see higher detail terrain, and objects.

1 Like

i did the settings here and made a bid of my own so im at medium to high settings at 100% scaling and only TAA and my frames are sometime sintsable but my gpuz and Vram are filles up entiredly. so thats where my stutters come from

copied from my post from another discussion:
Another big patch. LOD still terrible compared with pre Alpha 1.6.x, which looked perfect


Let’s try to recap and please feel free to correct me.

Autogen LOD:

Description:

  • Synthetic buildings and vegetation made from a collection of generic 3D objects.
  • Building and Vegetation settings set the object details ranges (more or less complex representation of the same objects aka LOD).
  • Building and Vegetation settings set the distance rings where the different object LOD are displaying.

Problems:

  • Below a certain distance to the outermost ring, objects used to fade-in, now they seem to pop-up instead.
  • This is mitigated because they are displaying over their footprint picture found in the aerial ground texture displaying underneath.

Photogrammetry LOD:

Description:

  • Realistic buildings and vegetation made from textured mesh based on aerial photography of the real objects.
  • Building and vegetation textured mesh has different LOD built-in.
  • Lowest resolution LOD is displaying the farthest, then increasing resolution LOD are fading-in in place as the view is getting closer.
  • Terrain LOD setting set the distance rings where the different textured mesh LOD are displaying.

Problems:

  • Below a certain distance to the outermost ring, textured mesh is popping in over the flat aerial ground texture.
  • The LOD rings are smaller than pre-release therefore the lowest detailed mesh LOD is displaying too close.
  • It is often referred to as “melted buildings”.

Ground Texture LOD:

Description:

  • Realistic ground texture made from aerial photography.
  • Lowest resolution texture is displaying the farthest, then increasing resolution is popping up over as the view is getting closer.
  • Terrain LOD setting set the distance rings where the different texture resolutions are displaying.

Problems:

  • The LOD rings are smaller than pre-release therefore the lowest texture resolution is displaying too close.
  • It is often referred to as “blurry ground texture seen at altitude” and wrongly attributed to network bandwidth.

Analysis:

There is a single setting, Terrain LOD, which is affecting both ground textures and photogrammetry LOD, which makes sense when you’re considering the outermost ring where photogrammetry and ground texture meet must share a similar resolution.
The LOD distances (v1.8.3 and v1.9.3) are trading off distance for performance but they are adjusted to render objects at 1:1 zoom view in 4K (both photogrammetry and ground textures).
At this zoom level and in 4K, photogrammetry mesh and ground textures are displaying just the right amount of details to fill enough pixels on the screen for their respective projected surface size.
In short, the renderer is dropping some resolution and details which are imperceptible to the eye under a given viewing condition (zoom 1:1, distance to objects).
It is similar to JPEG compression which is displaying similar picture quality to the original at 1:1, but it is showing compression artefacts when zooming in.

What’s wrong:

The LOD ring sizes have been reduced since pre-release and this is affecting mostly photogrammetry and ground texture.
Photogrammetry and textures were popping in with previous versions but it was less noticeable because it was happening farther away.
Because LOD ring distances are now closer:

  • ground texture quickly drops resolution when viewed from not so high an altitude.
  • the simulator is displaying too low resolution texture too close to the aircraft and this is especially visible when flying over non-photogrammetry areas.
  • you can’t zoom-in otherwise you’re viewing magnified lower resolution mesh and textures.

A few solutions:

  • Decouple photogrammetry and ground texture LOD with 2 sliders instead of 1 so that each user can balance performance/details depending on hardware and preference.
  • Revert LOD ring distances to pre-release values.
  • If FS2020 ships with same setting levels for both PC and Xbox, add a “Extreme” setting just for PC restoring the previous LOD.
8 Likes

at 70% render scale i see the cockpit blurry .Any fix for this? Playing at 1080p (RTX 2060)

@Apostoliskf It is expected to be blurry in 1080p. Please note the tile is saying “4K”, not 1K…

For 1080p set RS:120%, disable MSFS sharpening and set CP sharpening to 0.50 with ignore film grain set to 1.0. RS:120% is the lowest I would set, it’s the optimal setting on my rig. I mostly set RS:130% as my FPS drops no lower than 30FPS in the worst conditions on my previous high/ultra settings. The photo below is set to RS:120 and CP sharpness at 0.50 on a 1080p monitor with the settings recommended above for 4K.

i7-9700 @4.5GHz
RTX 2070 Super
RAM 16GB
1080p 144Hz G-SYNC

3 Likes

@TheDREW93 Actually this is really looking good in 1K with your suggestion.

The main advantage with 4K is legibility on EFIS and small letterings, but the FS2020 rendering engine is surprisingly giving very detailed images even in 1K for everything outside the cockpit.

Given a 4K monitor is 4x a 1K monitor you get integer scaling (which is lossless) and I might want to try out comparing 4K vs 1K from an image quality standpoint, and see how it compares as well regarding fps.

1 Like

You’re right the EFIS lettering etc is terrible in 1080p, regardless how high you set the rendering, everything else is reasonably good. It would be interesting to compare the image quality vs performance between a 4K, 2K and 1080p monitor on the same rig or similar rig.

If you want me to test some settings and forward the images, do let me know, I’m happy to do this.

1 Like

I’ll try to do it for 1K and 4K at least later today or tomorrow.

2 Likes

My last challenge is how to stop shimmering. How do I do that? What settings affect it? Apart from that at last I have good smooth performance and nice visuals. The most problematic thing was stuttering/fluttering. I used a combination of recommendations from the RDPresets Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Guide and some of the things mentioned here. A few settings like turning off V-Sync definitely helped with frame rate, but most did not make a dramatic or consistent difference, and nothing seemed to stop the stuttering, lagging and freezing. Frame rate fluctuated wildly between about 50 down to 4. The last two things that I changed finally tamed the beast. When I set the in-game Render Scaling to 60 and Nvidia Image Sharpening to Off the improvement was dramatic. After that I also increased Terrain Level of Detail to 150 without detriment to performance. I am now seeing FPS peek at over 70 and no stuttering, especially over water. At low level over dense population areas the frame rate does drop a little as expected, but I sill get a smooth experience with no stuttering. I am not a gamer, never used anything like this until MSFS 2020 came out. Frankly I did not expect to have to mess around for many weeks just to get this thing to work properly and I was on the verge of giving up. Glad that I persisted though. My laptop is an Alienware m15, I did not buy it for gaming but I wanted good performance for music production apps, streaming video, and general work, so I took the standard GTX 1060 video card option, which is not the latest and greatest but it is supposed to be a decent card. The CPU is Intel® Core™ i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz which I believe is not entirely shabby. I should also mention that I am using a Samsung 49” Odyssey G9 QLED Dual-QHD Gaming Monitor and that is where my problems started. While I was waiting for it to arrive I was just using the laptop display and did not notice any problems while going through the first 8 lessons in the Cessna 150, but when I connected the G9 the performance was dreadful. Although the in-game and Nvidia settings have been the most important issues I think that monitor settings are also significant and there seems to be little if any advice on that topic on the Internet. I turned off many of the feature on the monitor including Adaptive Sync. The Nvidia monitor options only offer 60hz and 120Hz with my graphics card, although the monitor itself is capable of 240Hz, so I set both to 120Hz and set screen resolution to 5120 x 1440 native resolution. Now I am beginning to enjoy MSFS 2020!

@AviatorDown8227 I’m glad if the information in this discussion is of any help for you! Please note though you’re really pushing your hardware to the limits in using such video card chipset with such screen and resolution.

Look at the maths: 5120 x 1440 x 4 bytes/pixel = 29,491,200 bytes per frame.
At 60 fps this is 1,769,472,000 bytes/sec.

To put this in perspective:

  • 4K screen uses 33,177,600 bytes per frame.
  • HP Reverb G2 VR HMD uses 37,324,800 bytes per frame.

This is just the size in byte of the drawn pixels displaying on the screen, but in order to draw these pixels the video card would have processed much more (overdraw, shaders, etc…).

Well, they seem immune, so why not?

Thanks for the reply. I don’t really understand all this stuff and I am already becoming aware of more things than I ever wanted to, however although my Windows screen settings are at 5120 x 1440 native resolution and also set the same in Nvidia control panel, I did not mention that I had lowered the in-game Full Screen Resolution to 3840 x 1080 Windowed, if that makes any difference. The G9 has a utility that can be used to divide the screen into sections, and as I have a very wide screen I prefer to run MSFS windowed and locked in the centre with a narrow section each side for pop out instruments, comms, nav charts etc. I notice that popping out the Cessna 172 Garmin G1000 panels actually seems to increase FPS. I note your comments and welcome any suggestions for improvement. I do not know what I should alter, there are so many settings in different places.

Tried these settings on my 2070 super . Must say I was skeptical but am very very impressed with this . Thank You very much . Nice to fly to big airliners into jfk without a hitch !

2 Likes

[update added in the 1st post]

[Update 16NOV2020 - Win10 20H2]

Changes:

  • update system and software items in introduction.
  • update NVidia CPL screenshots, comments.
  • added Win10 Graphics Settings

I’ve further adjusted my settings because I’ve now updated to Win10 20H2. I get marginal fps gain and they should be fine in VR. The most notable change is:

With the latest NVidia drivers 457.30 and Win10 20H2, I’ve found it is now better setting Threaded Optimization ON. (with older versions of drivers and simulator, threaded optimization was having an impact on my system and was better off).

I’ve also added the Win10 Graphics Settings screenshot because it is also important to set VRS there too.

1 Like

I have very positive results with nVidia Experience “Game Filter” which allows correcting sharpness, brightness, color temp. and the other post processing parameters on the fly. This way I can see the effect in real time when playing with the parameters. I can also correct if the scenery is too dark or too bright, execlty like I would do when developing RAW in Lightroom or Photoshop.
To avoid oversharpening I set the sharpening in the UserCfg.opt to zero and apply sharpening dynamically in the “Game Filter”.


Please disregard the actual image quality, I posted the screen to show the example of available options in the Game Filter, without actually optimizing the appearance of this particular scene.

2 Likes