Hmm it might be that the overall load increased, but the problem of calculating X closest aircraft to you is technically pretty easy knowing their coordinates.
The sim recalculates the closest aircraft quite often judging from the popping in and out of them. It just seems like it’s either working with different parameters since SU5 or it has a different data base (e.g. lagging behind the actual positions, resulting in a wrong “cloud” of rendered players).
Hard to say, I just can tell that it was MUCH easier to fly in big groups before SU5.
It’d also be great if we could add players that we would like to prioritize in this evaluation to have them rendered no matter if they are further away with higher priority. This way before a group flight one could at least add the group leader(s) to that list and would see them throughout the flight.
There’s SO much Asobo/MS could do with quite minor tweaks to make multiplayer more enjoyable. It leaves me speechless that they didn’t even bother to work on this for XBox release, where such “arcade” activities are surely more common than for simmers.