in addition to main road street light issues, I can see bright runway lights from 20 to 30 miles out but can’t see the airport beacon light until on short final. Can we dim the runway lights and increase the beacon light? Can this also be fixed?
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Is it just me or are the last couple dozen posts in this thread out of order?
Did some testing on beacons yesterday, at GPS distance of 26.9 NM, beacon and rwy lights visible, at 27.0 NM , both beacon and rwy lights gone. Regardless of ultra or low-end setting.
Personally (IRL) I always spot the appch / rwy lights long before seeing the beacon, and never at 27 NM, maybe half of that, unless straight in to a major airport with MALSR & such… And I see the highway lamps long before any airport related lighting.
So for me beacon (& rwy lights) are very much overpowered in MSFS.
For me that is the issue also as well as double lights in the cities. When flying in rural areas you should see the lights of the houses below and street lights should appear in small towns only. Major highways have lights at cloverleafs and only lights of cars in between. This as it is now just doesn’t look realistic.
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Interesting. I’ll take another look. I agree for sure the runway lights need to be toned down from a distance.
We have another update with night lighting for smaller roads gets further randomized.
Tried it and it looked OK, but still ruined with the bloated lights with anti-aliasing (TAA) on my 1080p screen.
@CptLucky8 you’ve mentioned above somewhere that you can set TAA up to “100”, “70”, “50” etc… How to do that? In the game there’s only “TAA”. Do you adjust it in usercfg.opt ? I want to have a play with the TAA level to see if possible.
Oh, and with the latest update, my night flights become more stutter. I don’t know whether this is related or not.
I mostly fly at night into smaller commuter airports in major urban areas. The runway lights at these smaller airports usually get lost in the city lights, so I look for the beacon to locate the airport at a distance.
Do you mean this IRL or Sim?
I find IRL the beacon(smaller airports in urban area) can be very tricky to see, drowning among many streetlights, headlights & other lights in urban areas (Currently Houston, Dallas, New Orleans) …
Also, flying instrument approaches often takes me “straight in” from a distance, making it easier to see approach lights / runway lights before the beacon.
But in the sim, the Beacon shines like a bright star standing out from adjacent lights, making airports way too easy to spot at a distance. (This is together with overly bright runway/approach-lights )
I might be wrong, but I think that was Update 7 doing that a while back, and then another smaller update was released (navdata) recently, but also contained the Update 7 release notes (Smaller road light more random)…?
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Ah make sense thx… I am beginning to think that perhaps we who witnessed enlarged light orbs are 1080p users (i might be very wrong about this)… Also start to think this is due to the TAA that were updated during update-5. I read some other threads like clouds getting grainy etc after TAA update.
Are you 4k users also witnessed grainy clouds? All these (light orbs, clouds, grainy trees etc) could actually be issues related to the new TAA?
Well I do experience improvements in FPS when I fly above big cities… But sacrificing night lighting, clouds, terrains etc for FPS? Hell no!!! I know my PC’s old and this sim is for next gen PCs, hence I plan to buy a new one in the coming years so I can play this with all settings set to max.
At least give us more sliders etc in the options screen should we wish to sacrifice graphics for FPS (like the avionics screen refresh rate options).
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Yeah that’s why I was intrigued that “they’ve done some more things” on night lightings and downloaded the update right away.
Couldn’t see any difference really… Yeah smaller (yellow/orange orbs) gets random, but couldn’t really see the difference much… The bloated square night orbs ruined it for me unfortunately 
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I was talking about IRL but not instrument approaches. I suppose if you are perfectly lined up with the runway you could see it from a distance, but otherwise I find I have to look for the green and white flashes of the beacon like a light house.
Agreed on the Runway lights… I can even see the Approach light system from 32K feet like this example below. I have seen runway lights from high up, but never like this clear… 
Could not agree more. Most of my flying is in small downs and rural areas and it was FINE before, now everything’s lit up like Las Vegas
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Cranking up the resolution scaling might help this out a fair bit.
I have a 1080p monitor, but run the game in 4K and scale it down. Fixes ALOT of problems with the engine.
You mean slide render scale all the way to 200? Tried that and yes, orbs get smaller (i said previously that cranking it up to 200 didn’t make any difference, but actually it did after I take a closer look). However the price to FPS was too much and MSFS runs even choppier than before update-5.
The thing is, if you use normal render scale (100) and no anti-aliasing, the orbs are smaller and move smoothly across the screen (while buildings, trees etc have this jaggy and crawly movement). When you put TAA on, orbs turns bigger and become square-ish.
What I want is normal render scale (100) with TAA on, but small light orbs like if I don’t use anti-aliasing.
Cranking render scaling up to 200 actually cranks the whole lot up (houses, terrains etc) and causing huge fps loss.
Well yeah cranking it up to 200 does of course. But you can also do render scaling in your driver. On my 1080p monitor and 5700XT, I run the game at absolute max settings, 4K, but resolution scaling down to 70, crank up the sharpening in the AMD driver, and with a framerate limiter get a completely stable 30fps with consistent frametimes, and a huge boost in visual fidelity vs 1080p native with 100 resolution scale, while still maintaining similar framerates.
Try this, works for me:
I might be doing something wrong but I’ve tried using DSR in Nvidia control panel to 4x (4k) but when I go to the game, there’s no change…
Oh good Lord let’s hope not. This is what I feared when I heard it would be available on the kiddie console as well.