First of all I am sorry that it sounds like a rant… But I really feel the need to speak this out.
I noticed in quite a lot of add-ons with about 17 euro and over add-ons you can still find a lot of blurry textures and low poly unrealistic models, and many times even worse night lightning - which in the eyes of the developers however are actually a care about the players’ fps rather than letting them down with a low effort priced add-ons.
I do understand that optimization is important process, but I still believe that visual quality and photorealism are far more important. Even with my GTX 980 I would prefer an add-on with a well made and crisp looking ground and terminal textures, realistic ground clutter and night lightning than some old convert with textures and models looking as if they were made in the late 90s or early 2000s. I don’t need this kind of care about my perfomance - I need a quality add-on instead. And I am not even sure in the first place, if it is really an optimization or just a quick money grab effort… but this is now more of a conspiracy.
So, if anyone else is also looking for a quality add-ons with well made models and textures - what are some of the must have add-ons that set the same high standards about they scenery?
One of those “optimized” airports btw. TJSJ by LVFR. At least they spared the jetways and the ground markings from it. And thankfully I got it from the Marketplace sale - so it wasn’t that big loss.
This all day. The amazing of payware I’ve bought that looks great and is let down by shoddy ground textures. Fsdreamteam for example, Zurich is great, and then you look behind the main buildings and there’s this grey mess where roads are supposed to be.
Then you see flytampas vegas and they crafted landslide roads and animated traffic and it looks awesome.
This is massively inaccurate. Textures are among the worst memory eaters of assets. They can absolutely tank performance is pushed too much.
Incidentally, textures are likely the asset that gets updated the most even by developers who convert their P3D airports, as they are literally the easiest to update considering that anyone but the worst newbie would have created them in high resolution to begin with. Models are what usually gets recycled.
I am yet to find any newbie and unknown developers prefering the high resolution textures.
Looking at places like Simmarket they just cover everything up into a blurry mess or just a single monochrome and repetative texture - then ask a price sometimes way higher than the top of the lane payware…
Textures are created in higher resolution and then compressed and downsized to fit in a decent memory footprint when implemented in the simulation to avoid turning it into a slideshow when you load into the airport.
That still does not explain how some developers manage to make add-ons with 4K textures meanwhile others refuse even to look at them no matter how big or small they add-ons are.
Also, I am sorry if I again missing your point but wouldn’t a downsized texture look even better?
The same as with the 4K videos that would look way more better on 1080p monitor rather than 4K.
From what I remember the textures start to get blurry when you get a very small texture and stretch them instead.
Downsized textures have less resolution, so of course they look worse.
Edinburgh airport is a great airport, but it’s also a relatively small one, so the developer can afford pushing resolution up while staying within a reasonable memory footprint compared to larger hubs.
If you look at general aviation airports like London Oxford, you’ll see a even higher level of detail.
An airport is like a scene. When that scene is loaded, it needs to be streamed into memory. All of it. Textures, 3D models, animations. The more memory it takes, the more it will affect performance. If it exceeds its allocation, it can absolutely tank performance, and it needs to share memory with everything around it, it doesn’t exist in a bubble.
Some developers will put more of their memory allocation into 3D details, and less in textures. Some will do more in textures and less 3D details, with varying balances depending on their art style, size of the project, more.
And yes, some developers will also just use crap textures because they’re not good, but that’s very rare among the reputable names.
Good textures are not blurry and don’t take much space either. Some aircraft have textures that look like they’re coming straight from FSX, from a time videocards had less than 1GB of memory.
Yes when texture size exceed the amount of VRAM the FPS will go down. But that shouldn’t happen on modern systems and with textures with resolutions common for the year 2021.
A quick activation of developer mode and the FPS counter, which shows memory budgets, will show you how wrong you are.
It’s extremely easy to exceed the memory budget in MSFS. Airports aren’t the only thing loaded at any given time. They need to share memory with everything around them.
You’re using extremely arbitrary definitions. “like it comes from the nineties” is not a very valid way to define a textures.
A texture is (literally) numbers. It has a certain size and it takes a certain amount of memory. It doesn’t have a date.
Many games “from 2021” can have better textures because they have extremely different requirements of the details to show within a scene.
MSFS’s airports aren’t displayed on their own. They have to be displayed together with an extremely detailed cockpit or aircraft, which takes most of the budget because it’s always on the foreground, on top of the world around them.
Perdonally I don’t mind some relatively low fps while taxiing, landing or taking off as far as there’s no stutters and input lag. But usually it’s RAM and CPU instead of VRAM that is responsible for the last. With my 32 GB of RAM I see no slideshow even on the low fps.
35 or 20 fps would be a problem in a shooter or rising game but not a flight simulator for most of the people who just want an airliner experience. After all I am not there to do some Reno style races across the terminal buildings.
Movies are even at 24 fps and I don’t see people running out of cinema
And that animated terminal with at a performance cost depending on your setup.Flytampa KLAS causes massive framedrops on my rig because of it.When facing the city my frames drastically increases.
It´s not about FPS alone - it´s this insane graving for 90-244 FPS that started about 2-3 years ago.
Everyone was only keeping on babbling about “motion sickness” and “FPS” all around the clock, and that “low FPS makes me vomit” and “low FPS makes me sick in the head” and blah blah blah…
This lead to sacrificing EVERYTHING every quality and visual fidelity aspect of graphics, and having all immersion destroyed by “FPS-optimizing” so much that half of all graphics elements in all videogames were popping-in in reaching vicinity to ensure an incredible amount of FPS with almost no VRAM usage in a computing system.
Plus an endless insane witchhunt and hater-culture broke loose and everything was only about “lazy gamers WHO SHOULD GO OUT OR SHOULD GO TO WORK!!!11111” and “■■■■ NERDS ALWAYS STARING ON A SCREEN!!!111 instead of taking part in the REAL-LIFE!!!11” and trying to establish some kind of insane ANTI PLAYSTATION!!! ANTI MICROSOFT!!! ANTI GAMERS!!! KILL ALL NERDS - OR MAKE THEM DO HARD AND STUPID WORK LIKE EVERY MONDAY MORNING WAS SOME CONCENTRATION CAMP!!!111!!! culture of stupid haters and online bullys.
All of this destroyed the decade long good video game culture who always was good and had positive vibes and atmosphere since the late eighties - and brought us dozens over dozens more frames than the human eye can see (because for the human eye everything rendered with ~40-50FPS is fully fluent).
(because for the human eye everything rendered with ~40-50FPS is fully fluent).