One thing that has characterised FS2024 for me has been really aggressive LODs, with detail coming in only when you, the player, are almost right on top of it. It’s persisted since day 1 and there appears to be no real change to SU3, at least in my experience.
It’s so silly that there’s part of me wondering if it’s something on my system that is set incorrectly. I’ve just been sat at MKStudios KSEA and the faces of the people in the terminal right in front of me have melted. It’s the same with airport equipment and so on.
Not only is the default game like this, but almost all 3rd party sceneries I own are the same. IniBuilds airports are bordering on the ridiculous, with stuff either disappearing or being destroyed by low detail when you’re mere metres away from them.
Even with everything on maximum at 4K I’m sat here with a load of GPU headroom. Surely we should be given the option so we can find our own happy mediums. As it is at the moment it is kinda spoiling the visual beauty of the game.
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No idea if both Ini and MKS used automatic LODS creation or not, but i’ve fixed some of INIbuilds LOWI models myself to get rid of the horrible pop-in. So I know 100% it is a problem they can solve and it’s not a sim issue and no sim setting wil fix bad LOD models.
This is default Inibuilds LOWI:
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That’s worth knowing. Guess it’s bug reporting time then.
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Reported to LOWI the week it was released. Same for the many manholes (that have good LODS btw ;))
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Don’t know if you have it but Heathrow is properly horrible. It’s not simply LODs, stuff just is either there or not. It looks really bad to me.
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I do have INi’s Heathrow but hardly had time to fly in MSFS for the past two months. I’ll check it out asap.
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Landing on 27R all the buildings and car parks on finals just appear out of thin air.
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I think having lower LOD at range is a good thing for performance, but it should be tweakable based on the object. For example, if I’m on short final I don’t really care whether a passenger in the terminal has a blurry face, but I would care about objects ahead being rendered on the runway, taxiway signage being visible as well as readable, or a windsock at some un-towered field visible at circuit height.
Hopefully these things can be configured independently of each other.
I’ve seen that too. Look away for more then a few seconds, and they get dumped. Turn back and after a split second they render in. Unsure if that’s straight up LOD or poor offscreen terrain caching, despite me having it set to Ultra. I swear its never been the same since 2020 <SU5.
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I think that in part, this contributes to this stuttering in the flare as all the airfield clutter, buildings etc is loading in right at the moment you don’t want it to.
Something definitely isn’t right somewhere, whether it’s the 3rd party or the sim I don’t know. I suspect a bit of both. 24 is noticeably worse than 20 for it in my experience
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I don’t tend to fly into those locations, with very complex geometry, so I think this is something I am somewhat insulated from.
I hope they also look at some of the default aircraft regarding LODs. The 747 Dreamlifter and Supertanker appear to beautifully made when less than a millimetre away, but horrendous as soon as you zoom out slightly. Great shame as it looks like alot of work went into the visual models.
Try turning dynamics settings off. It’s not very good at doing what it’s supposed to do.
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Absolutely.
I found it almost unusable to be honest. It didn’t seem very ‘dynamic’ to be honest
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Got to agree with that. Tried it once recently. With it off, my frame rate with the settings I had set was stable 36, then switched it on with target of 35 (so in theory it should have left my settings “as is”) but it turned TLOD down to what looked like 20!
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It is very aggressive, yes. The PG ‘tiles’ don’t seem to stay in place. Every time you pan the camera around, the tiles morph into view. Poor draw distances and the world ahead of you doesn’t seem to look very sharp, both on the runway and at different heights.
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I turned off dynamics settings on day 1, once I saw how useless it is. Even with this setting OFF ground objects still pop up in front of the camera or disappear even when you move several meters away from them. It looks awful. It feels like many objects don’t have LOD enabled, instead of switching to a low quality 3D model they just disappear.
I don’t remember how it worked in 2020 but Xplane12 has it done perfectly. Airports are full of dynamic and static little objects and nothing pops up when I taxi to the runway. I can even see planes parked at gates, taxiing and taking off when overflying 35,000ft above the airport.
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This isn’t because of the dynamic setting option. Its a issue and should be brought into the limelight so please vote!
If you look at the release notes, there is a very long list of vehicle and AI Aircraft LODs that have been adjusted. The new LOD system involves a huge amount of manual editing of each an every asset, and only now are Asobo getting around to adjusting some of the asset LODs … the ships are still nowhere to be seen and it could be a very long time before all the assets have their LODs properly configured. What a …
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I think this explains why LOD on some of the POIs either does not pop in at all or pops up very late. Main LA area with the group of buildings after you take off from LA International - the tallest one doesn’t have any detail on it until you slowly circle it a few times, and as you fly away, it again becomes a flat polygon just a few hundred metres out. Same with West Minister structure around the Ferris Wheel in London, or the tallest structure in Sydney as you are flying towards the Opera House - detail pops on with the yellow background and red lettering really late and then disappears soon after. The West Minster structure is a flat cardboard cutout and you have to fly very slowly over it a few times until you finally see the details pop in.
So annoying. Will we ever have a “normal” experience in 2024 and 2020? I swear things were not so broken a year or two ago. They should have just stuck to 2020.
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Its also VERY apparent with model matching planes, where gears disappear at a already very short distance. Big immersion killer and nothing the model matching providers can do about it, because its 2024 thats limiting here.
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Could this be exacerbated by the new way developers are supposed to build planes for 2024, as in defining all the new required LOD levels for an object, and all its components?
https://docs.flightsimulator.com/msfs2024/html/3_Models_And_Textures/Modeling/LODs/LOD_Selection_System.htm
You can also debug LOD levels, and have current object LOD reported to the UI:
https://docs.flightsimulator.com/msfs2024/html/3_Models_And_Textures/Modeling/LODs/Debugging_LODs.htm
You could in effect observe a plane with missing landing gear, and confirm what LOD level it is currently displaying. I would expect that the landing gear are large enough that they should be displayed at all but the lowest LOD level, where the plane is just a spec in the sky. When it is large enough to discern the fuselage shape, then perhaps have the gear displayed also.
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