You have orbx scenery installed? That really makes the riverside and canary wharf look much better, but the pg itself still looks bad to me in that video, and once you fly away from the river it doesn’t look good.
Did you watch the whole video or just the first few minutes?
And did you have the YouTube quality setting at the highest scaling 1440p HD?
1440 yes, didn’t watch the whole thing but I did scan and sample at a dozen spots. Plus I fly round London a lot, I used to live there so I know it well, and I know what it looks like in the sim.
This screenshot from your video is typical of what I see in many areas around London.
That looks awful to me, but as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder so others may disagree.
I’d compare it to say Barcelona, somewhere I’ve visited IRL and often in the sim, the pg there mostly looks fantastic (apart from the docks but LVFR LEBL fixes those).
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Jorg: The World Update 3 delay was because of London’s photogrammetry. Something was not quite right, and we think that the problem was a data processing problem. We plan to revisit London photogrammetry in the future. Also, there was a very high vertices count in the London photogrammetry, and Asobo has written a script to reduce that in order to get better framerates.
Sadly we are still waiting over 2 years later!
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IIRC they already did some improvements to London PG since WU 3
Yeah your snapshot picture looks awful but it is not what I am seeing in my video, so no idea why it looks like that.
I also know London well, born and bred in the London Borough of Uxbridge.
Anyway bear in mind that PG is not designed to be be viewed close-up but generally suggested to look ok above 1500ft. I deliberately made my videos at low-level typically around 300ft and below to show the level of detail visible at rooftop levels. So it can be a matter of expectations. Also it will always look much better when viewed as a moving picture rather than a static snapshot where you can pore over a frozen frame. Snapshots of moving pictures can be blurred for example. Try just watching the whole video without stopping it and it becomes a different experience.
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You’re not wrong, but there’s some places I enjoy flying helis low with pg and some I don’t, I don’t need a video to remember which these are. 
Yeah PG and helis don’t always go well together.
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The problem is that there are many areas in the world (though my experience is mostly in North America) where you can fly 150 feet AGL and see nothing but perfectly rendered PG buildings. So it may not be “meant” to be viewed “close-up,” but our experience in MFS proves that it most certainly can be done if done correctly. That’s what makes places in most European PG areas so disappointing.
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Depends on the quality of the source PG data. Not everywhere in the world has the same level of detail available and many areas have nothing at all. Some countries probably restrict their data for national security reasons etc.
Interesting. I have never seen that. Care to specify some exact locations so that I can take a look?
I live in Columbus, Ohio, USA, which is a good example, but Manhattan in New York, works, too. You can fly to the center of the city from CMH or KOSU or simply set the city as your departure point. Fly low and pause frequently to look around. I’ve simply never seen the “melting building” problems that are almost universal in London (other than on handcrafted POIs).
You’re entirely correct about rendering being dependent on the quality of the dataset. I’ve been arguing that point from the beginning, when so very many users were trying to blame it on server overload, slow Internet access, inadequate use of rolling cache, etc. The problem is all in the PG data. Garbage in, garbage out.
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All of those other things are real problems that can impact results as well. The source data determines the ceiling, the best you will ever get. After that often you may find the pg looks worse at some times than it does at others, then all of those other factors come into play, and one of them will likely be the culprit.
This complexity, not just with pg but with the sim as a whole, is what frustrates a lot of users. If everything is all working perfectly the results are astonishing, but if one duck is not in line then the results are often well below what it could be and as users we have very limited visibility and opportunity to fix these things, and that is probably responsible for half of the posts on this forum.
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One of the reasons why the London PG is bad is that there aren’t many data sets available. Flying low enough over central London to take the aerial photographs needed to generate good PG is highly restricted and generally reserved for Police helicopters etc. So to get full PG might take months or years to be able to get the flight plans approved to collect the data. During Covid, when air traffic was largely shut down, we did see an aircraft flying the tell-tale ‘corn-rows’ pattern over central London for a few days that suggests it was taking aerial photographs for coverage. Maybe this is the new data that Microsoft has bought. The best existing data appears to be the set that Google is using but I’m pretty sure Microsoft couldn’t get access to that.
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Very interesting information – it explains a lot. I’m intrigued by the difficulty getting approval to gather top-quality PG data because it seems as though it would be very valuable to local government.
Well, with London the problem is that the airspace is very crowded. You have four airports with significant traffic routed near (or in the case of EGLC, over) the city centre. Even helicopters (and occasional GA) are normally limited to an airspace corridor basically over the river. Getting low enough to photograph the city in enough detail to construct 3D models of the buildings in full detail requires special permission and NATS will not be willing to disrupt normal commercial operations except for special events.
I suppose you could supplement aerial photography with imagery shot from the ground, but I imagine that would require a LOT of imagery and a lot of processing and for tall buildings it would probably produce poor image quality because of perspective.
We’re also pretty limited in how drones can be used in public airspace in the UK. I suppose it might be easier to get drone coverage of all of central London, but it would take a long time to do.
Following that logic, NYC, which as far as I know is not any less congested, would never receive a new PG update. I assume the reality is different, and there are more than one version of PG for NYC created by Google, Bing, governmental entities, etc. We are in 2023, and cities and countries are frequently being photographed and scanned even with high air traffic. That’s my common sense, and I might be wrong, but I have hope to see a comprehensive update for London one day. What an amazing city!
I believe it was mentioned up-thread, Jorg said on a Q&A that they have better PG data for London and will update it at some point. Perhaps a future City Update.
NYC is certainly as crowded (or more) of an airspace as London… perhaps US ATC rules are just not as draconian? I can’t pretend to be an expert there. Or anywhere, in truth 
Perhaps we MFS users should hope for a widespread airline strike.
Yes, NYC airspace is extremely congested. I think there are six airports within 50 miles of NYC that land commercial jetliners. If you have all of the payware airports installed, it will definitely impact your PC’s performance.
Last night I went sightseeing in a heli around Bilbao. The intention was to visit the Guggenheim of course, but the highlight for me was actually the photogrammetry.
Bilbao town has excellent pg, I think the best I’ve seen in the sim. There are very small details, even down to aircon units on building roofs. I was flying my heli very low, skimming along the rooftops. Even 100ft above they looked good.
This cathedral is photogrammetry not modelled, and the detailed shape on the building is fantastic.
I would estimate there are 3D features about 0.5m in size. Compared to the mess in London it’s an entirely different experience.
Obviously if you get down to street level and “walk” around it still looks bad, it’s not going to be a driving simulator for some time. But it shows that the sim is absolutely capable of drawing fantastic photogrammetry suitable for low and slow helicopter sightseeing, it just all depends on the quality of the source data and how it was post processed.
And that’s the big problem, photogrammetry source data is highly dependent upon the equipment and skills of those capturing it, and of course dollars spent on it, and these factors vary considerably between countries.
PS. If you do visit Bilbao don’t be surprised if the cranes, parts of the docks, and bridges look bad. These kinds of non-solid structures are notoriously difficult for photogrammetry to render properly and some of it looks quite bad.
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Also the speed of your Internet connection and the capabilities of your CPU/GPU hardware to process and render the scenery data rapidly all have a considerable effect on each person’s experience.
If anything London has too much data, If you pause and wait for the graphics to catch up things start to look very much better, but that is not much use if you are at flying speeds.