If you have flown there previously with PG on, then it should still work afterwards while offline. First you need to get it in the cache (Until manual cache is fixed and you can download it that way) Of course you have to fly the exact same paths as any additional data needed when you deviate won’t be there.
To re-iterate again, melted buildings are cause by a lot of things
- Bandwidth, if you can’t get the data fast enough, the sim falls behind
- Ram, if you can’t fit all the data in memory, the sim falls behind
- CPU, if you don’t have enough grunt to process all that data in time, the sim falls behind
Terrain level of detail increases the draw distance, more data to download, store and process
Object level of detail increases the quality presentation of the data
Lower Object level of detail means less strain on the GPU, but more strain on the CPU. The game has to create lower level detail of the data streamed in to ease the render load for the GPU.
It always has to do this for further away detail, but the lower you set object level of detail, the more work the cpu has to do to convert the PG data to lower LOD. I got worse performance on my laptop at Terrain 100, Object 100 in NY PG, compared to Terrain 100, Object 150.
Altitude also plays a big role, the lower you go the more detail the game downloads and uses. You see it in the manual cache, there are 3 level of details, high, medium and low.
At 500ft you get the high level detail, for London that’s 4.4 GB at LOD 2.0 in a straight line fly over.
At 2000ft you get the medium level detail, for London 1.2 GB at LOD 2.0 in a straight line fly over.
The game adjusts this data further depending on object level of detail setting, it never goes straight from the server to the GPU. Hence having it all in the rolling cache doesn’t mean it will always look good or that the sim won’t fall behind.
Fetch data → process data → render data
When either fetch or process falls behind your current rate of travel → melted buildings