Some random thoughts on this CU:
Overall, I consider that this is a very good CU - on the same level as WU21, CU15 & WU22 on my PC. I flew around all nine areas at ~ 1,000 ft in the Zlin Shock Ultra, spread over 8 hrs. The selection of the nine areas allowed my flights to cover two areas at a time:
- Trieste & Urdine
- Rimini & Pisa
- Reggio & Calabria
- Cagliari
- Bolzano & Genoa
Making for some great flights.
In most areas, TIN trees were effectively masked by “regular” trees, though there were a few spots where they were, as in previous CUs, rather noticable.
Buildings were generally well represented. Some had that “melted” look (but not too badly), and others a slight greenish tinge, but not in sufficient numbers to detract from my flying experience.
Performance was good, with framerates in the 80’s and 90’s, except at Bolzano Airport, where they were exceptionally low - 'teens to 30s. This may be due to Bolzano being a bespoke airport (WU IX), surrounded by mountains & now with higher resolution TIN around it. The combination overwhelmed my standard bush-flying graphics settings:
Expand to see my graphics settings
| Item | Setting |
|---|---|
| Display Mode | Full Screen |
| HDR10 | On |
| Exposure Compensation | EV-1 |
| Full Screen Res | 3840 x 2160 |
| Anti-Aliasing | TAA |
| Render scaling | 100 |
| AMD FidelityFX Sharpening | 200 |
| Max Frame Rate | On |
| Max Frame Rate Value | 60 |
| Frame Generation | AMD FSR 4.0 |
| Framerate Multiplier | 2x (N/A) |
| VSync | Off (N/A) |
| VSync Interval | Monitor refresh rate (N/A) |
| Dynamic Settings | On |
| Frame Rate Target | 40 |
| - | - |
| Global Rendering Quality | Custom |
| Terrain LOD | 400 |
| Off Screen Terrain Pre-Cache | Ultra |
| Displacement Mapping | On |
| Buildings | High |
| Trees | Medium |
| Plants | High |
| Rocks | High |
| Grass | High |
| Object LOD | 200 |
| Volumetric Clouds | Ultra |
| Texture Resolution | High |
| Anisotropic Filtering | 16x |
| Water Waves | High |
| Raytraced Shadows | Off |
| Shadow Maps | 2048 |
| Terrain Shadows | 512 |
| Contact Shadows | High |
| Windshield Effects | Medium |
| Ambient Occulsion | High |
| Cubemap Reflections | 256 |
| Raymarched Reflections | Medium (reduces windshield reflections) |
| Light Shafts | Ultra |
| Depth of Field | Ultra |
| Motion Blur | Off |
| Visual Particle Effects Quality | High |
| Glass Cockpit Refresh Rate | High |
| Characters Quantity | Low |
| Characters Variety | Ultra |
| Characters Quality | Medium |
| Airport Services Quantity | Low |
| Airport Service Variety | Ultra |
| Parked Aircraft Quantity | Low |
| Parked Aircraft Variety | Ultra |
| Aircraft Traffic Quantity | Low |
| Aircraft Traffic Variety | Ultra |
| Road Traffic | Ultra |
| Sea Traffic | Off |
| Fauna | Ultra |
| Seatbelt Visibility | On |
As soon as I left the vicinity of the airport, framerates started to increase. Leaving the TIN area they were back to the high 90s - low 100s, which is “standard” for my settings.
One minor TIN bug was noted at Rimini, reported here.
On the plus side, the port at Genoa looks really good at 1,000 ft, though if you go down close, you’ll notice there is a mixture of TIN and generic cranes that don’t quite match.
This high-resolution TIN does wonders for some pretty complex autostrada, and most of the time the AI traffic followed the elevated sections rather than dropping to ground level. I enjoyed following these roads & viewing the engineering that was required to create them IRL.
The photogrammetry looked really good on my 55" TV screen. I flew in real-time with live weather, so don’t know how these areas look in different seasons, though.
The main detratctor in the CU is simply that the areas covered are rather small. With the exception of Reggio & Calabria, which made for a great tour around the Strait, it did not take long to fly out of the covered areas, even with the low-n-slow Shock Ultra. Yes, I know these are “City” updates & they did indeed cover the cities, but a larger coverage area for each would be so much better! 