Poor rendering of mountains, even with TLOD at 200 -400

[SlabsFly]

I am going to a large extent parrot @AboezD:

Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
• no

Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:
• you have a more capable system than mine (rtx4080/9800x3d/1Gbps)

I really have not experienced anything remotely like what you have. I have TLOD 400, OLOD 200, 4K. Note that I keep my system pretty basic and I tend not to fiddle. Other info that MIGHT possibly be pertinent:

• TAA
• No FG
• As for nVidia drivers: I have used 566.14 and 576.52 over the past weekend. I did not notice significant IQ differences.
• ReBar off

I am at a loss as to why your image quality should be so incredible poor. Some recent screenshots as examples. I tried to pick a variety of geographical locations, type of scenery/topology, aircraft, altitudes, visibility and weather.

[PILOTOWAWAWA]

Is it the same with an airliner for you? I get better rendering with MSFS on prop planes. I am guessing the scenery doesn’t need to render as fast?

Are you using the “Dynamic Settings” option in MSFS 2024? It would be interesting to see if turning that option off if so helps with any blurry terrain issues for you.

[PILOTOWAWAWA]

I’ll give it a try. I’ve usually had this at 20 FPS to only have it work when it is at a minimum. I am truly curious on what may be causing this for me that other users are not experiencing.

From my experience here in the forums it seems many users do complain about this, but then seeing the other side of the spectrum some users don’t see issues with this at all.

So the next question is if it’s a TLOD issue. I see that @SmotheryVase665 had TLOD set to 400. Unfortunately me doing that causes me to get VRAM issues. And in the 2020 - 150 TLOD was sufficient for good rendering near the aircraft.

If there are any other ideas I could try keep them coming my way. I am willing to be a test rat to find the solutions for this.

[WhaleCowboy]

I did the test, and for me, yes, it has a big impact on bluryness.
I used to turn it off because of this issue, but, right now, it is the only way i have to not encounter stutters or hit the “Vram wall” (i call it like that i hope you understand what i mean ! )
I set it to 15, and even if i have good FPS in flight, i have this bluryness…
I would be happy if some of us could do a comparative test, because I’m just speaking of a “undocumented test” or a “feeling” and I’m not playing right now to make this test.

And, i have the feeling that the blurryness is more visible inside the cockpit tand in external view.

But I really think “dynamic setting” is a driver of this blurryness.

[WhaleCowboy]

My TLOD is at 200. And there is room for CPU and GPU to work. (In flight or in GA planes) - sometimes when on ground i can have the famous message on graphic capacity exceeded

I do not want to go under 200 because for me the rendering is not good enough under this figure.

I’ve got quiet everything set to “intermediate” and plyaing at 1080p

And i’m mostly flying the Fenix.

[PILOTOWAWAWA]

Interesting observation. Thinking back I haven’t done a flight without Dynamic setting, or another thing that I will not name. I’ll try with nothing controlling the terrain dynamics and see what results I get when I return home from a work trip tomorrow.

I appreciate the dialogue and troubleshooting from everyone.

[Chewwy94]

Thank you for the bug report.

We have created an internal ticket to see if our team already has this logged, and if not they will attempt to reproduce the issue and create a new bug report. This item is now marked as feedback-logged. If there is an existing bug report or one is created, we will move this thread to bug-logged.

[SmotheryVase665]

@PILOTOWAWAWA

Is it the same with an airliner for you? I

Yes. This is a flight from Tokyo, so the FPS are very low due to the known issue at that airport, but visually it is good both at ground level in external view:

Cockpit view:

at altitude (~ 26,000 ft here):

and during approach:

You might want to test without any addon-ons or apps that modify terrain textures, if installed.

[PILOTOWAWAWA]

Do you have any add ons installed at all? Wondering if there may be something. As far as I know I don’t have any terrain altering mods. @SmotheryVase665

[SmotheryVase665]

No addons installed, but do use LittleNavMap that connects to MSFS in order to read data about the current flight.

[PHSepp796]

Hi @PILOTOWAWAWA

I would like to share my pov with comunnity about this lod feature

The difference i see is that lod factors in fps counter is at 0.50 factor vs 1.00
0.50 lod by @SmotheryVase665 pictures vs 1.00 lod by @SlabsFly pictures
This means if they both have Tlod at 400 and Olod 200 SmotheryVase665 is flying actually
at Tlod 200 and Olod 100 unless he edit his usercfg.opt and set it to Tlos 800 and Olod 400
Whch is possible to do so.

To see what your Tlod and Olod is in the sim is using, it is best to “create and open” a crash report from ui which include lod settings displayed.
Altough it does not explain why some of us having lod factor 0.50 vs 1.00
And it still does not explain what means lod
Imo
LOD means Load On Distance for Tlod were T says terrain while Olod means Level Of Detail and
O is says objects in combination of these two it will show the amount of detail at a certain distance

[johnwhite92]

Dynamic settings can temporarily lower TLOD
if the GPU overloads like in heavy areas.
There will be less stutters but in return it can possibly reduce the visual quality in the most critical cases like these poorly optimized airports.

[WhaleCowboy]

Yes, you are right, but I found that even if I’ve got a TLOD or OLOD factor at 1.00 and room for more complex scenery or graphics, with Dynamic settings on, the blurryness on ground when flying at altitude is more visible than if the dynamic setting is off.

[SmotheryVase665]

@johnwhite92

Dynamic settings can temporarily lower TLOD if the GPU overloads like in heavy areas…

I have Dynamic settings turned on, and my system performance bottleneck is my Intel A770 GPU.

Expand to see my basic PC specs:

Item	Setting
CPU	i7-12700K (no overclocking or undervolting)
RAM	32 GB 5200 MHz DDR5 CL40 RAM
GPU	Intel Arc 770 (16GB, v32.0.101.6314)
REBAR BIOS Setting	On
Peripherals	Microsoft USB Natural Keyboard, Microsoft USB Wireless Intellimouse Explorer, Xbox 360 Wired Controller, Logitech Extreme 3D Pro
OS	Windows 11 Pro 24 H2 v26100.4351 + all OS updates.
MSFS 2024 Edition	MS Store Premium Deluxe + all WUs & CUs
Downloaded Content	None (i.e., all Streamed)
Build Version	SU3 v1.5.9.0
3rd-Party & Community Addons	None

No performance-improving applications are installed (e.g. for CPU or GPU improvements).
Neither the Intel Arc Control Service or Arc Control App is running.

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	65 (Resolution: 2496 x 1404)
AMD FidelityFX Sharpening	150
Max Frame Rate	On
Max Frame Rate Value	60
Frame Generation	AMD FSR 3
Framerate Multiplier	2x
VSync	Off (N/A)
VSync Interval	Half refresh rate (N/A)
Dynamic Settings	On
Frame Rate Target	60
-	-
Global Rendering Quality	Custom
Terrain LOD	400
Off Screen Terrain Pre-Cache	Ultra
Displacement Mapping	On
Buildings	High
Trees	Medium
Plants	Medium
Rocks	Medium
Grass	Medium
Object LOD	200
Volumetric Clouds	Ultra
Texture Resolution	High (was medium in earlier builds)
Anisotropic Filtering	4x
Water Waves	Medium
Raytraced Shadows	On
Shadow Maps	2048
Terrain Shadows	512
Contact Shadows	High
Windshield Effects	High
Ambient Occulsion	High
Cubemap Reflections	256
Raymarched Reflections	Medium
Light Shafts	Ultra
Depth of Field	Off
Motion Blur	Off
Glass Cockpit Refresh Rate	High
Characters Quality	Medium
Traffic Airport Quality	Low
Air Traffic	Medium
Road Traffic	Medium
Sea Traffic	Medium
Fauna	High

[ZeekR5430]

Flying around Alaska seems to have some really bad looking mountains in general. Idk if it has to do with poorer satellite imagery but the mountains around Anchorage and Homer look like pudding. Not as much of an issue for me in other areas of the world.

[PILOTOWAWAWA]

I’ve made some interesting discoveries today. First, I believe I found the issue. @Chewwy94 @SmotheryVase665

I began my test with deleting every folder I could. My %appdata% folder, my community folder, my caches, everything. I started the simulator and loaded in MSFS 2024. It uploaded to the latest beta released today. It was vanilla on all my settings except control profiles.

I loaded into the default KTPA airport with default ULTRA preset. I loaded into the ground, scenery is CLEAR just like @smootheryvase665. I then opened the developer mode FPS viewer to see my FPS. FPS was sitting around 50-60 FPS. Thinking about what we thought may be the issue, I turn on dynamic settings to 25 target FPS as I had prior. Render quality stayed the same for the terrain.

Then, I turned on frame generation with Nvidia DLSS. To my surprise, the FPS STAYED THE SAME! 50-60 FPS. Which can’t be as in previous builds, 2020, even lossless scaling I get around 90 FPS in my system.

See these pictures here with DLSS Frame generation, you can see that I didn’t gain any meaningful FPS.

I then said. Well, let me try AMD FSR3. In the past, it makes my system unusable, so it can’t work. Instantly, Frame Generation began behaving the way it’s supposed to be. With 90 FPS!

So, then it dawned on me. What if the issue is that frame generation isn’t actually working in the flight mode. In the menu, I get 110 FPS. When spawned, I get 50. Then, I started thinking, what if the dynamic settings were reading my FPS as low, so it was doing its job by lowering my render to maintain game play…

I don’t understand how I could have the same FPS with DLSS on then with not. Then to see AMD FSR 3, actually produce the FPS I am used to seeing. I am going to try an NVIDIA driver reinstall with DDU to see if a clean driver would give me the same results.

[PILOTOWAWAWA]

Additional update. Turning off Frame Docking on the developer mode fixed DLSS FG. Scenery quality has remained. I will test adding third-party content one by one to see if I find the culprit.

[PILOTOWAWAWA]

Just wanted to mention here. Deleting all of my folders in the %appdata% folder, and letting them reinstall on an update has solved my ground terrain issues. I think there may have been corrupt files, or old files from the initial launch. Anyone having this issue, try deleting all of your Scenery Indexes, Useropt.CFG, WASM, Literally everything in your profile, the server will download your controls anyhow try and see if a fresh %appdata% directory will solve your issue. I’ve made it a practice now that anytime I upgrade version I delete everything, set a fresh community directory, and cache file.

With SU3 .13, still seeing significant amount of changing in the ground rendering and low resolution of the ground terrain.

[Jacobes16]

Any chance you can post screenshots of exactly what I should delete in the app data folder? I’ve stayed up on clearing scenery indexes and other caches.
Just not familiar with this method and don’t want to delete the wrong things.