You can see that in some of the historic cities too … example Florence below. Photogrammetry gives the right skyline and is overall more accurate. BUT - even here the autogen is pretty good if you’re just zipping by and not sightseeing.
Photogrammetry does seem to throw up obelisks and those giant mutant monster trees all over the place; autogen is pretty crisp as said above. Take your pick - I guess it depends what you want to do.
Interestingly, here I was getting steady 38-40 fps in Photogrammetry; varying 22 - 40fps with autogen depending how much I’m looking at.
As stated before I’m a dense autogen object type of user who likes to drone around ground level and explore places. So yes Photogrammetry OFF is the best option for me when wanting to do so.
Instead of looking at a nuclear melted lego block wasteland when I touch ground in some areas.
This is actually a great feature…now if only it switched from ON/OFF quicker(takes 2-3 minutes)
So I thought I’d do a little comparison. Here are 4 pics of the same place - Southampton in England - the only place in the UK to have photogrammetery. The first is Google Maps in 3D, the second is Google Earth, the third is MSFS with photogrammatery ON and the fourth is MSFS with photgrammatery OFF. I know which I prefer and looks most like the real thing.
Interestingly I didn’t move the camera between these two screenshots, but it looks like the angles have changed etc. I wonder if the photogrammatery is doing something with the ground height too?
Anyway, up close OFF looks much much sharper and more realistic - but the buildings are not the right ones. For me, it looks much better from above - which I suppose is what was intended after all.
As I said, at least we can choose, and all of it looks miles better than anything I’ve seen before
Thanks for those comparisons Southampton is pretty good … wonder why the only place in UK for photogrammetry is there. Probably no easy answer to that!
It’s a good problem to have - take your pick depending what you want. Both are better than anything we’ve had before. Orbix TrueEarth is excellent, I think the default MS autogen is as good or better - and of course we just got the whole earth!
Interesting about the camera position - I was perhaps too high to notice in Florence, but the autogen scenery there is taller than the photogrammetry…
As the developers have stated before, about this new FS being a ten-year project, do you think they will be upgrading/improving the quality of photogrammetry cities over time? Or is it better to wait for addons?
Judging by all the people who don’t have this problem on YouTube it appears to be a bug of some kind but we don’t know what causes it. I’d like to see it addressed. I was cool with it at alpha launch but the fact that it’s still an issue post rtm is annoying me.
I have no problem with the quality of the scenery in that shot except for the awful texture seam where the satellite imagery doesn’t match. I’ll take that over autogen for sure.
The New York shot is ok cause I’m right over it but doing laps around Manhattan I go over midtown it looks great but then downtown melts. I go back to downtown it looks great but then midtown melts. Then you look at airports like Boston and Vegas where the runway is right up against the building and it’s a melted mess. From that distance it should render the main skyscrapers at least. Maybe not every house or square inch but the skylines are barely discernible from those runways.
I know some people claim manual cache won’t work, but would you give it a try to create a highres manual cache for the melted lego area?
I tryed Rome Colosseum earlier, and it went from melted lego to solid concrete gradually as the scenery downloaded. After doing manual cache it worked straight away.
Maybe European Azure server cluster has better size/performance than American?
Colosseum itself looks good. Just like other landmarks. If you fly to Seattle, the space needle is crips is hell. But everything around it is just a mess. Even if you download the manual cache around it. The funny thing is…when i watch the intro video, there is a flyover by some city…That is the way it is supposed to look like…And it looked like this first few days. I am sure they flipped the switch in azure as they were not expecting such a load…The fact that anyone can grab it in game pass exponentially increased the user base…
I tried without photogrammetry, but apart from the scenery being less attractive, I also experienced lower frame rates and more stuttering. From high up I noticed even whole cities not being there. I’d rather see them melted than not at all
I tried Seattle yesterday, it was a 21Gb manual cache size after I diligently selected all the areas for high. It looked great, no melted lego blocks. Then I deleted my Manual cache, came back to the same location, and it looked identical (didnt take screenshots, just had to rely on my memory).
So most likely I have good internet connetion/luck with Azure clusters in Europe, and able to stream real-time, no visible benefit of Manual cache. By the way, my rolling cache is only 8 Gigs.
Caveat: I usually fly small props, but for yersterday I tried the Airbus too, and as it flyies much quicker (and hence covers more area in a given time), I got occational stutters as my PC tried to prbably stream the scenery.
I’ll put Manual cache aside, as I couldn’t justify the tedious work and time it takes to select the mini rectangles vs no visible quality gain.
One thing I wonder though, whether putting the rolling cache on an SSD would make things a bit smoother…
Agree the manual caching is very tedious. My frame rate dropped to about 5 when actually doing the caching (not flying!) and the menus seemed very laggy until I backed out to the main menu again. Bit wierd.
My rolling cache is on an SSD - same as the game install - I assume this is helping performance and so would seem sensible if youare able to do that.
Funnily enough, I accidentally forgot to switch on photgrammetery the other day, and was in Toronto. This is a pic of the CN Tower looking like the monolith from 2001 A Space Odyssey:
I realised my mistake when I was taking the shorts of Seattle as I went to switch off PG and realised it was already off - duh. So I went back to Toronto with it switched on, and look at the CN Tower now:
Upgraded my internet from ~ 30 Mbit mobile cube solution to 100mbit fibreglass. The difference is enormous. But very closeup it’s of course still a little blurry and warped but I think that’s the technology…
Here’s a hot melty mess for you. This is Fisherman’s Wharf in SF with precached scenery at High level, and PG on. This looks like the aftermath of a massive storm or an explosion
I have this issue. Coming into Chicago from across the lake… the city POPS in and looks melty… I have 80MBPS internet… I am not sure how that is too slow! It looks fine directly over the city, but not from a bit away. Same happens with trees and neighbourhoods. They are not rendering.
If you’re good close but messy in the distance, try cranking up the LOD. You can go way beyond 200 by following the guides here in the forums. But be ready to melt your cpu what bothers me more is that it looks usuallly bad even up close.
