Can I ask what the GPS coordinates are of both your sample pictures (and maybe the heading of the runway(s) relative to the GPS coordinates). I’d like to “fly” there myself (actually respawn in midair) and see how the runways you both are referencing look with my settings and follow RexShockViper’s advice to improve my settings if need be. You guys are probably both experts compared to me but if you never bother with GPS settings, here’s the (obvious) way I get them from the sim. Terrain mesh in mountain areas - #21 by JALxml
Increasing terrain level of detail should also help,
Yeah sure that’s EDDS, runway 25C, 6:00 PM, Distance to POI 3.5NM, height no idea.
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Thanks. I’ll give it try and see how your suggestion work for me. Your pictures look great!
No what I was saying is with AF at x16, changing to the texture SS has no visible effect on the runway at that distance, you probably have to be in the runway to notice any difference.
I’m not at my PC at the moment but the coordinates from Google maps is approximately 18.104623,-63.068082. That’s off of runway 12 from TFFG. Not sure what my altitude was, probably no more than 1000ft, time was approximately midday.
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Thanks, no rush. I’ll give it a try. The main benefit is for me! Hope to learn some good stuff from you folks and the other people who have commented on your thread. I had Lens Flare and Depth of Field both on. Depth of Field is the opposite of what it sounds, I think. Intended to give a Bokeh effect (focus fades away to either side, near and far of object in focus). Think turning both of those off improved the overall focus of my view of the Frankfort/Main runway although I think TheOriginalBabu stated in his guide that there really isn’t any difference between Depth of Field being ON or OFF.
I thought DoF was only for use on the drone camera where you have DoF control?
Here’s an attempt to generate an Frankfort/Main 25C runway view roughly equivalent to RexShockViper’s - he’s a little bit more to the NNW and at a somewhat higher altitude but we are probably about the same linear direct distance from the runways - and some of his pix are even closer.
I think the main resolution thing is just being able to user higher video settings 2560x1440 for me vs. 1920x1080. I have 1.78x more pixels resolution.
The picture was generated by reloading an .FLT file saved at that flight position, clicking Ready To Fly, immediately invoking Pause On (bound to “p” key for me) and then screen capturing. So I can take the same picture in the very same spot again and again and I can Esc key to the Options menu, General to change the graphics settings if I want to without having to restart the flight (reloading an old .FLT file has no effect on current graphics settings).
I used Ultra settings with V-Sync OFF. I upped Texture Supersampling from the Ultra setting of 6x6 to 8x8 and I tried all three Nvidia 3D global settings: 1) Let the 3D application decide, 2) Use the Advanced 3D Image Settings, and 3) Use my preference emphasizing: Quality. To change the Nvidia driver settings in the Nvidia control app, I exited MSFS each time, made the settings changes and restarted MSFS and reloaded the .FLT file to put my plane back at the same spot in the air.
Since I resaved my .PNG screen capture as a 1/6th the size .JPG to avoid a large file upload the uploaded picture is not quite as sharp as it was in uploaded screen capture.
2560x1440 res, Ultra Setting except Depth of Field and Lens Flare both OFF
Anisotropic Filtering 16x, Texture Supersampling 8x8
Use my preference emphasizing: Quality
Click on the picture to expand it to its full size.
P.S. Besides my higher video resolution, I might be further accidentally cheating by being more to the SSE and catching more of an angle with the setting sun and thus greater reflective contrast off buildings and the runways, etc.
It’s actually angle rather than distance which causes this effect. It should be less noticeable with a steeper glide slope, but I appreciate that’s not any sort of solution.
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You might be right. I haven’t seen any good overall explanation of what the heck Depth of Field in Graphics Settings Options means relative to the camera applet itself, which has its own commands and key/controller bindings for controlling depth of field. So I wasn’t sure where DoF in the graphics settings applied to External and Showcase cameras.
Perhaps the problem is that there were a detailed set of instructions given out bit by bit for everything on the Alpha Tech Insider Preview but no one ever got around to really writing a comprehensive cross-referenced indexed manual with Table of Contents thrown in, too. Instead we have the GA release and people are busy writing bitwise GA release guides one-by-one with no great long views of the forest or the paths that go between different parts of the forest, e.g. DoF in graphics settings and DoF in the camera applet, etc.
I tried turning both Lens Flare and Depth of Field Off in graphics settings and I thought turning off each made some difference so I turned them both off together. My drone camera DoF is disabled. At the very worst, just to be safe, I didn’t think it could hurt to turn the graphics DoF off, too, so I did so. I have a wee problem deciding what’s sharpest visually since as a 74-yearold, I wear extremely graduated bifocals and the slightest up-and-down head motion changes the sharpness of what I see.
In looking over the DoF for the drone camera, I also see that F1, F2, F3, F4 can control drone camera DoF settings. But I’m perplexed since F1, F2, F3 on my keyboard right now control throttle settings!? Where is the long view for the relationship of those settings if MS hopes to attract newbies like me. Maybe someone from X-Plane or FSX understands straight away how to keep the cats and dogs in their own bailiwicks, e.g., I assign throttle bindings to a throttle control, then the drone camera can be free and easy with F1 thru F4?
I don’t need an explanation of any of this stuff right now. I’m just pointing out that I think for MSFS, a coherent, integrated guide: “Here’s how you see the whole forest and appreciate the relationship of all the trees in the forest” is really missing - or why do we not understand why some runways look very blurry and what needs to be done to fix it. I guess the fact that we’re looking forward to a patch that will actually make sure everyone has a straightforward and stable installation of the product more than two weeks after it was released says something about where things are at.
TLDR, we need better manuals that explain how everything relates and explain how to fix common problems that users are likely to encounter flying the world.
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Binding aircraft controls to the same keys as the Drone camera controls doesn’t really matter because all the aircraft controls are disabled in Drone camera. But I’ve deleted a lot of the aircraft control from my keyboard that are on my controllers just to simplify things and reduce the number of things I have to use Ctrl and Alt for.
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Here’s a picture I took from roughly the equivalent position from the airfield as you did. It has the same settings as the picture I posted of the Frankfurt airfield. I am perhaps a little farther out to sea than where you took the picture as I am using an External Quickview Camera rather than a drone camera or anything positioned near the plane. Perhaps a lot of the difference is just the 1.78x more pixels in a 2560x1440 view so if your computer could support it, maybe running at a higher resolution would give you the easiest best results?
Click to see full size screen capture.
Here’s just the runway and foreground houses in lossless .PNG format
Here’s the GPS position and altitude that the plane was at:
I discovered that the .FLT file is just a text file and can be edited, resaved, and reused. I initially flew to this position at 7:21 am but since your picture was taken around noon, I just edited the time to 12:01 pm local time, reloaded the edited copy of the .FLT file and BINGO! I imagine the same could be done for GPS position and altitude. If you’d like the text of the .FLT file that contains that information to put your plane in a similar position at will let me know.
I described in the following post something that’s probably already pretty well known by folks who aren’t newbies like me: how to save your mid-air position in a flight (useful for documenting where a picture was taken) and find the exact position, altitude, and time of day when you reload the resulting .FLT file.
I think I discovered and duplicated why the picture is fuzzy. My surmise is that the fuzziness arises mainly from the zoom level of the drone camera (if that’s what you were using) and doesn’t have all that much to do with the sim graphics settings (although if you were running at a higher resolution, the screen capture at the zoom level taken would not be as fuzzy).
Thanks for inspiring me to learn (a little bit) of how to use the drone camera and giving me some pointers. I will definitely pair my Xbox One controller with the computer to better fly the drone.
Here’s my ~equivalent picture to the pix in your OP post with the drone camera settings showing. You can see my picture became pretty fuzzy, too, at the zoom level I had to use to take the picture. I didn’t mess around with focusing - I’ll try that next and if it makes a difference, I’ll replace the fuzzy picture with a better one if focusing can generate it.
I tried to recreate the same drone view of the runway with drone AutoFocus enabled and just for good luck, 100% focus. Doesn’t seem to make much difference in the fuzziness of the runway when zoomed in, this time to 93% max zoom vs. 92% before.
But that’s why we all need 4K monitors and better graphics cards - so when we decide to zoom in with the drone camera to get a cool telephoto distance foreshortening (the thing that brings the moon in close in dramatic pictures!), we can enjoy the effect at much better resolution!
That’s about the same as I’m getting, note how the quality drops going along the runway.
But it’s just a shame that the runway is treated like the ground texture, having it’s quality reduce quite quickly with distance and not like the building which keep their sharpness at a lot longer distance.
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I think if you look closely more pixels from 2560 x 1440 does make a difference. Look at “your” cars to the left of the airport main building (left of runway). “My” cars are much more detailed. Same with buildings at sea’s edge and details in unpaved land around and in front of the runway. I thought the cars in the AutoFocus 100% pix and the buildings might be a bit sharper than the AutoFocus Disabled but I think it’s my bifocals! 
I guess the autogeneration for buidlings and runways could have different algorithms that handle scaling differently. Perhaps if you think it’s a bug or an oversight, it merits a report to Zendesk (and a fix 3 yrs later?!). It might be interesting if you feel particularly persuasive to find someone who has an RTX 2080 Ti and a 4K monitor to try to produce a similar picture from an even higher resolution setup. If a 4K setup picture looked just as fuzzy zoomed in, that might be even stronger reason for the developers to scratch their heads over what might be done to fix it.
The ultimate resolution that one can zoom to and have any relation to reality has got to be related to the quality of the underlying satellite/aerial data or whatever. Maybe for some reason (dirt on the runway, tire skid marks, worn-out paint??, the quality of the runway data isn’t as good as the building data (really stretching it here!) and the AI is less enthusiastic about making up smaller details for the runway vs other stuff?
Yes more pixels helps but your runway looks blurry, similar to mine. Note that pictures is with AF x8 and terrain LOD at 100 before I upped them both.