Separate terrain level of detail / draw distance sliders

My suggestion takes into account all of the developers publicly available discussions on it, thanks.

You’re welcome.

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I’m glad you agree it looks out of place, to this day there are still people who think the terrain morphing is not an issue…

Although it is indeed a custom 3D model, an observation I’ve made is that, unlike trees and buildings, POIs do actually sit on the underlying terrain mesh. If you watch the above video carefully, at approximately 0:03 and then again at 0:07, you can see the stock terrain of the main rock morphing to a new shape before the 3D rock models are applied.

The reason POIs are popping up and down as you approach them is precisely because of the terrain morphing. I’ve documented this with videos for both the Preikestolen and the White Cliffs of Dover in the morphing thread. But in the end certain areas, like Lord Howe island, suffer the same even without POIs on top, and I find that Norway (after the Nordics World Update) is the worst offender in general.

To answer your other question, increasing Terrain LOD does help with the morphing somewhat, because it is moved further away from the camera. This is the mainly the reason I would like to see LOD extended beyond 400 in the menu (but only if photogrammetry is not affected), yet in some extreme cases, like those I’ve already pointed out, it will not really help no matter how much LOD is brute-forced, and areas with high-detail mesh like Switzerland will still morph even when the camera is very close. But this is related to poor shape retention which is more suitable for the morphing thread.

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I believe providing these extra settings mentioned on the topic are going to help us with maintaining better frames and visual fidelity. It will also avoid that confusion about what affects what.

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Just happened to be watching this video and heard something that I thought was rather interesting:
According to the video XBOX Series S operates two settings dynamically:
Terrain LOD and Object LOD which vary dynamically between 25 to 50. 17:35 time stamp
If it is true that XBOX Series S has dynamic settings, then surely it must be possible on PC?

Steam Deck vs Next-Gen Gaming: Ray Tracing/Flight Simulator/Unreal Engine 5 + More Tested! - YouTube

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Thanks for bringing this up OP!
One of the most important things for me when it comes to visual quality, is the sharpness/quality of ground textures.

I don’t need ultra sharp rendered trees 30NMs far away from my plane, but having sharp ground textures at all flight levels, would improve the image quality to another level!

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I’m learning a LOT from reading these, thanks ! :nerd_face:

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Does anyone know about what is actually going on with the recent hotfix/patch and effect on the “great MSFS brain” to greatly increase FPS and decrease stutters (though I still have to keep TLOD on the low end), seemingly without quality decrease (I use nVidia DLDSR 2.25 also), ie the mechanics of it. It seems to have worked very well. I just want to understand better what they do to remove some of the CPU bottleneck/overload, what things are affected in positive or negative ways. I often compare the SDK performance box, RTSS/MSI, and GPU-Z numbers. I have a good, medium spec system and it has run great for about 2/3 of the 20 months - I7 9700K, RTX 2070 Super, 64 GB 2133 DDR4, ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 4S, NVME 1 TB, 27 inch 1080 display).

Did I detect a little bit of “irritability” in yesterday’s developer conference ?

DAYTIME: (look closely at detail sattelite textures, it’s sharper in distance as well…)

LOD50

LOD100

LOD150

LOD200

LOD300

LOD400

NIGHTTIME (Even night lights draw distance are linked to this slider…)

LOD50

LOD100

LOD150

LOD200

LOD300

LOD400

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Much of the bottleneck seems to be related to network streaming. I’ve had days where my MainThread was being hammered in a particular photogrammetry area, but then the next day not. I’m pretty sure I had the rolling cache disabled too.

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need more votes :slight_smile:

I’ve pretty much lost all hope in this cause…

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There’s absolutely no reason why ground texture quality, that is the LOD for it should be linked to the LOD for the 3D models, the positioning of all that stuff is not dependant on the quality of the ground images on our end, they will be placed in the same spots regardless. That’s a joke, why would you bundle the quality of textures, something that doesn’t impact performance much, only really RAM, with something else that hits the CPU probably the hardest, why would any good developer think that was a good design?

So, we have to choose between crushing our FPS and having good textures near the camera, or much better FPS and terrible textures right next to us, good job again Asobo, separate these things now please.

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Is there an online source where I can monitor number of users and maybe by country, or XBox and PC users over time, or graphs ?

Wow, that is interesting. Actually, very interesting.

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Sorry… I’m not sure.

I created a example mockup picture which partially demonstrates the suggestion:

(bigger image uploaded to first post)

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This is really good!
I missed this topic.

Voted. Will make optimising much easier and i could remove those ugly pg buildings in the distance and replace them with default buildings instead?

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Thanks!

That’s a great idea, but I don’t know whether they can do it. If not, there might be odd gaps in the buildings if the photogrammetry distance was much shorter than the autogen buildings distance.

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I agree, thought about that after inwrote it :rofl: Anyway, really good seggestion of changes in the settings :slight_smile:

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Some games use a “fizzle fade” technique that helps reduce the “popping” of objects and terrain at different LOD levels. Perhaps that’s something Asobo could implement.

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