So, i’ve been given a time out for 3 days after some rant i did while being really annoyed by how things have gone after su5. I’ve said some bad words, behaved like a child. While i still agree with me being angry (
) i also understand that this is no accetable behaviour. So sorry for that.
I must say, not being on this forum for 3 days and actually use the sim without looking for things to complain about, gave me some positive insight why su5 might not be so bad after all. I mean, it’s still prety horrible in some aspects like the culling, stuttering while panning and weird colorbanding in the clouds. Oh and don’t forget the way too shiny water surfaces with horrible screenspace reflections (we need raytracing for this). And don’t even start about the floatplanes water rudder not doing anything than just being animated. Clicking sensitive trim also bothers me.
BUT. the thing is. I believe, that the new optimization features (mostly the culling) offer possibilitys for future graphical improvements wich will result in higher lod’s and better quality photogrammetry.
I mean… Performance wise, it has taken a huge leap. At this moment, this comes with a huge cost in quality. Especially noticable in large photogrammetry cities where sometimes large parts of the city take a few frames to load back in view while panning around. This causes the popups and also introducea stutters while looking around.
However, i honestly think this culling can be adjusted to be less agressive and make better use of available ram/vram on higher end systems. Wich would make it possible to load larger parts around the view area to reduce popups and improve smoothness. For example: now i get 80fps while not looking around, but as soon as i look to the left it drops to maybe 40 or 50 fps for a few seconds till everything is loaded back into the screen. This causes major stuttering on my end and prety much destroys the wonderfull 80fps experience i was getting a few seconds earlier.
But when using more of the available recources of higher end components (in comparison with xbox) fps should be more stable.
I’ve used the user.cfg adjustments to increase lod’s on both the terrain and objects. But i didn’t notice much more ram usage. Also it seems to make pop ins even worse because it has to load even more data in the same time when looking around. The culling method just doesn’t seem optimized to acomplisch even an lod of 200 in some areas.
I hope this is just a start of a new & better foundation to build on. It might be a complete mess as it is now to the fact that they just had to push it to make the xbox release deadline.
This doesn’t take away the fact that i kinda feel like i’ve been funding an xbox game and being used as a guineapig to create this big money making buisness model.
But there’s always the possibility that asobo indeed is willing to keep improving this game and will continue working on a way to make the pc version the sim we all wanted from the beginning. And in my opinion, the performance increases that su5 brought ous, are just a glimpse of the capabilitys we now have, to make the game run and look better then ever before.
Now let’s just hope it’s not gonna take another year before this mess is all cleaned up and actual improvements are being made.