Slider to adjust/disable the scenery culling (reduce panning pop-in and stutters)

Agree. Even with SU4, RAM and VRAM usage has been astonishingly low. When I checked my RAM/VRAM utilization, it was usually well below 10GB each (out of 32G/24G) and as such nicely within the specs of most users’ rigs. Therefore I don’t understand why this has been tuned down even more at the price of lower quality. The way I see it, memory usage has not been a problem except with low-end rigs (<16G RAM, <8G VRAM).

I might be wrong but I guess that even some amount of stuttering etc. could be avoided by a proper cacheing of scenery into the usually abundant memory.

Happy about any opinions/objections.

Cheers,
K.

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Yep, including me! Well at least no need for any more threads asking “Is it worth upgrading to 64gb RAM?” :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

As I said I think the LODs at 100-200 are not too bad. I don’t need to see objects futher and further away, I just want nearby objects to be there when I look at them!

I have huge faith in the devs, I just hope the fix is soon.

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I’m fine with LOD 150 as well, but I’d be happy to trade 16 of my 32GB as a popup-blocker.

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Same here!

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@ChaoticSplendid

This is an old post of mine (Sept. 20) which you might find relevant for this topic:

Another big patch. LOD still terrible compared with pre Alpha 1.6.x, which looked perfect - #99 by CptLucky8


Let’s try to recap and please feel free to correct me.
A few posts above is mentioning there are 2 different but related problems.

Autogen LOD

Synthetic buildings and vegetation made from a collection of generic 3D objects.

  • Building and Vegetation settings set the object details ranges (more or less complex representation of the same objects aka LOD).

  • Building and Vegetation settings set the distance rings where the different object LOD are displaying.

Problems:

Below a certain distance to the outermost ring, objects used to fade-in, now they seem to pop-up instead. This is mitigated because they are displaying over their footprint picture found in the aerial ground texture displaying underneath.

Photogrammetry LOD

Realistic buildings and vegetation made from textured mesh based on aerial photography of the real objects.

  • Building and vegetation textured mesh has different LOD built-in.

  • Lowest resolution LOD is displaying the farthest, then increasing resolution LOD are fading-in in place as the view is getting closer.

  • Terrain LOD setting set the distance rings where the different textured mesh LOD are displaying.

Problems:

Below a certain distance to the outermost ring, textured mesh is popping in over the flat aerial ground texture. The LOD rings are smaller than pre-release therefore the lowest detailed mesh LOD is displaying too close. It is often referred to as “melted buildings”.

Ground Texture LOD

Realistic ground texture made from aerial photography.

  • Lowest resolution texture is displaying the farthest, then increasing resolution is popping up over as the view is getting closer.

  • Terrain LOD setting set the distance rings where the different texture resolutions are displaying.

Problems:

The LOD rings are smaller than pre-release therefore the lowest texture resolution is displaying too close. It is often referred to as “blurry ground texture seen at altitude” and wrongly attributed to network bandwidth.

Analysis

There is a single setting, Terrain LOD, which is affecting both ground textures and photogrammetry LOD, which makes sense when you’re considering the outermost ring where photogrammetry and ground texture meet must share a similar resolution.

The LOD distances (v1.8.3 and v1.9.3) are trading off distance for performance but they are adjusted to render objects at 1:1 zoom view in 4K (both photogrammetry and ground textures). At this zoom level and in 4K, photogrammetry mesh and ground textures are displaying just the right amount of details to fill enough pixels on the screen for their respective projected surface size.

In short, the renderer is dropping some resolution and details which are imperceptible to the eye under a given viewing condition (zoom 1:1, distance to objects). It is similar to JPEG compression which is displaying similar picture quality to the original at 1:1, but it is showing compression artefacts when zooming in.

What’s wrong

The LOD ring sizes have been reduced since pre-release and this is affecting mostly photogrammetry and ground texture. Photogrammetry and textures were popping in with previous versions but it was less noticeable because it was happening farther away.

Because LOD ring distances are now closer:

  • Ground texture quickly drops resolution when viewed from not so high an altitude.

  • The simulator is displaying too low resolution texture too close to the aircraft and this is especially visible when flying over non-photogrammetry areas.

  • You can’t zoom-in otherwise you’re viewing magnified lower resolution mesh and textures.

A few solutions

  • Revert LOD ring distances to pre-release values.

  • Decouple photogrammetry and ground texture LOD with 2 sliders instead of 1 so that each user can balance performance/details depending on hardware and preference.

  • If FS2020 ships with same setting levels for both PC and Xbox, add a “Extreme” setting just for PC restoring the previous LOD.

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@ChaoticSplendid

In another post:
Discussion: December 10th, 2020 Development Update - #28 by CptLucky8

Having both ground texture resolution and object distance controlled with a single Terrain LOD setting is a problem too. In effect, many are reducing Terrain LOD in order to reduce the number of objects (buildings, trees, photogrammetry) in the distance and save fps, but in doing so it is also reducing ground texture resolution too quickly and makes the ground appearing too fuzzy too close to the aircraft. Therefore, it would probably be beneficial you do offer 2 sliders: one for ground texture and another one for ground objects, instead of binding the two in a single Terrain LOD slider.

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And another one (Oct 2020):

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/an-open-letter-regarding-quality-of-service-l-o-d-consolidated-vote-1024/304589/13?u=cptlucky8

Regarding Trees LOD, the problem doesn’t lie in streaming more or less content, rather, there is a bug since the last 2 versions at least with is causing trees to disappearing where they shouldn’t. This bug might be a consequence of a change in draw distance introduced to gain more fps, a change which could have been partially implemented to some of the code, missing a few other places where it was expected too, which in turn is causing Trees LOD distance mismatches between settings and rendering.

Texture LOD is another problem again not related to streaming data because the simulator is already streaming the higher quality textures. The issue is that the LOD rings around the aircraft are too tight and are degrading the texture resolution used for rendering as a consequence.

Photogrammetry LOD is directly affected the same way as Texture LOD: rings are too tight and too close.

Building LOD seems ok but there is another bug I’ve documented in one of my posts linked above. In short, buildings are lego bricks the shape of which are based on actual footprint seen from sat photos. However windows and decoration is based on algorithms. Combining the two you get convincing buildings for a region but the code is actually displaying lego bricks and decoration with different LOD values which makes the simulator displaying plain color bricks at a distance which is distracting. There is also a bug there, similar to the trees bug, where some of the buildings are still displaying their windows in the middle of a forest of window-less lego bricks.

This sums up my discoveries and knowledge of the problem so far.

Something to consider: in my opinion, besides the LOD bugs I’ve documented, I’m finding the simulator LOD are designed for a 1:1 zoom or less. When using default external view with its default distance/zoom to the aircraft, the trees are fading in just in time when they are covering enough pixels above the same-colour ground texture, so that they are becoming discernable. It is roughly the same for ground textures. However I believe this is wrong because even in 4K and let alone 1K, there is still not enough pixels compared to what our eyes can discern in real life. This is why, besides just enjoying the view, some of us do zoom in the view to spot some details and this is where the problem is exacerbated. I’d tend to say terrain, tree, texture, buildings and photogrammetry LOD rings should be based on a minimum zoom factor of 2:1 to make it much better.

Of course many things I’ve posted above are becoming maybe too old and irrelevant, but it looks to me the same problems persist over time, and maybe one way to addressing everyone’s concerns is simply:

Possible solutions: add separate LOD sliders for each of these elements. In the current implementation, Trees LOD for example is controlling complexity and distance. Terrain LOD is then a multiplicand to Trees LOD.

It would be better to have Terrain Texture LOD, Trees LOD, Buildings LOD, Photogrammetry LOD as 4 independent sliders only controlling the draw distance (how close and tight the rings are).

Then each one should also have a Quality setting (LOW, MED, HIGH, ULTRA) controlling the complexity of the items only.

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Thanks! Even if old, it seems to me that many of these observations are still very much relevant today. We really need more sliders for finer visual control, and it seems it’s finally getting started with the planned tree draw distance slider. Hopefully they’ll follow suit with more of them.

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I’ll try this… Thanks

Well, I’m not really sure if @CptLucky8’s observations from back then apply here. Maybe it’s really been a bug shortly after release, but what if it’s an architectural decision now to make the game Xbox compliant?!

It looks to me that this happened intentionally—hopefully I’m wrong on this one. I’m about to assemble my gazillion-bucks ultra-high performance PC and don’t want to see it rendering the same quality I currently get with my four year old rig… :sweat_smile:

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@TheMacallan1605
I believe unfortunately most are still prevalent and valid.

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The culling was definitely intentional in order to improve performance on PC and make the simulator fit on the Xbox, but maybe the visual side effects were not intended. After all, they said repeatedly that there would be no visual degradation with these optimisations, and while they could have simply underestimated most people’s tolerance towards these pop-in artifacts, considering how obvious they can be I find that somewhat hard to believe.

We really need to see where they stand regarding this panning redraw (hopefully soon), and we should continue to push for improvements to all these old, but still relevant LOD issues CptLucky8 has been documenting in great detail.

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This wishlist item is quickly ascending the list of wishes, already more than enough to be featured on the next feedback snapshot.

Didnt expect it to grow this fast!

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Indeed! After the first day I was thinking it could take three or four weeks to reach the required ~300 votes, so this was quite unexpected.

Jayne said that she will try to get a response from the developers as soon as possible about these visual side effects, so either way we should have some idea of what they plan to do next week!

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Wasn’t it in the most recent interview with Jorg and Seb, where Seb talked specifically about the LOD issue for trees, and that they fixed that issue? In his presentation, none of the culling was noticeable if I remember correctly.

Sometimes I’m really not sure anymore if they’re intentionally trying to fool us or if they’re getting confused themselves…

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That is a nice thing about the various Q&A sessions and interviews they have: Listening to them over a number of sessions I have a really hard time thinking they are intentionally trying to mislead anyone. I don’t believe it.

To me it makes sense they had a LOD draw distance issue that was related to latitude that they fixed, and then they applied the scenery culling solution on top of that fix.

I even agree that they have not “dumbed down” the sim to fit Xbox limitations - but they have done some clever optimizations to prioritize performance over visuals, the scenery culling being one of them. I am sure they spent a lot of effort on that optimization, so calling it “dumbing down” is not fair IMHO.

But I would like to see a different tradeoff, and it seems many users agree, which is why this proposal to have a slider to adjust or disable the scenery culling is an excellent idea.

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Some hope at the end of the tunnel , looks like they are aware now.

read the last comment

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You are correct, I think it may have to do with the fact that the trees seem to be loading in more quickly than other assets (like photogrammetry tiles), and also the panning speed was extremely slow.

Sometimes though they do show us some things that just look completely different to what we’re getting. They were showing the terrain grid system with wireframe enabled in an earlier Q&A, and there was none of the morphing that’s been plaguing the simulator for a long while. So bizarre.

Completely agree. I think some people forgot that tons of PC users have been asking for better performance since launch, and the amount of those who kept calling the engine “unoptimised garbage” because it was CPU-, RAM- and I/O-bound wasn’t small.

The culling was necessary to improve performance, especially on low-end systems, but maybe the implementation is not as good as it can be. It is fairly common in AAA games, even Flight Simulator X had it, but usually there’s little to no panning redraw and no frame drops. I’m very interested in hearing more from the developers regarding this implementation, what could be done to further improve it, and whether a slider as described in this request could be delivered.

Yep, Jayne also said in other threads that she’s aware it’s a big deal, and she will try to bring us some information from the developers since it will be a while until the next Q&A.

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That actually makes sense, since SU5 I can mostly see buildings on the distance, houses (that are smaller on screen size) does not render until I get closer.

In SU4 it didn’t have that effect.

I think 5% is way too much, it would be great if we had the possiblity to tune these values ourselves, plus a separate value for the actual terrain texture draw distance. Right now they seem to be tied, yet I’d be kinda okay with keeping the current 3D object LOD rules but have a much higher terrain texture radius…

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They really should give us expanded graphic settings to PC users, so we all can decide what quality and what fps quantity we want on our system. They will never satisfy all of us with a fast food meal.

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