Terrain Pop-in NOT fixed after World Update 6

Melting mountain is definately an issue after WU6.

Well I am back flying my around world trip, and yes making those changes will indeed help. I’m at 4.5/5 respectively. I did see some lists of things that got broke and things that really need fixing, but I’m odds with the process as they seem to take two steps forward and one step back, It’s like whatever they do, they’re their own worst enemy, with some but no all saying "i give up, it’s a deep dark whole to which there is no end " may very well be right


PACO572

Morphing did not start happening after the Xbox release, it‘s been there since launch and got worse with the US update back in December. It is particularly visible in areas with a high-res DEM. It‘s got nothing to do with the Xbox. Terrain morphing was already a problem in FSX and P3D. Nothing new. But rather annoying, I agree.

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I would prefer to have a solution for us all and not only for the high-end crowd.

It’s not for the high end crowd. Where did you get that idea? Have you actually tried it?

The performance benefits of SU5 were disproportionally weighted in favour of lower end systems, so they gained the most.

It seems you’re hell bent on disagreeing with anything I write, irrespective of what it is. C’est la Vie.

If we have a slider, the best quality will be obtainable only by those, who have the rigs to handle it.

Im having the same issues, however it seems like maybe this varies a lot by location, i could be wrong.

Well, I’m not having the popup problem so, maybe your settings or other stuff is causing these issues?

Ah the classic “I’m not having issues so it must be your fault”
 you do have the issues but fortunately for you, you do not notice them. Go fly around the mountains and you’ll see the pop in.

You still don’t understand the difference.
A pop in mountain would be a lot more obvious than the morphing due to LOD change :joy:

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You’re way too fixated on the terminology. Sim Update 5 made the morphing significantly worse and is unacceptable regardless of the term you want to label it.

If you love to confuse other users


Let’s mark this as solution
 When the SU-5 came, this was an old issue already. The first (real) “mountain pop ins” came with the Nordic update. Like in this video. Difference is
 back then it was mountain tops warping. They put in a repair for that before .

Now, it is buildings and ground texture decompression and (RAM) memory limits. But I don’t see altitude bugs anymore in the mountains. I was very glad they solved that. With GA aircraft you don’t want to fly somewhere mountain tops are popped in while you approach !! :grimacing:

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I think that’s just it
 in order to accommodate the wide range of hardware this sim may be run upon, they have implemented graphics (and other) option sliders and enum selections so you can tune the sim to a level that you like that also balances with what your hardware can handle. High-end rigs can handle more, so why not allow the sliders to go higher to utilize that extra available horsepower.

My guess is that they had to implement a lower level of terrain (and object) LoD to make the sim work on lower to mid-range hardware. The compromise is that you can’t have high levels of detail loaded into precious VRAM that doesn’t exist on said lower to mid-range hardware. The result is that terrain morphs (and object pop-ins) at closer distances with the LoD settings being lower.

They (presumably Asobo) tried to mitigate some of this by implementing the culling of memory that was introduced at X-Box release time. This however, had the unfortunate (and intended) side effect of textures and objects being thrown out when they were not in view and thus had to be re-loaded when the view changed. It really sucks when you have TrackIR or a Tobii eye tracker.

The “hack” fix for it now is to go into the UserCfg.opt file and manually increase LoD values above the 2.000000 limit set by the sim’s GUI. The higher you go with these LoD values, the more VRAM is used. Someone did an experiment on this going all the way to 9 on the terrain LoD and showed that in fact the VRAM increased with increased LoD values:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/lod-at-9-22-5-gb-of-vram-usage-on-3090/451104

If they allow a higher limit for this slider in the GUI, everyone would be free to tweak it to their heart’s content to find the sweet spot for acceptable FPS vs visuals that their hardware can handle. The sim can’t add VRAM to your system, it can only try to optimize how it uses the available VRAM. And IMHO, they’ve done a pretty good job at this optimization in the latest release.

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Yup. It’s been around for quite a while. SU5 did make it worse though because of the lowering of draw distances and messing with LOD settings.

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I don’t want to trade the ultra settings I have now for increased LOD. I cannot have usercfg LOD higher than 3 without huge performance losses.

Sounds like you’ve made your choice then. Nobody here can make that choice for you. It’s a compromise. You can look at it this way


Only so many apples will fit in a basket. If you want to carry more apples, get a different basket. If you want different apples, you have to get rid of some that are already in your basket.

Or, we can hope that Asobo makes a better basket. My guess is that they don’t have much more headroom to optimize the basket to hold more apples.

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I don’t believe it did, it morphs in the same now as it did pre-su5, as above the ORBX NZ Mesh method is great and Asobo, for whatever reason, don’t use this method in their mountain rendering which is a shame.

I’m don’t really notice the ‘popping’ in mountains generally but I do notice they look much better close up than a mild distance away.

But to be honest I don’t think either video looks all that great. I’ve always thought the mountains look just OK in MSFS but going to X-Plane with some good ortho or mesh and it’s night and day. Not perfect in XP still but the draw distance is that so it still looks much better for far more distances.

Would love to see an increase in the LOD level from further away.

I don’t think the slider is the only possible solution.