This is a possibility for us to discuss the issues raised in the BUG REPORT. (Please vote)
This BUG REPORT was opened by me on January 12th. The issues with LOD, PG, low resolution ground textures and slow loading in general has not been fixed, and not even addressed by Asobo.
The sim has been severely degraded over the past many months, and it’s a huge issue and should be addressed ASAP.
Many people have added great evidence with screenshots and great descriptions of the issues that are now destroying this once beautiful sim. - Unfortunately many comments on the original report has been removed, since it is not a place for discussion. - This topic is.
ORIGINAL POST:
The in-game LOD sliders no longer have the same beautiful results as they used to. I have since introduction been using LOD400 with great results both visually and performance wise.
Now i have had to lower LOD to 200 to have ANY chance of a smooth experience. Ground textures will look good at times, but they have most def. lost their crispness all over the world.
The terrain LOD with regards to both buildings and not to mention the NIGHT LIGHTING. Geez!
I understand that for a VFR prop flight staying below 6000ft, it all looks great! But for us who like to fly jets at 36000ft, it looks absolutely terrible. The night lighting LOD and building LOD has to be extended by at least 3x.
PRECACHE. My precache is at ultra but at any and all airports, looking in one direction and the back will continuously introduce and remove objects which leads to stuttering.
Can we not have more sliders on PC for Terrain LOD/Night lighting, and or an option for DYNAMIC LOD with regards to altitude?
LOD 200 well lucky you i cant even have mine much above 100 without severe frame drop so be grateful and at 36,000 what is it you really want to see?
what i have noticed though is some airports are rendering high quality buildings at severe distances Freeware Gatwick for instance creator admitted a lot of his buildings have no LOD’s thisis causing huge stuttering’s when approaching even 60 nm away
What is a good, working LOD with a 5600X + 3060 Ti on 2560 x 1440 in TAA (or DLSS-DLAA). I can hardly see the runway or the terrain in front of the aircraft as it is now. Is runway object lod or terrain lod? Not sure what to set. Also, since the quality seem to go up and down, its hard to really now how it should look, if you know what I mean… =P
Asobo needs to do some proper multithreading, maybe then we can push LOD.
but even at LOD400 there are spikes and deformities.
Would be great to have some dynamic LOD like nanite or the one in the DX12 ultimate stack.
Is “Game Mode” in any way involved in how terrain is loaded somehow? Sometimes it gives me smoother genral gameplay and sometimes…well, Im not sure… Whats the latest opinion of Game Mode on a modern computer? On? Off? (a bit OT, but hey…there could be a connection maybe).
Pre SU5 you could fly with the highest details (you probably remember), and with the LOD giving you photogrammetry/autogen to the horizon keeping 30fps solid. Servers, optimization, multithreading, and dx12… send it Asobo
Also after SU7 when they fixed issues from SU5. SU10 was good, SU11 (40th anniversary) was great, until they released the 2 hotfixes. Ever since then it’s been getting worse and worse.
I suppose what I mean is how would you quantify it. You say what you see isn’t good enough, but what do you expect to see? Are you merely referring to texture quality, or ground clutter in the form of trees, and buildings?
The sim looked absolutely stunning until SU5. SU5 greatly reduced LOD to allow the XBOX to operate running MSFS.
They fixed the issues with SU7 and it’s been up and down since then.
When i say it’s now unacceptable, is when the state of the game, and the experience you get changes day to day. This happens even though i don’t change anything on my system.
Since the 2 hotfixes for SU11 the ground textures changes between looking okay to good to extremely bad. The PG quality has been severely downgraded worldwide, and in many places it looks like everything is melting.
I don’t think that is true. I don’t think its gotten any better or worse. When you are up close to it, even if you have a slower broadband connection, the PG will eventually load to the best there is available.
To that end London looks no better or worse than it ever did. But if you are talking about how PG looks when you are zooming in to it from a long way away, you have to accept that this is LOD at work, and it will not look good when zoomed in to it as that is just how LOD works i.e. a lower level of detail when further away. If you are expecting it to look just as good really far away, and zoomed in, as it does when it is close by, then you have only one LOD level, and that defeats the purpose of it.
For you to quantitatively state that PG looks worse now than it did, you would need to provide evidence of this. I have videos on my YT of London PG. I don’t remember how far back they are, maybe last year some time, but I really don’t see them as any worse now than back then.
My final thought on this matter is that zooming in at PG that’s really far away, seeing the tiny triangular buildings, then claiming the PG is busted is kind of missing the point of how LOD works. I would agree that these lower resolution buildings could be presented better, like a reduced complexity model that still appears as rectangular shape rather than pyramid.
Difficult to say without an image to compare it to. A good way to do that is to pause the sim, fire up the drone camera, take a shot, now move the camera down towards the point in the centre of the frame, and see if you can detect additional autogen appearing and/or the terrain imagery improve. OLOD should affect autogen I believe, rather than TLOD.
I would agree that in general terms the sim has taken a hit from both SU5, and SU7. I’m sure that are enough of us out there, like me, that have footage of the sim as it was during the month of release, and the ongoing months, who would agree that cloud variation, for example, was better back then.
I have noticed a general reduction in performance, and where I was at one time able to run 500/500, while in the air at least, then having to back that off to 400/200, and now having to further reduce that to 300/200, that I would agree is an issue. I even tried out LOD 1000 as a test, and was able to zoom in to see trees being generated on the far size of Heathrow while I was over London City. I haven’t repeated that since to see what it looks like now, and how it performs.
One thing I would add about that image is I didn’t see a marked difference between the imagery at the top of the image, and at the bottom i.e. the furthest, and the closest. Which might indicate they are all at the same LOD, so presumably already their lowest?
I see phrases like this a lot, and I don’t aim this at you specifically, as I’ve seen it from many other people, in bug reports for instance:
bad quality ground textures
For that to mean anything, you would need to supply an example of what you would consider acceptable, or even good.
Pointing at something, and saying “This is bad!” without explaining why, or producing an example of something that is good, doesn’t help. Trying to avoid a circular argument if at all possible would help an investigation.
That’s why I have repeatedly asking of someone saying “This PG is bad”, the question “So what is good?” is often ignored. You need to have that comparator to make that kind of statement have meaning.
And with very few exceptions, the images that should “bad PG” are zoomed in on objects extremely far away, and when you reduce the zoom back to what ever the standard zoom would be, those objects are only a few pixels high. So why would you ever render those at the best level of detail? It’s just wasting resources.
I did, and I only found one set of images where you provided both a good, and bad example. Al the others were images from different angles, or just two bad images without providing an example of a good one.
In that first image you can see the red lines appear blurry at first, then sharpen up. I don’t think this was you moving the camera around, but the ground textures loading in the higher LOD.
It’s unlikely that these were the same LOD level. To maintain performance levels, the LOD has to drop off at higher altitudes. It’s unrealistic to expect it not to. The degree to which it drops is open to discussion though.
