TERRIBLE LOD is destroying a potentially great sim! (DISCUSSION)

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The usual theory put forward is that these measures have been taken to protect the performance on the XBox, even though a lot of people have PC’s that can handle more than we currently, and even if they didn’t there are settings that can be tweaked to improve performance.

Visual fidelity of clouds is a hot topic on that front. These ideas are aggressively denied, but when I look back at videos I shot back in 2020, things seemed smoother back then, than they were in some cases now.

The amazing thing to me is that back then I was running an Intel 9900K with an Nivida 1080. Nothing special at all, and I was simply amazed that I could run 1080p, at Ultra, with 400/400 hacked via the config file. And it was smooth! All the more shocking since I had just come from years of X-Plane.

Then SU5 came along, and the sim was a stuttering mess. They had messed around with offscreen terrain caching for the XBox, and destroyed the PC version in the process. A little while later they added the option to change that terrain caching, and that improved things no end, but even at Ultra its not the same as it was. I can turn my head about in the cockpit, and see cars appear, and disappear, and this with me on the ground.

Many things have improved over the last few years, and XP12 has been a huge boost for me as I have a 24GB 3090 now. But quite a few things have been lost along the way as well.

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I dont get it then in one post you say nothing much changed then another oh yes it did. you even now confirm the performance was better with better graphics after saying the hardware does not yet exist. when someone flip flops like that you never know where you stand with them or if you can trust what they say.

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Its situational I think. That, and I tend to nit pick peoples arguments. I hate it when people use hyperbole to bolster an argument, and I will focus in on that. Picking holes in someone’s argument.

I don’t disagree with the idea, but I will often take issue with what is provided as “evidence”, and how it is presented.

A single image is not evidence. A single image that you point at and go “Look! Look what they did!” without actually highlighting in the image where the issue is, is not evidence.

You have to present you case the best you can, and I rarely see that.

When I post images highlighting an issue, I will mark clearly in that image what I am focusing on, where one’s attention should be directed. Waving your arms about at an image helps no-one as you aren’t describing where the problem lies.

And where possible I will post one image with the issue, and one without, to make the issue more obvious.

One example like I posted was illustrating where the LOD issue is taken to extremes, complaining about the quality of scenery when its about 20-30 miles away, and zooming in on it to complain about PG quality, for example. It’s so far away that at normal zoom levels it can’t even be seen as its a few pixels high. Is that an issue? No, not to me. I accept that the LOD level at that distance is lower because I know what the alternative is: lower peformance.

I’d rather have higher performance to enjoy the things I can see, than accept lower performance because of things I can’t even see clearly are being rendered at their highest detail level.

If anyone on PC wants to play around with this. override the GUI LOD settings, and relaunch the sim. I haven’t done this for a while so I am assuming this still works. Set the TLOD to something like 500 or even higher, and see what improvements it makes. Feel free to post dev-mode FPS settings before, and after. Out in the country it may not make a huge difference, but try the same thing near cities, and even worse PG ones.

I’ll redo a comparison I did of London a while back, where I showed fully zoomed in views up to LOD 1000, and post the results here. You don’t get as much as you would think, and what you do get can’t even be seen with the naked eye. :slight_smile:

IIRC zoomed all the way in you could make out buildings at the far side of Heathrow, and a sparse smatter of trees, when sitting above London City. I will post my comparison shots here. At the moment I run 300/200 because of performance issues in larger PG cities like London, and that is a nice compromise. I haven’t revisited that in ages so this will be a good test of whether things have improved or degraded in the mean time.

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53

it’s a darn good thing it’s not all about you then or i guess we’d be in trouble!

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Wrong because I had both great performance and graphics/LOD on Xbox series X before the most recent WU. I had zero complaints about performance or graphics and the sim was a dream. And that was with many add-on airports and runway textures, etc.

All I want is it to go back to the way it was.

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You should have seen it before SU5 then. Joking aside, I don’t see any difference on my sim because of the WU.

Here’s something for you to try in that case. Uninstall the last WU, and see if it improves things for you. I’m betting it won’t.

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Hi, I have a very powerful computer so in 2D (I mainly fly on VR) I can have the settings very high, but I can see a circle of trees around the the plane. They cut off at a certain distance even though I have the LOD settings all the way up, therefore there is room to improve LOD settings for this area alone. The more time goes by the more users upgrade to better hardware, the more users will see LOD problems.

Thank You.

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I’ve noticed a downgrade in the overall quality of the graphics, (on PC) whilst not changing my settings since i began playing over a year ago. It’s disappointing, and i wish i hadn’t invested as much money as i have into extra planes due to this.

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Shot do you have both LOD sliders set to?

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To achieve highest possible LOD for trees you need to set both terrian-lod at 400 and TREE setting at ULTRA.

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21.8KM is maximum. Maybe they can increase that distance becasue there is minimal impact of FPS.

Maximum distance. t-lod at 400 and trees at ultra

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Minimum distance T-lod at 400 and trees at low

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I agree, I have noticed the same thing, overall visual quality seems to be less.
Another thing I have noticed, with the exact same settings on my Win10 and Win11 SSD, same computer, same everything except the OS, I notice the visual display is BETTER with Win10. Makes no sense to me but that is what my eyes are telling me.
…
Maybe they are trying to up the FPS for the lower end computers because they announced a minimum requirement for running MSFS and I suppose they have to stick to it until another “Major” release is made.

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Shouldn’t that only affect lowest settings?

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Well, if one had the highest visual settings and things were not so good and the computing power needed was lowered by the porgram then one might expect better FPS’s…

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Look at this:

This shows that it has nothing to do with our computers. - I have an RTX3070 and New york looks horrible on my system. About a year or a year and a half ago it looked stunning.
Even with a 4090 this guy is experiencing exactly what i am. - I think it looks absolutely horrible with the PG loading in and out in patches right in front of the plane. Horrible.

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Agreed. It would be nice to hear from Asobo on why the sim has regressed in this area. The suggestion from some is that its to accommodate Xbox but I’m not sure i’ve heard that from them.

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It looks like different LOD levels being loaded as you get nearer to them. I wonder if the same effect would happen if you were to fly backwards with the drone camera. Ideally the LOD level would change at a distance where it is not as noticeable.

Did they state in the video what they have their TLOD/OLOD set to? I skimmed the video, and I don’t think they showed the lower pane of the graphics settings.

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This is a comparable video I shot 11 months ago. I don’t remember my LOD levels, but I would guess either 400/200 or 300/200.

I’d be happy to re-fly that to see what it looks like now.

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I’ll add my 2 cents. If you are going for realism, the question would then be about the atmospheric dropoff of terrain details (haziness, smog, size of details, etc.) and whether it looks realistic. Perry’s test was a good one. Take a photo and compare it to the same location in the sim. How far away can you see a tree or a barn? Set your TLOD accordingly, and fly that way for a week because I find realism and immersion can’t be judged with a quick flight. For me, the terrain looks fake below 3000ft, so I pretty much ignore it until I get up there. This way the majority of the flight is fully immersive.

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I’ve seen that type of haze before, which works really well when there are lots of rolling hills ahead. You can just make out the ones in the distance, and the ones before it gradually come into view. This isn’t a fog-like affect, but atmospheric particulates.

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Yeah it was MUCH better.

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