I do the same, that make sure the cpu can keep up with the work that needs to be done before rendering process and we get most out of the hardware 
But we always need to tune the settings. If we use a more complex aircraft we need to tune it for that. Or if we use more traffic we need to tune it for that.
With new beta update yesterday this is the worst visual degradation Iāve ever seen on XBox re LOD and blurred textures - a total regression in NY area which looked amazing at the beginning of the year - back to the dark days of Oct/Nov 22. Micro stutters, black screen and a few CTD when spawning in air in the Cirrus. The latter could be due to an SamScene update but NY area looks awful right now.
Originally, we would modify the LOD in usercfg.opt in order to get settings above 200. Now, you can go all the way up to 400 in the Simās Graphics settings, so the only reason to set tLOD in the cfg file is to get levels above 400, which is extreme. That means that itās still possible to set LOD in that cfg file but, for the vast majority of users, no longer necessary.
EKCH PG test at tlod 400 ultra settings 50 zoom
EKCH test at tlod 400 ultra settings 100 zoom
EKCH no PG lod test at tlod 400 ultra preset 50 zoom
EKCH no PG lod test at tlod 400 ultra preset 100 zoom
You are wrong.
Everyone who says this is my faultā¦
The best example is that i have the same hardware now that i had when the game came out.
Itās been a rollercoaster ride of upās and downs.
It used to look and run great! now it stutters and everything is spawning in patches.
Compare MSFS to any other game/sim and it is terrible.
Show me where this happens in my video above (post 65)? ā¦ and before you say itās only 1440p I can repeat it in 4k TAA albeit at a sub 30 framerate (the limits of my hardware). Fact is that with every update relationships between hardware output changes and that always means a recalibration and to expect it not to would mean nothing could be developed further.
Btw people have a habit of remembering how great their screenshots were when they turned everything max but if at all they could only ever crawl with those settings. Thatās why Iām still waiting for your before video, if you donāt have one just say so.
I have no need to prove anything to you.
Go to the bug report of this post, and you will see peoples uploads.
Iām not interested in people uploads, I just want an explanation why itās a bug when itās patently wrong settings, hardware limitations or both. How is Asobo supposed to fix that except reducing to the lowest denominator for everyone ā¦ thatās only a lose lose situation
This is mainly caused by the water reflections and wave animations which by the way are quite CPU intensive. On the other hand the terrain (or water bodies) are composed of small squares (something around 100x100m each). Each of those squares can potentially have some kind of textures and elevation mesh data, despite you are at sea or lakes areas. Indeed you can see some lakes with bugs where there are steps in the lake basin and water appears elevated when those squares elevation does not match with the one of the nearby squares.
As far as I have seen world in game is a terrain with water animation on top at just few meters from elevation surface and everything is set on a kind of chessboard pattern. You can clearly notice the chessboard pattern when the shadows bug is reproduced and you see how terrain shaders are progressively applied at short distance in front of you as you fly. When you activate developer camera and try to go underground there are a lot of terrain spikes and imperfections on the squares boundaries (most likely caused by the original elevation data) and they are apparently rendered because they are visible while being underground. To go underground you can just place an object in editor and set its altitude below terrain level. Then double click on the object and camera will go underground.
Even if anyone would expect that a flat and empty sea area should allow you to go to TLOD 1000 without any impact this is not the case. TLOD setting basically means overall drawdistance. Buildings have their own additional LOD setting but as described in some post their impact is not that high. What puts stress on the system is the overall TLOD.
Cheers
The obvious solution is to set every connected ocean to a mean level but we all know itās not that simple because of tidal differences, river levels etc.
Okay, so explain why my near identical video does not have the issue you cited in someone elseās video?
Why did I not have those pop ins? I know why I didnāt, and I think you do too but perhaps donāt want to admit that for some reason. You yourself admitted that my drone footage flying towards Manhattan looked fine, and for me it looked just like it did 11 months ago, in my earlier footage. My sim isnāt magical, I just have my LOD settings set higher than yours.
I think if this thread were to be renamed āwhy do we get LOD pop inās when we set the terrain LOD to what is now a medium settingā we might be closer to the truth.
From your own bug report:
We have only one thing to agree on here. 200 is no longer giving the results that it used to, and this is why I donāt have this issue because I use LOD 300. I donāt know for sure what they changed, but LOD400 in the GUI has been around for a long time now, so perhaps its something unrelated to that.
It may be tree related, as I mentioned before, but that too was a while back. Smaller trees necessitates more of them. I donāt think you ever showed your FPS readout, but I suspect you are getting CPU bound. Did you even list your computers specs? Mine are in my profile.
Iād like to see some video footage in that bug thread rather than still images. That would show the issue better than stills, and it would allow others to re-create that flight to show comparable footage.
ItĀ“s not that easy because water has āno real volumeā in game. When a water polygon is set on editor you will see how water is just an animation and texture with reflection which is created over terrain level and textures. To create a water pond for instance you need to reduce terrain elevation to create a hole and then put water on that hole basin. The water level in the pond is managed by the elevation of the water pond hole. Therefore the water polygon does not have a height property as the other polygons in editor have, but just the type of water property. Indeed you can see water animations climbing terrain on the coast or the rivers borders, which should not happen if water had a height value independent from terrain height.
Cheers
Yes, my point with those tests were more to show that the t-lod affect mostly the CPU not the GPU
Most sims, and users, are CPU bound, and this is worst when on the ground due to close proximity to lots of geometry being shown at its highest LOD. Dynamic LOD could assist with this, allowing you to have a much lower LOD when on the ground, because of your altitude. Thereās no point rendering high detailed objects a few miles away that you cannot see. Slowly increase this as you gain altitude, and can see further.
Depends. If we are located at an high altitude like a mountain and we can see long distances while on ground we want higher T-LOD even on ground.
I would say itās no point have high t-lod if we have 5FPS. t-lod should get lower if the we are limited by main thread (cpu)
I also want to point out that dynamic t-lod should always be optional.
Here is my version:
Their image has no trees, the roads look like they are from the offline scenery rather than Bing, canāt really explain that. Perhaps low LOD is not their only issue.
Altitude as in MSL rather than AGL. Though that might make high altitude airports frame heavy as a result.
I see no point to reduce t-lod if we are not limited by main thread near ground. The altitude should not be the thing that sets the t-lod in my opinion
About the visuals of LOD. I think some aspects of drawdistance has got worse while some things has improved. At release we needed to use mods to not see tree popins near aircraft. I feel that the terrain texures has got worse but that may depend where we are flying because the textures quality is not same all over the world. Some textures are new and some are old.
PG i never felt were good. Always been like melted buildings far away or the textures looks really bad when near those buildings. The trees looks really bad and have really bad performance. Test fly right above central park. We get massive gpu load.
About those melted buildings, why even show that low res LOD? Better to add only one lod and increase the draw distance of that highest res LOD if we have hardware that can handle that.
The problem is most people are thread limited on the ground because of airport buildings, other planes etc. Altitude was just one metric, based on visibility, and line of sight. Ideally what you would actually do is not render objects you cannot see at all, or at the very least at a lower LOD. For example, when parked at EGLL, if I use the drone camera to go up, I can see the Millenium Dome. On the ground I cannot physically see it, but it is still drawn. It doesnāt pop into view as the drone comes up. Kind of like ray tracing, if I cannot see it, donāt waste resources drawing it, or if you must, to avoid pop-in, show it at a much lower LOD. Your object LOD settings would determine the range at which the full detail object is shown.
Low LOD buildings, rather PG buildings, could definitely be rendered better. If a building is a rectangular or cube shape, when you reduce itās complexity, keep the corner axes, and donāt reduce it to a pyramid. Itās lowest detail shape should always match its highest detail shape, while still reducing texture quality. Like drawing a bounding box around it.
At its minimum, a building could be defined by just 8 points.
