TERRIBLE LOD is destroying a potentially great sim

After testing yesterday I have noticed that this LOD thing is more an issue in third-person view. Which makes sense to have nerfed, cause CTD’s in my experience happen more often when switching to exterior view.. Still just feel they have overdone it. The contrast is excessive and cockpit views are not immune to it either.

https://www.xbox.com/play/media/5FHNW957SB

I wanted to show you guys and the Devs that the LOD issues in this game are real. See how the textures on the mountain pop off detail and pop back in with the details as I fly away from it and towards it.

Is busy cities especially you have to be almost right I on top of an object to see the full LOD and the moment you fly just 50-100 metres away from it, you’ll seethe polygons popping off making the object look more simplistic and 2d. I never ever remember noticing such anomalies in SU10 or past builds.

What are they doing with flight simulator on Xbox??

Is it going to go back to the visual fidelity it arrived with on Xbox launch day and the smoothness and fps consistency of SU10 or not?

In this second video, you can see the details on the runway and around it pop off as I take the drone higher and then pop back in as I hover back to the ground.

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Saba, and in general rocky shores, has always been bad, but this one is just terrible. I’m still waiting for a devs reply, but I’m sure they will repeat that “the LOD issue has been fixed”. Are you sure???

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Hello @sickboy771752,

There was a very specific LOD bug introduced in SU11 that caused the Xbox console to inadvertently render MSFS in a low-detail mode even in cases where it wasn’t necessary to protect against poor framerates. This bug was fixed with the release of AAU1.

What I’m seeing in @SpeedDemon996’s video above appears to be normal behavior. When you are further away from an object, the graphics engine deliberately renders it at a lower level of detail (LOD). In certain circumstances this can cause a brief “pop in” effect when you reach the transition point where the engine switches the model from one level of detail to the other. This is by design and how MSFS works on PC too. In fact, almost all 3D PC/console games going back several decades work this way.

Based on comments from Xbox players during the AAU1 beta, developers from Asobo analyzed the graphics engine to confirm the SU11 LOD issue was resolved and it is now working as intended. We are continuing to monitor player feedback in this thread very closely.

Thanks,
MSFS Team

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Thank you!

Is this “protection” against poor framerates still active? Because since the release build is Live i notice very, very poor framerates on the ground, especially on handcrafted and 3rd party airports. Almost as if it doesn’t kick in anymore. The beta builds were a lot better for framerates, is my observation.

Not only that, the amount of black screens and CTD’s are increasing as well.

That is interesting.

Are you saying you’ve been seeing a steady increase in the frequency of these issues since AAU1 released?

The departures from 3rd party airports are “solved”, so to say. Except from the poor framerates. These were causing a lot of issues in the past, as we all know. It’s the arrivals on 3rd party airports that are causing problems as of late. This past week I had 2 cases of black screens followed by CTD’s when arriving at such airports. This didn’t happened from a pretty long time.

It could be just coincidence and bad luck, but it’s worth asking? I don’t know if it’s related.

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I have no insider knowledge, but I always understood that third party airports are always rendered at the quality that the creator made them. That’s why during the LOD problems of SU11 the airports were unaffected. If the game can willy nilly decrease the quality of add-ons, you would think it would have an impact on the sales of those add-ons.

Also explains why big or unoptimized third party airports always crash. The area around can only decrease so much to compensate.

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If that’s true, then that’s a real bad situation. Big 3rd party airports shouldn’t even be allowed on the Marketplace for Xbox then if they always crash :joy:

Oh my it’s bad after this update. The servers must be hammered at the moment.. Anyone else dealing with this? Kinda hope it’s just my connection, even though there’s not any indications of that :upside_down_face:



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It’s not working as intended, sorry. I don’t remember seeing this level of pop in and out with SU10 or past builds.

Also, the performance seems to be fluctuating wildly in busy cities. When are we getting back smooth and stutter-free SU10 level performance on Xbox?

It is what it is. Appreciate the prompt response though.

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I agree . I was hoping that the beta might help but it has made no difference ( as expected because msfs think this issue is cured ) . I certainly don’t remember the popin being this bad in the glorious days of SU10 it really ruins the immersion of the game.
The night lighting that slowly turns on in blocks in cities is another low but can’t seem to find anything on that .
The peaks and troughs of this game can be quite frustrating

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Anyway, I’m pretty sensitive about framerate issues, and I confirm I don’t see any stuttering at all. Over big cities, in big airports (even 3rd party airports), everything runs smoothly. I can see fps drops just with some type of clouds, in 787 cockpit when taking off from big airports and in Guimbal cockpit in detailed sceneries (I suppose the problem is the rotor or some glass reflection). What does it mean? Even in this case the game behaves erratically…

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According to the official reply, it seems that LOD works as intended. Is it worse than before? Sure. Is it a toll we have to pay in the name of stability? Don’t know… At least I don’t see CTDs anymore (just one in weeks, and I play a lot) or bad stuttering. For sure I’d like a better looking game, but now I can complete every single flight.

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of course it is but the point is that we are now not very far to have a very nice simulator on what our console can handle including addons airports and more detailed airplanes.

A litlle improvement still has to be done to set it perfect in my opinion .

3 points for me :

more sharpness and visibility at high altitude

more realistic AI planes . they are just awfull

Black screens on avionics

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This is an interesting point.

I am not convinced the LOD scaling was ever working properly until AAU1. And this lead to a LOT of CTDs especially when flying near 3rd party airports and whatnot.

I do think we may just be experiencing the sim working as intended for the first time. And when things slow down, the LOD now drops to maintain 30 FPS.

This is just my theory at this point, and I cannot yet confirm it to be true.

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I am in shock that the light issue at night has not been tackled, or mentioned on here??? Squares of lights loaded in, then next to that a complete black square, then after a second or so it loads in a wave like fashion

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Los Angeles in particular is bad!!! The rendering/lod issue on Xbox is bad. Houses loading in less than a mile away from you, very poor

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Why did it downgrade from SU10?? That was perfect on Series X

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