To this day I’m still not able to understand what texture resolution affects, if only cockpit textures or even also ground, scenery textures quality
I did see a post two years old though no other precise infos
My understanding is that it affects 3D modeled objects - e.g. aircraft (interiors & exteriors) and scenery objects found in the various packages in your …\Official\OneStore and Community folders. Ground textures are not affected by this setting as the ground is not a 3D model.
(If I’m wrong, will someone please chime-in & say so!)
From the SDK Documentation (v0.24.3.0):
Reviewing Texture Quality And Memory Usage
When reviewing the texture quality in Microsoft Flight Simulator, it is important to be aware that the in-game graphics settings can affect this. The highest quality settings are meant for users with a top tier GPU, which typically have 8GB+ of GPU memory. The lowest quality settings are meant for users with a low-tier GPU, which could have as little as 2GB of GPU memory.
Microsoft Flight Simulator will automatically reduce the texture resolution of textures loaded into memory based on these in-game texture quality settings. This saves on the texture memory used for those with less GPU memory available, but will result in a more “blurry” display when viewing up close. The table below describes how the texture quality level modifies the texture dimensions:
| Quality | Albedo | Others |
|---|---|---|
| ultra | 1x | 1x |
| high | 1x | 0.5x |
| med | 0.5x | 0.5x |
| low | 0.5x | 0.25x |
A typical texture budgets for aircraft (including cockpits) is between 150MB for small aircraft and 600MB for large aircraft. Since the *.DDS format is a GPU-ready format, the size of the textures on disk is more or less what the game will be using in texture memory. Thus, the texture memory used by your add-ons can easily be determined by looking at the package output’s texture folders.
I hope this helps answer your question! 
6 Likes
“others” refers to the PBR textures correct?
this should be exposed in sim tooltip, because it’s an easy way to conserve VRAM if only the PBR texture quality is being dropped going to high
2 Likes
Does this mean, the texture resolution option does not affect *.DDS files?
Hi @argonox ,
First, the SDK referenced in my post was for 2020. I’ve not delved into the 2024 SDK to see if there have been any changes w.r.t. Texture Quality And Memory Usage.
As I read it, DDS files are included in the the texture resolution option, but I’m not a model builder, nor am I an expert on the SDK (I just quoted the document) , so really someone who is more knowledgeable in this area needs to chime in here.