Tree Draw Distance / LOD Issues

Great News!

At the 53:05 mark they address the LOD issue are looking into it and already have an idea to improve it for us!

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good to know improvements for drawing distance are comming! :heartpulse:

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Pretty awesome video - that has a LOT of info being discussed a lot on these forums!

Learned DX12 wont be a significant performance update and that they are already using multicore a lot and how. They can improve it but it looks like memory optimisations ongoing will help a lot.

We are lucky they are willing to give such golden nuggets :slight_smile:

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The developer answers to the questions asked were very weak for me. Good marketing is all about it ā€¦ I believe the visuals will improve if I see it.

When I was a beta tester, I admired the sight, I was impressed. I admired the landscape in flight, looking at it for hours. After the release of the simulator it only gets worse ā€¦

I look forward to restoring the old sight, detail, wonderful forests, trees, water.

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Certainly not as satisfying.

And the colors look much more comic too.

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Hi,

Iā€™ve finally identified the source of the problem and Iā€™ve discovered a root cause which Iā€™ve Zendesk.

There is valuable information in this discussion but this is all spread out and buried in various posts. This is one of the reason Iā€™ve tried investigating and documenting at least a single problem related to trees and ring distance which I hope will be helping Asobo finding a solution faster.

We also must try getting their attention to the information Iā€™ve disclosed in raising the vote count above their minimum threshold (the 30th in their list is 142 votes and this discussion is only at 50% of this threshold).

Letā€™s help us all: please cast your vote and tell your friends!
LOD Problems - Trees Fix Revisited

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How did you get the TBM door open?

It was possible in the alpha, for some reason it is no longer possible.

Wow the difference is day and night
Honestly the Sim doesnā€™t look beautiful anymore, lower quality textures,Lower LOD , washed out colors , downgraded Night lighting
If it stays this way then im afraid Iā€™ll cancel my Game pass subscription
Had faith in ASOBO but the way they keep downgrading the sim is just unacceptable, however i still hope these are only optimizations for XBOX version and PC can return to its full glory.

I have read a lot of discussions about trees draw distance, and I experience this problem as well. But it is a lot more disturbing for me the distances at which buildings are being drawn, and I have read little about it.

The experience is totally destroyed when flying into a city. In this screenshot (everything on ultra, bing maps data on), while flying into Stockholm, you can see that only the buildings closest are drawn, all the rest of the city is in 2D, and as I fly closer to the airport I see it drawn little by littleā€¦ The only exception with the one building you see in 3D in the distance itā€™s because itā€™s a landmarkā€¦ My internet speed is very high, but in addition I have cached the area manually to be sure, but no difference.

Is the buildings problem also experienced by others, and similar to the trees problem? Is there someone who doesnā€™t experience this problem? Any tips?

Have you tried adjusting the objects level of detail slider and setting buildings to Ultra? For trees the quality also seems to affect the range at which trees are visible. (or maybe not)

Iā€™ve been to Stockholm and it looked like this a couple patches ago (September 6th)

Buildings High, Object detail 100

I fly low to avoid those ugly transitions and 1080p helps obscure it as well, but you can still see the buildings stop. SInce the LOD ranges were adjusted Iā€™ve been flying with terrain detail at 200 (trees ultra) and buildings at 150 (which is for photogrammetry, AI buildings LOD are part of terrain detail) which still doesnā€™t match what it was before.

I tried to replicate your shot

Buildings and Trees on High, Terrain and Object detail at 100

Putting Trees and Buildings on Ultra increases the density

Increasing Terrain and Object detail to 200 indeed increases the LOD range

I tried setting terrain LOD to 4.0 in usercfg.opt

{Terrain
	LoDFactor 4.000000
}

As long as you donā€™t touch the terrain detail slider in the graphics menu, it should stick. Iā€™m going to try to fly around with Terrain detail at 4.0 (400) tomorrow, see if my laptop can handle that.

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Thanks for the detail and write up!!

I agree about the trees on ultra. In a flight today I noticed it too. For buildings, higher settings seem to impact detail at higher altitudes.

One question, you mentioned youā€™re on a laptop. Me too, with good specs (for a laptop). When I crank up my LOD my FPS doesnā€™t change that much, but I get horrendous stutters. So I have to dial back LOD to 125 to keep things smooth. Have you seen this? Any way around it?

I get stutters no matter what. I have 16 GB ram (2667 mhz) and a 26 GB page file on my SSD, using a 1060 with 6 GB ram. Itā€™s memory related. My laptop is cpu limited (2.2 GHZ) until about 150 render scale (screen in 1080p) then becomes gpu limited with higher render scale.

I get less stutters without rolling cache. Less work for the CPU, no updating the cache, and since I fly around the world Iā€™m always flying into new terrain anyway. Stutters have mostly to do with streaming and disk access (to store streamed data) and gets worse when windows has to start paging memory in and out to disk.

Want it stutter free, turn all online options off. It wonā€™t look pretty, but it will run smoothā€¦

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Limit your fps in nvidia control panel. Graphics setting with excellent results in 2560x1440 does wonders for stutters

Thanks for this amazing analysis.

My shot was with everything on ultra, including terrain and object detail at 200. My PC is not powerful enough to run ultra in big cities like NY, but for Stockholm it works fine. My resolution is 1080p. It seems that on mine I am flying slightly lower, so maybe my case is a bit worse (? not sure). But itā€™s comfortable in a way to know that the problem per se is not only mine.

I havenā€™t touched the usercfg.opt file yet, but indeed there is a big improvement from your screenshot when you increase the terrain LoD to 4. I will also try it to see if my PC can handle it in cities like Stockholm that arenā€™t too heavy.

I am not an expert, but from what I have read around, I think it should be possible to optimize this without simply bumping up everything in LoD. I hope they are working on it. It just doesnā€™t make sense that you see some bigger buildings around 2D terrain so often when flying to citiesā€¦

Thank you for sharing these screenshots. If you look closely to the little island about 1/5th from the lower left corner, you can see it is loosing trees when raising LOD from 100 to 200.

This is a bug Iā€™ve documented which is conditionally affecting trees rendering distance depending on the trees species:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/lod-problems-trees-fix-revisited/296923/19

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My experience trying to fly with Terrain LOD at 4.0 (400) was pretty disastrous. At first it starts out all right yet the sim slowly grinds to a halt. After 2 half hour attempts I reverted back to LOD 200 then had another crash trying to use slew mode to get back to where I was. I finally got past the area by flying high over it (instead of at 1500 to 2000 ft above the terrain like I normally do)

I donā€™t know whether that specific area has a problem or whether my laptop was still messed up from the 2 nasty crashes. The first was when I used dev mode to see what the problem was (gpu only 20% utilized, cpu not much higher, < 10 fps) The second had my entire screen turn black for 5 seconds, then windows came back with FS2020 only showing a low res crash screen in the taskbar thumbnail, unresponsive, couldnā€™t switch to it. End task to get rid of it.

Memory, streaming or area related. Iā€™ll let the sim fly that stretch again on its own to see if it gets past it now. After flying high over it I had no further issues, render scale 200, 4K downsampled to 1080p ran fine and stable for the rest of my tour.

Donā€™t mess with the LOD :smiley:

Update, maybe the LOD is fine, it crashed again simply running in the background flying over that area


I donā€™t see anything special there. It was already running slower than usual when I checked. I was on Firefox which also crashed after FS2020 crashed. Some bad mojo near Lumeje (FNLM) coming from Cazombo (FNCZ)

Update 2: When flying slow enough it makes it through (150 knots) yet with a faster plane it does the same (tried it with a business jet, crash after about the same time) the game slows down and crashes. Higher LOD had the same effect. Somewhere the sim starts running behind which gets worse and worse until it crashes.

This mod increases the tree draw distance as far as up to 10 nautical miles, with realistic tree height.

https://www.flightsimulator.blog/2020/12/27/increase-trees-draw-distance/

EDIT: The latest version 1.7 adds all the vegetation (not only the trees) as well and makes some of the too tall trees and jungle palms a bit shorter too.

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This trees fix is much anterior than your ā€œcreationā€ (7th Oct for the first version)ā€¦ so itā€™s not a steal at all I think ! But your spam is one imho.

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What you are doing selling that stuff is a rip off. When others can easily fiddle with the cfg and get the same results. Seriously I would award you for trolling! The best thing to do is not mess with the cfg files something we learnt since ALPHA testing.