Yep, definately something up with London PG…
4 Likes
April 1st;-)
There is so much confusion, and in my opinion it comes from a poor description of what the settings do.
Does anybody actually know which settings does what?
From my own research it seems like Terrain LOD doesnt really have anything to do with LOD (Level of detail), but rather has something to do with overall draw distance (PG, autogen, trees ++).
And it seems like the Trees setting has to do with the density, quality as well as the drawdistance of trees (within the overall terrain LOD).
Likewise it seems like the Buildings setting has to do with the Quality as well as drawdistance of autogen buildings (within the overall terrain LOD).
Objects LOD I actually have no idea what it controls, and in what way.
I also have no idea what controls the quality of PG.
And also what controls the quality and drawdistance of the bing imagery? (I have a feeling its lumped in under terrain LOD, which would be weird as it is a texture load).
Note to Asobo/MS-
I would suggest reworking/renaming the names and/or descriptions of the current graphic settings as they seem to be confusing and maybe even misguiding. At least maybe have some better explanations of what the settings does.
1 Like
It’s both. Level of detail of distant objects. The higher the setting the further it will render but the detail will be a lot lower obviously
UK PG is awful compared to everywhere else. End of story. Nothing to do with any settings we can control from our side. Japan, USA, AUS, Germany and Iberia all look great on my modest rig even with only 150 terrain LOD. The UK cities are grainy, melty messes in comparison. London and Bristol are the worst i’ve seen in the sim.
6 Likes
Is that the official explanation? 
or where is that from?
Hi, can you link the source material please
The point about not needing to go above 100% (assuming a LOD of 200 = 100%) is incorrect in my opinion.
It is demonstrably better at 400 than it is at 200. It also improves the photogrammetry a bit.
The issue I have is that the UK stuff, whilst never great, was never as bad as it is now. Something has happened that has meant the streaming of UK photogrammetry isn’t working as it should. When the UK update was released I never saw these melted triangles, and that was on a 40mbps connection instead of the 1GB connection I have now.
1 Like
OK so I did some testing: (all other settings on HIGH/ULTRA. 500mbps internet. No rolling cache. No manual cache.)
Terrain LOD seems to affect the overall draw distance of everything, and more spesifically the ground elevation data, PG quality(range) and possibly bing imagery quailty(?).
Sidenote: Theres buildings up close that changes quality only when you get to 400LOD - which is worrying. You can see the quality-“rings” shift further out as the LOD increases. I worry these have been “tuned” too much a while back (the closest high quality ring is just at that warehouse building to the right at 400! LOD).
Here is where I am a little bit confused. It seems like Objects LOD affects the quality(range) of handmade custom mesh objects in the scene (example the boat and some of the buildings, but not the PG).
Buildings seems to affect the quality/complexity(range) of autogen buildings, and their draw distance.
Trees seems to affect mainly the density and draw distance of trees.
There seems to be no difference what so ever betwen OFF and ULTRA in this portion of the UK.
12 Likes
the USA is still OK as it hasnt been given the ‘treatment’ yet.
I expect that at some point there will be an scenery ‘update’ for USA.
I am getting the strong impression that between the time the Simulator was launched and now, there have been some technical changes along the way. Probably changes in how scenery is compiled and created.
If all goes perfectly, it may possibly look better. Certainly the mountains in Spain look a lot better than some in USA.
But on the other hand, flying over USA seems to be more problem free with better performance.
Just my impression.
1 Like
Im curious if the melted PG issues is just bad/slow servers, or actually bad/poor data.
The Bristol PG is really quite bad and it also doesn’t blend well with the surrounding autogen at all, you’ll see houses half done in the melted PG and then half of them as autogen. I prefer to just to turn it off when flying around my home city.
2 Likes
It really seems like servers, as I don’t always get melted scenery, especially if I switch systems.
I think some of the PG like Bristol is just really bad source data. I’ve never seen it not melted like crazy.
4 Likes
I think this thread has TWO related conversations going on.
-
Broken, melted UK photogrammetry
-
Sub par UK photogrammetry
The former seems to be a server issue.
3 Likes
Really interesting videos there. It’s amazing how the TerrainLOD changes the quality of photogrammetry. The others work as I would expect but the Terrain Vector thing is interesting. That’s definitely one of those settings that I have no clue as to it’s purpose.
Maybe I’m clueless on this too and there’s a logical answer but I’ve always wondered…. given how much data FS purportedly has to stream, why does Task Manager show my internet connection as all but dormant when the sim is running? I would have expected it to be constantly downloading information at a reasonable speed, yet generally the usage is kbps, not even mbps. It doesn’t make sense to me. Everything looks just fine, but it really isn’t a lot of information that is being downloaded.
@WellREDBarron Absolutely. The UK PG has never been up to the standard of the USA, but it was passable. Right now it’s a hot mess…it is unquestionably worse now than it was after WU3.
2 Likes
I think there is a logical answer.
MS throttles their servers. This allows more people to use one server at the same time and then, MS doesn’t need to buy exponentially more servers.
Years on Xbox never getting download speeds like I get on some other websites and services.
MSFS doesn’t need as much data at any given time as people might suspect. And much of the initial data download happens as you load your flight. The rest just comes in packets. So it doesn’t exactly need lightning fast speeds, so throttling a server in the best cases has no noticeable impact on the consumer.
Now, let me delve into a less plausible theory I like. I think there are a disproportionately large amount of UK simmers, and MS might simply need to allocate more servers for the region to keep up with demand.
This won’t fix the photogrammetry looking a little worse than other areas, but it should stop the melting.
Otherwise, I suspect the UK data got corrupted somewhere along the way, and that would need a fix by Asobo/MS… but I think a misallocation of servers to keep up with demand is more likely.
2 Likes
The areas around “the middle” in your screen shot look horrible after 10-15 minutes. Did you include the picture to show how bad the buildings look after 10-15 minutes or to show that they look “really good” after that much time? How much time do you have to spend flying around the city to see the improvement you mention?
In my view photogrammetry never looks as good as “ordinary” autogen in terms of texture crispness or building geometry. It is a tradeoff between those things versus being able to identify individual real-world buildings. If you think they look horrible I will not disagree with you.
My point was that in my subjective opinion they do not look significantly worse than photogrammetry elsewhere as a response to various comments here and elsewhere that Vienna photogrammetry is unusually bad just like UK photogrammetry.
The main point I wanted to make is that I get similar end results from photogrammetry everywhere I have looked, but it takes a different amount of time in different locations to go from its initial “melted triangle apocalyptic mess” to its final state.
I think it took 5 - 10 minutes or maybe a little longer before it had reached its final state, but that was not a scientific measurement.
1 Like