I’m running an AMD 5950X with 128GB of ram, a 4080 in the x16 PCIe slot closest to the CPU, a 4k monitor, and gigabit internet, with fast.com consistently reporting a maxed out network connection. I have rolling cache turned off. I have my graphics setting set to ultra. I’ve turned off DLSS and frame generation to rule out any “NVidia is ruining the party” factors. And yet, photogrammetry looks like a molten hellscape.
New York, Vancouver, London, it doesn’t matter, everything looks like it was rendered using the LoveCraftEngine, with windows looking like they were drawn on with wax on a hot day, bridges with solid in-fill underneath them, and buildings that look like they’re made of an in-progress voxel blender render.
Why have you turned the cache off? Regardless of how fast your internet connection is, the servers that serve out the PG and other data cannot match that speed.
The cache is there so that your PC doesn’t need to constantly re-read from the internet (which is many times slower than reading from a local SSD)
If you think about it quite simply, even streaming a 4k movie uses a cache, so why would this be any different?
Tbh, PG isn’t great at the best of times, and I personally found the Canadian areas particularly poor, but regardless, the cache should be on (although it can need deleting and recreating on some occasions).
I have a I7 9700k and RTX 2070 Super and 1TB NvMe and 64GB DDR4 2133 and 5-600 Mbps and upgraded monitor 27 inch 1080 to 32 inch 4k … mostly ultra settings and nVidia DLDSR 2.5 and DLSS quality and get 35-55 fps … have extensively fooled around with all these settings on Las Vegas, Phoenix, LA, Vancouver, NYC, SF, Seattle, Paris, Sydney, London, etc … from what I can tell, this wavy post-apocalyptic appearance of buildings is probably related to the photogrammetry data ….
BTW, very nice freeware add-on bridges for Vancouver at flightsim.to …
There are a number of very detailed guides on-line that describe the range of visual effects of each setting and the FPS costs of each …
how does that solve solid bridges, or melting windows? They’re still solid, and still melting. The photogrammetry is not to make things look good “if you’re far enough away”, literally the whole point was to make it look good, period, with every “look at how awesome this is” promo material showing urban flybies with buildings that looked normal, not like hot wax in a kiln.
If you’re going to fly around at 100ft then autogen will look much better. If you fly at 1500ft then pg will look a lot better and importantly a lot more accurate. You choose in the sim settings which you prefer.
Your current expectations are too high for current consumer flightsim technology, nothing is currently available to meet them.
PG really struggles with structures that are not solid, such as bridges and cranes, and with odd shaped especially concave surfaces. It often struggles with glass surfaces, especially all glass buildings. It also never looks good very close up because of the resolution of the data to begin with.
If you want nice looking bridges up close you will have to get hand crafted ones, many of which are available in freeware or payware scenery. Same for cranes, dock yards, many skyscrapers etc.
I was going to say this setting as well, but figured 1,000ft AGL would suffice. Lol
Sarcasm aside, photogrametry is not photorealistic. Of course the promo material is going to look perfect, because they only showcase the best areas. I don’t remember any specific promo off hand, but I’m willing to bet there was no imagery of places like London, which has some of the worst. Or if they did, it wasn’t very close up unless they were showcasing a hand crafted landmark with careful camera angles to avoid the post-apocalyptic areas being in view.
It’s unfortunate, but you’ll need to lower your expectations or maybe seek out some of the third party scenery mentioned above. Photogrametry is nowhere near capable of turning this into street level realism, but it’s still a huge improvement over past sims in how the world at large looks.
They say the solid under-bridges, tree size, density, placement and a number of other things will be fixed in 2024 … Bijan 4 Seasons does help tree variation quite a bit …
With my limited computer knowledge, concerning the answer about the cache. My limited understanding was Cache had nothing to do with PG. They are separate things. The cache is just the default downloaded sim incase you have a internet blackout. The same as when you manually cache an area, it just downloads to what ever detail you set. So assume ultra in the high detail location. When I experimented with a PG city Little Rock and then no PG but High detail manual cache they looked totally different. I never worked it out past that.
That’s pretty ridiculous, we figured out distance based rendering kind of a long time ago, why would I need to go into my settings to turn PG off just because I’m getting closer to landing in a PG city during the day? Unless you intentionally want to ruin immersion of course, then this is great.
Absolutely not. My expectations based on the system specs are entirely reasonable, and the fact that apparently this game (which isn’t 3 years old, but only a few weeks, because of the continuous update cycle) can’t do what even 2020 tech should reasonably have been able to do is extremely weird.
Here’s hoping. At least the add-ons should all still work.
Do you really understand PG? It is not about the capability of YOUR computer what is possible with PG.
Switching between PG based buildings and autogen based on distance would break immersion because PG is based on real 2D data and autogen is based on what the engine would expect what building could be there so you would see a switching between actual buildings in flight.
I would like to see where PG performs better in a SW that costs ±100€
I would agree that your problem is based on too high expectations and not understanding that the PG limitation is not a problem of your personal setup.
Your expectations are too high. Simple as that. You may think they are not, that is why you asked these questions here. But don’t believe everything you think.
Heaven forbid dude wants what AAA games have been able to do for decades (i.e. just render buildings and windows with straight lines instead of like molten wax), requiring a level of graphics programming that every current AAA game vastly exceeds already. (and remember, this game is a first party Microsoft property. The company that’s going around not just making AAA games but buying entire AAA shops).
The idea that these are “too high expectations” is Stockholm Syndrome, and mocking wanting to see a render engine produce straight lines with PG on is downright silly. Maybe you got it in your head that this is what things are supposed to look like. If so, I’m sorry to hear that, but they’re really not, and not asking for better is settling for far less than your system is capable of, the graphics community is capable of, and what Asobo and Microsoft are capable of.
So yeah: hopefully they actually implemented a better render engine for MSFS2024, this one’s not up to the task.
OP clearly doesn’t understand what photogrammetry is if he says AAA games have been doing it for decades. Tell us which AAA games have hundreds of complete cities rendered in 3D with the real buildings, I’m curious.
There’s a huge difference between a regular game where everything is hand crafted over a limited space and using automated systems to render much of the real world. It would be impossible to hand craft the world and push the game out in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable price, so they are using technology to help the process. It’s not perfect, and anyone that understands how marketing works knows not to expect the perfection you see in the promo material in all cases.
There is no setting you can change to “fix” this. This is how the servers are sending that data to you, and it’s would require more technology improvements on the back end to get better results. It’s not Stockholm Syndrome, it’s knowing the limitations of the system.
If I were you I would read up on what PG/TIN is, how it works, and once you have understood that you will understand what multiple people are trying to tell you. Right now you don’t seem to understand the fundamental difference between a PG building, and an autogen one. When you do, all will become clear.
