I literally did this with San Antonio above, as did many others. You can ignore it, but it’s there.
I didn’t personally notice LOD differences until this latest build, and this is even ignoring worsening pop-in for LOD too, especially at night.
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Screenshots do a poor job communicating what goes on visually.
What I see much more now is the terrain detail changing in quality at a closer distance than before. This is far more apparent while the sim is in motion, because you see it happening, which is jarring, I tried to illustrate this with two screenshots where I marked up the textures in hillsides. Again, screenshots do a poor job illustrating the abruptness of the texture change as the aircraft moves forward.
I posted one looking out the cockpit window of the A320neo at a KSFO gate and the trucks have poor texture detail just a few meters away. I know they had higher quality texture detail before.
I posted a screenshot of elongated spike/pyramid buildings on approach to KPHX.
None of these were zoomed or using any other sort of method to illustrate my point — they were just looking out the window of the aircraft from the cockpit.
I loaded into the Velocopter at S50 Auburn Municipal just SE of KSEA. I wanted to fly into Seattle and see what the helicopter experience might be like for this pending release version. Looking out the window from where it spawned me the entire terrain and buildings are a psychadelic melted mess. They continued to be so as I flew away from the airport. Downtown Seattle looked very poor and The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle is a POI and it was a melted blob — even at a distance, so I tried to get closer to make sense of what I was seeing.
Yes, yes, I know that the sim struggles with low altitude detail, I am fully aware of that fact, but this is far worse than what I’ve seen in the past. I flew the Velocopter, when it was released, all over my small semi-rural town and it looked nothing like this. The buildings were defined and there was minimal melty weirdness with objects. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but it was not like those screenshots, at all.
There is a thread here regarding melted buildings where the solution for the OP’s issues was to increase LOD to solve the melting. It got me thinking that the current Xbox LOD setting is, therefore, probably responsible for the melted state of these terrain/buildings around Seattle. I don’t know, though, since I can’t see the actual settings they’ve given us.
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Thank you. Really appreciate your efforts in making me understanding the issue.
By looking very closely at your screenshots, I definitely see what we are talking about. My question to you is, is this really so much worse than it was during the last SU’s, 8,9 and 10? As far as I can tell, those issues were always present. I recognize those melted buildings all too good, for me personally it has always been this way since I began playing this Sim on Xbox, which is from the start.
And again, I admit that I am perhaps a bit biased, because i only fly airliners. I don’t do low level VFR. So probably I don’t notice it too much. I understand that for folks who fly VFR on a much regular basis, it’s much more noticeable.
But during my days with the current beta build, it didn’t bothered me at all. Those screenshots I posted, that’s what I was experiencing and it was fine.
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I also fly airliners often and noticed the drop in LOD immediately upon takeoff and approach without needing to zoom in. It’s different from melted photogrammetry data, as the buildings load in fine when you get very close but revert back to the lowest LOD pretty quickly if you move away.
This is San Antonio coming into KSAT about 4 miles away at 4000 feet, no zoom. @NixonRedgrave is spot on.
The optimistic thought is they can improve LOD a bit to balance things without compromising our improved stability.
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This is what I hope for as well. My only concern is that they improve the LOD a bit too much, and we lose the much improved and much needed stability. I don’t ask for much, only for not having nervous breakdowns when loading a 3rd party airport.
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We had a go around, you and I, a bit further back in this discussion (I have no issues with you United and value your contributions here to the discussion — I hope that isn’t lost in translation. Text can be difficult to interpret tone from). During that, I tried to explain that, yes, we have had a low LOD for awhile with Xbox, but that given how low it was to begin with any further reduction is all the more noticeable.
Look at it this way, if high-end PC users are running an LOD setting of 400, then dropping that to 350 isn’t going to be as drastic as, say, someone running LOD at 100 and dropping it to 25.
Now, all this is probably gibberish since we Xbox users don’t have these settings to play with in order to really see the differences. However, I can definitely tell you that on my PC, I can really see major changes in detail — both Terrain LOD and Object LOD, for which there are sliders for each — as I alter the settings. On PC, the minimum value is 25 and, I think (I deleted the sim off my PC, so I can’t check) the Max is currently 200. At one point I understand it was 400 or maybe that is a setting you have to do manually by editing the user.cfg file. Anyhow, there are radical differences in visual fidelity as you alter those LOD settings. Below 100 seems to be a critical value where the changes start to become very clear. The trucks at KSFO, for example, look poorly as they would on my PC if I dropped Object LOD to a minimal value.
At the lower end of these settings, it is really noticeable as you incrementally increase the value. It is in this low range that we are clearly set to.
In short, yes, the Xbox has suffered from a lower LOD, but, as such, reducing it further (as it appears to have been done) is all the more noticeable, because it was so low to begin with.
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Spot on. Then, I see only one solution. Give us the performance / graphics option many of us are asking for. Because one way or the other, there will be disappointments when SU11 drops. Either for the people who value great stability, or for the ones who like high fidelity graphics.
I still can’t see we have both of them the same time, on Xbox. Great stability comes with a price, I’m afraid. Then again, let’s stay optimistic and see what the future brings.
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No worries😀. I can appreciate a good discussion, based on facts.
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It’s been a year, and I started on a Series S and moved to an X, once I could find one.
However, I don’t think my memory is so cloudy that I’ve built the sim up in my mind to be better than it was when I first got the sim. I think, what, it was SU6 or 7 when I started flying? Anyhow, I remember it looking amazing on Series S and being smooth and performing extremely well.
Of course, I started on the Cessna 152 and at my local municipal airport (from which I don’t deviate all that much. So much for exploring the whole world, ha!), which will always perform better than any major airport in an airliner.
I did fly the A320neo, I remember, clearly, trying to control it with the Xbox controller before I had any peripherals. I do not remember having issues with performance, at that time.
I guess what I’m saying is, there was a time (again, my memory could be playing tricks on me) when we had strong visuals and strong performance.
My hope is we can have that again. As @Ant1975uk said above, these systems are in their early days of performance optimization. Look at any console generation and compare early titles to late titles and you will see big gains in graphics and performance in the later titles as developers really learn to program efficiently on the system with time.
Fingers crossed.
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I think the problem is that we are using a product with tecnologic from 2019 (there was no Nvidia serie 3000) with current graphics… It’s not that it looks worse, it’s that we need more power hardware to do the same, with the updates the simulator probably is getting heavier to move everything as before, for example the cabin of the Honda Jet has nothing to do with what it was back in the day (the default planes by Asobo still have Many functionalities buttons do not work) … And all this needs resources to move smoothly, in my opinion we need more power, not forgeting optimization and bug fixes.
Fingers cross day 11 
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To the best of my knowledge, because it keeps coming up in this thread, LOD has nothing to do with stability, it just effects smoothness and reduces stuttering.
Stability is a different fix.
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Ok, so what have they fixed/changed in SU11 which led to the improved stability?
Since the Xbox version is basically the PC version, and I have hundreds of hours on PC whereas I am closer to 100 on Xbox, I can assure you, the Level of Detail sliders have never had anything to do with the stability of the sim, or compatibility of mods.
It appears they basically turned down the Terrain Level of Detail slider on this update. Something PC users can adjust in the graphics settings whenever they wish. Likely to reduce CPU Main Thread bottleneck issues which lead to stuttering.
So it is unlikely the reason why 3rd party airports crash the sim less often. That is probably another fix in the code or something. Whatever they changed to improve stability was likely not related to graphical settings. But I do not know what it was they did.
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Thx. Well, it looks like i worried about my “precious” 3rd party airports a little bit too much then😂
But the process of improving stability has clearly already started with SU10. A lot of times when I am taxiing from or to the gates i notice 1 or 2 big stutters, which in SU9 and before very often led to a CTD. With SU10 it won’t.
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Are you familiar with the real building? That’s just Frank Gehry’s (the architect) signature style. It looks like a melted blob IRL too.
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Wow. That is rather hilarious.
EDIT: I should have known. I’m familiar with his Disney concert hall in Los Angeles. A close friend who was going to SCI Arc when I lived in LA said his designs look like he just whipped them up on a cocktail napkin.
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PG sucks, and it always will as they’ll never go Google. I rarely ever turn it on and just enhance the major cities and landmarks I frequent as much as I can. MS can’t even get boats on the water, it’s a huge step back from even FSX(or FS2000) in many ways. I still like my ‘crispy’ textured buildings, even if they’re not the right ones…
I think the obvious thing that sticks out for me is the LOD of tall buildings specifically. The rest of this KSFO nearby scenery looks fine enough to me, with the exception of the obvious low LOD blobs that are downtown SF. Maybe tweaking that could be a reasonable adjustment while preserving stability.
I did zoom a bit here just to make it clearer in the screenshot, but that specifically is noticeable right away on takeoff.
