[Xbox Series X/S] Visual Downgrade - LOD Reduction

[AerMingus]

This post might be a bit longer than usual, but please bear with me; I’m going to do my best to make an important point regarding the future of the sim. Recall my post from a few nights ago.

@AerMingus

Since I haven’t really flown in over a month, I decided to take the good ol’ 787 for a whirl despite my disdain for the graphics. I loaded into FlyTampa’s KLAS. Within about a minute I was experiencing the black avionics bug, which is suspected to be a memory issue. After about two minutes I got a CTD.

Guess what… I decided to try again. This time I was using an A320neo with a 4Simmers livery at IniScene’s KBUF. Shortly after pushback, another CTD. In SU10, I would have CTDed the second I clicked “Ready to fly”, so I guess stability has technically improved, but it’s functionally no different.

Assuming that visual quality and stability can be traded for one another, and assuming that Asobo is engaging in a balancing act between the two, this is what concerns me:

In my experience, the sim currently doesn’t work well nor does it look good. They’ve run out of room to spare on either end of the spectrum; they can’t trade graphics for stability, because the graphics are already so disappointing. They also can’t trade stability for graphics, because the sim already crashes any time it’s tested by more than a few high quality addons concurrently. Therefore, if Asobo is stuck in the aforementioned balancing act, they’re bound to upset plenty of us (unless they give us some performance/graphics settings as a workaround).

The only way to dig themselves out of that hole would be to optimize, thereby increasing visual quality or stability (or both at the same time) without the tradeoff. However, optimization typically lies somewhere between laborious and impossible due to hardware limitations, so I’m not sure how much can be done.

Best case scenario is either: 1) the poor visual quality is merely a bug that can be fixed without reducing stability, or vice versa; or 2) I’m simply underestimating Asobo’s ability to optimize their software.

All we have for now is speculation, so I’m not going to get hung up on anything; however, if reality doesn’t align itself with either of those two scenarios, I’ll be very worried about the future of the sim on Xbox.

[FleeToTheCleve]

Theres speculation that VRR / Freesync is also now not working on Series X? I used to have unlocked frames. Great FPS. Something is definitely not working here along with the terrain.

[ArchBlizzard278]

One last example on how reduced the LOD distance is and how much it reduces immersion. This is on approach coming into KDCA from the south, not even that high up. Maybe 2 miles away is DC, which is a blurred mess with no buildings visible.

Northern Virginia to the left is visible in detail for a couple of miles and then back to blurry soup. Kills immersion completely.

[Pazdzie22]

A terrible downgrade for sure. At this stage it’s not worth playing anymore on Series S.

[NoiseMan]

@Pazdzie22

It’s worth trying to contact Digital Foundry, the graphic experts that did an analysis of console version of MSFS after realese. I wonder what they would say now about the ‘true next gen experience on Xbox’. Here are the Twitter accounts of the editors.

That’s an excellent idea.

[ZeMosc4]

Yes. VRR support is gone. No more unlocked framerate! And that LOD. Jesus!! I uninstalled the game, couldn´t look at it anymore. Hoping for the best in the near future though.

[FleeToTheCleve]

When you say “VRR support is gone” it sounds as if the developers purposely/officially removed the feature from the sim? This has to be some kind of bug that has to be addressed asap, because it is painfully obvious there is a problem with it.

[DrewmorKuZy]

If you guys don’t open a bug report for VRR, or don’t report it to zendesk, how will Devs know this issue?

[NoiseMan]

@ExplorerJB

I’ve been so disappointed with where the visual quality has gone that I stopped flying a month ago. SU10 started noticably degrading the visuals. I hopped back on for SU11 and the new aircraf

It started even farther back than that. Sim Update 9 removed antialiasing on XBOX, and ever since we’ve been experiencing some incredibly ugly shimmering and moire artifacts on anything that has closely-spaced parallel lines. I especially notice this on skyscrapers with vertical lines, fences, etc. Aircraft also display significantly jaggier lines on certain elements like antennas, control surfaces, and window edges (especially noticeable when in cockpit view looking out). For an easy example of this, just look at the Cessna 172 flaps from an external view and notice the jaggies in the parallel corrugations on them as you rotate the view. These details were all razor sharp prior to SU 9.

The peak of image quality on XBOX was prior to SU 9, and the optimal image quality/performance balance was with SU 7. By the way, if anyone doubts that SU11 seriously downgraded the LOD, just go look at the Hollywood sign in L.A. You can’t even see it until you’re literally right on top of it. Until you get within maybe 500 feet of it or so, it just looks like a black pile of jumbled junk. It makes the famous landmark completely useless. And there are many more examples like that.

[FurtiveFeat]

A bug report has indeed been sent.

[LuvMyXBOX]

Thank you for remembering this! Everyone on Xbox was happy with SU10 because if fixed a lot of things SU9 broke. But I remember early 2022 Xbox version was impeccable! Sure there were some problems but for graphics, it was near perfect.

I don’t remember what build it was but I think it was before the April update which broke a lot of things.

[kobassaking]

As someone mentioned earlier, hoping this graphical/LOD trade off is not just for the new thermal and vortex physics added to the simulator for gliders and helicopters (CPU trade off). As much as I appreciate they added this, i tried both for about 10 minutes and will probably never touch them again.

[dgvrnsky]

It’s not just Xbox. SU11 ruined MSFS on PC too. This sim has become a complete let down for me. It’s just not worthwhile investing as a user when there is zero control over the devs screwing everything up and waiting for fixes.

[Broseph4245]

@dgvrnsky

It’s just not worthwhile investing as a user when there is zero control over the devs screwing everything up and waiting for fixes.

For me it’s two things: 1) fixes take loo long. There are bugs from 2020 that are still not resolved 2) Radio silence from the devs on most issues. There’s a forum open right now for questions for Friday’s Q/A. Dozens of submissions with valid questions. The devs will pick 3-4 questions, gloss over them for 10 minutes and that will be that.

[dgvrnsky]

It’s now more about revenue and add on content than delivering a stable simulator

[anon44786522]

(post deleted by author)

[osd9933]

Marketing is in control. They said a release was set for 11/11. Ready or not out it went. It wasn’t ready. This nonsense is not great for developers who rather have the time given to fix this seriously broken platform. Incredible.

[Pompeylad8762]

Even with the visual downgrades and performance boosts I’m still getting ctds or avionics blackouts with 3rd party airports. So if these changes were for stability it’s a big fail in my opinion and should be rolled back and find the real root of the problems

[Finger117]

Yes I feel the same. I guess there was a huge amount of pressure from Microsoft to hold that date with that amount of features. I mean it wasn’t enough to just bring us helicopters or bring us gliders or a huge number of new aircraft or thermals or a study level airliner. It needed to be all of that in one update. That is a huge amount of features to cope with.
I’m sure the developers were also not happy with that deadline and that amount of new features and also the delayed su10. I know the struggle from my daily work business. However that seemed to be quite an amount over the top regarding the visual downgrade here, especially in conjunction with the main focus of low altitude flying aircraft delivered.

I fear that they will be hugely busy to also fix all the problems with the new features instead of dedicating the next sim purely to performance or graphics.
After this update I would expect that SU12 will be solely dedicated to optimizing performance and especially graphics rollback without any new features at all. If they are not doing something like this, then I fear for the future of the sim on Xbox. If the new features already required a graphics downgrade like this, then there is no more room for anything more here.
However I believe this is not the case. It’s all about optimization and really taking the time for optimizations. It’s essential after such a huge feature update to have the next thing to develop not being features but refactoring and optimizing all that was rushed for this update.

I think the developers have shown that they can do that with SU10. It was a blast on Xbox. Hope they can do something similar in a very soon SU.

[TundraJeans3649]

What the most annoying fact is - NO RESPONSE from Asobo or Microsoft in that matter.

Its honestly not possible that they not seeing this Visual Downgrade !

Or did i missed something ?