Hi everyone. 🙂
In these days I have visited many videos of FS2020 in flight with the liners.
There is a doubt that disturbs me.
Why FS2020 blurred scenery? 🙄
They look like FS2004.
I have saved some screenshots from different videos (click on the images for enlarge details).
The scenery is conspicuously blurry at high altitude!

 

A premise, it is not my intention to make premature controversies at FS2020.
But this story has left me a little perplexed, I didn't expect to see again "FS9 blurry" in a modern simulator.
I am currently still flying with FS9 (yes, I'm an old romantic simmer), and also with Xplane11.
I made some screenshots with Xplane11, using airliners, at high altitude, above photoreal scenery ZL16.
Xplane11 doesn't blurred the scenery, the details are preserved even at high altitude.
(click on the images for enlarge details)

My doubt is this: "are we sure that FS2020 will be the ideal simulator for high-altitude airliners"? 🙄
The clouds and the sky of FS2020 are certainly exceptional, wonderful, beautiful.
But the blurry high-altitude scenery?

It's just my doubt.
Thanks a lot to anyone who wants to answer me. 😉 🖐️

Actually your right, maybe a setting or streaming/ connection issue

Edited August 16, 20205 yr by suchw

There are certainly some areas of the world (even just some chunks of otherwise good scenery) that seem to not be recognised by the AI that is generating the higher quality textures and other models like cars and buildings out of bing maps data. That being said it could also be exaggerated by depth of field if it was turned on in those screenshots and the video compression will cause some lack of definition... In my opinion things will most certainly improve with development time, but for all the faults it's still an overall improvement compared to other simulators.

Edited August 16, 20205 yr by High_Alpha

I don't know ... I have the impression that blurry was introduced on purpose to limit the excess of calculations and safeguard performance.
This technique was also used by FS9.
Older PCs could not process a large area of scenery, and so the designers of FS9 introduced blurry.
It was a trick ... but it worked.

Perhaps the same trick was also introduced in FS2020.
As I said, I have seen many videos of FS2020, really many, even of people with powerful hardware and high settings.
And in all "high-altitude liners" videos, the scenery is always blurry.
Little or a lot ... but there is ... always.
Coincidence?
I do not know.

Edited August 16, 20205 yr by efis007

The blurries and popping in/out of textures is present in every video I’ve seen thus far. It sucks but there’s probably a reason it’s still around. 

Edited August 16, 20205 yr by langly

There are depth of field settings in MSFS.. maybe you can adjust this somewhat to your liking..

If you run MFS on medium settings it looks like that. Just set it to high or ultra and as Bert said, back off the depth of field and it sharpens up a lot.

Oh I don't know, perhaps it is simply atmospheric distortion...

There are a lot of videos that show a different LOD (Level of Detail), which is basically draw distance than what is currently available in P3D and X-Plane. 

What I mean by this is as you are flying, there is a virtual circle around the plane that displays higher detailed ground textures. Beyond that circle, the quality of detail degrades and that is when you start to see blurry textures and autogen popping into view. In many videos that I see, that circle of nicely details ground textures is small. To add, this is on high end systems with high or ultra settings. 

It also means if you are flying above a certain altitude, let's say 8,000 feet, then the ground textures become blurry. It will be interesting to hear what the flight sim community will have to say. 

Something must be wrong with my eyes.  The only blurriness I see is in the bottom pictures.  Yes, I'm serious. I'm also 70 years old and post-cataract surgery.

Hook

7 minutes ago, MikeT707 said:

There are a lot of videos that show a different LOD (Level of Detail), which is basically draw distance than what is currently available in P3D and X-Plane. 

What I mean by this is as you are flying, there is a virtual circle around the plane that displays higher detailed ground textures. Beyond that circle, the quality of detail degrades and that is when you start to see blurry textures and autogen popping into view. In many videos that I see, that circle of nicely details ground textures is small. To add, this is on high end systems with high or ultra settings. 

It also means if you are flying above a certain altitude, let's say 8,000 feet, then the ground textures become blurry. It will be interesting to hear what the flight sim community will have to say. 

Have the level of detail cranked @ 200  . Doesn't look blurry to me 🤷‍♂️

4 minutes ago, joec63 said:

Have the level of detail cranked @ 200  . Doesn't look blurry to me 🤷‍♂️

Hopefully that will make a difference in the release version when one is at high altitudes. We shall see soon enough. 

My take is that as you go higher, MSFS seems to load a lower ZL because a lot more tiles have to be loaded at higher altitudes. The blurriness is something that can be somewhat, but not totally mitigated by turning settings way up.

But I expect them to eventually give us more options on this front. For now, they've got a roll out to do for millions of new users.

Edited August 17, 20205 yr by bonchie

19 minutes ago, bonchie said:

But I expect them to eventually give us more options on this front.

That is what I expect too. I was hoping to see a UI control to select LOD as well as LOD for Autogen and Trees. Maybe in a future update and maybe there is a way to get into the app files and manually adjust this. 

I think those whose main experience of flight is in desktop simulators, tend to have a slightly unrealistic preconception of how terrain looks from high altitude.

In XP and P3D, terrain detail at high altitudes is typically extremely sharp. Sharper than is typically the case when flying in actual airplanes. Especially when there is any amount of low level haze. You may be able to see good detail when looking straight down, but at any significant angle, the detail is hard to see.

Here is a photo I took from 38,000 over North Carolina last summer. My main interest was the large thunderstorm, and admittedly it kind of dominates the photo, but you can see that the hills below it are kind of muddy looking and washed out.

Here is another shot taken from 36,000 feet over Illinois. This is KCMI, (Willard Field), an airport many long time simmers will fondly remember from the first MS Flight simulator. Again, detail is kind of lacking, and this photo was zoomed in to capture as much airport detail as possible. What I saw visually out the window was quite a bit less detailed.

Finally a shot taken from only 3500 feet on approach. The day was pretty clear - probably 15 to 20 miles visibility with slight haze. The city below shows good detail, but looking at the farmland in the distance, the detail becomes increasingly indistinct.
 

MSFS does transition from detailed scenery to the underlying satellite imagery at higher altitudes. The result is actually a more accurate representation of how the earth typically looks at high altitudes, as opposed to the unrealistic amount of detail that long time users of P3D and X-Plane have come to take as a “given”.

I am speaking here of loss of visual detail in real terrain when viewed from high altitude. Loss of detail and color at a distance is not the same as terrain that becomes overtly blurry at a distance. If that happens in the sim, it would be a reason to complain.