LOD and popping

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

Taken from the MSFS for folks that don't venture over that minefield:-

 

 

Autogen LOD:

Description:

Synthetic buildings and vegetation made from a collection of generic 3D objects.

Building and Vegetation settings set the object details ranges (more or less complex representation of the same objects aka LOD).

Building and Vegetation settings set the distance rings where the different object LOD are displaying.

Problems:

Below a certain distance to the outermost ring, objects used to fade-in, now they seem to pop-up instead.

This is mitigated because they are displaying over their footprint picture found in the aerial ground texture displaying underneath.

Photogrammetry LOD:

Description:

Realistic buildings and vegetation made from textured mesh based on aerial photography of the real objects.

Building and vegetation textured mesh has different LOD built-in.

Lowest resolution LOD is displaying the farthest, then increasing resolution LOD are fading-in in place as the view is getting closer.

Terrain LOD setting set the distance rings where the different textured mesh LOD are displaying.

Problems:

Below a certain distance to the outermost ring, textured mesh is popping in over the flat aerial ground texture.

The LOD rings are smaller than pre-release therefore the lowest detailed mesh LOD is displaying too close.

It is often referred to as “melted buildings”.

Ground Texture LOD:

Description:

Realistic ground texture made from aerial photography.

Lowest resolution texture is displaying the farthest, then increasing resolution is popping up over as the view is getting closer.

Terrain LOD setting set the distance rings where the different texture resolutions are displaying.

Problems:

The LOD rings are smaller than pre-release therefore the lowest texture resolution is displaying too close.

It is often referred to as “blurry ground texture seen at altitude” and wrongly attributed to network bandwidth.

Analysis:

There is a single setting, Terrain LOD, which is affecting both ground textures and photogrammetry LOD, which makes sense when you’re considering the outermost ring where photogrammetry and ground texture meet must share a similar resolution.
The LOD distances (v1.8.3 and v1.9.3) are trading off distance for performance but they are adjusted to render objects at 1:1 zoom view in 4K (both photogrammetry and ground textures).
At this zoom level and in 4K, photogrammetry mesh and ground textures are displaying just the right amount of details to fill enough pixels on the screen for their respective projected surface size.
In short, the renderer is dropping some resolution and details which are imperceptible to the eye under a given viewing condition (zoom 1:1, distance to objects).
It is similar to JPEG compression which is displaying similar picture quality to the original at 1:1, but it is showing compression artefacts when zooming in.

What’s wrong:

The LOD ring sizes have been reduced since pre-release and this is affecting mostly photogrammetry and ground texture.
Photogrammetry and textures were popping in with previous versions but it was less noticeable because it was happening farther away.
Because LOD ring distances are now closer:

ground texture quickly drops resolution when viewed from not so high an altitude.

the simulator is displaying too low resolution texture too close to the aircraft and this is especially visible when flying over non-photogrammetry areas.

you can’t zoom-in otherwise you’re viewing magnified lower resolution mesh and textures.

A few solutions:

Decouple photogrammetry and ground texture LOD with 2 sliders instead of 1 so that each user can balance performance/details depending on hardware and preference.

Revert LOD ring distances to pre-release values.

If FS2020 ships with same setting levels for both PC and Xbox, add a “Extreme” setting just for PC restoring the previous LOD.

Edited September 30, 2020 by Ianrivaldosmith

[Keto Ketchup 240]

Ultra is the new Low. Seriously, my Ultra tree setting now feels like what Low tree setting used to feel like, and I have all the LODs maxed at 200 (no config mods). It is a serious nerf to graphic quality, and I'm not impressed. I can't imaging what the actual low setting looks like.

[wthomas33065 994]

5 minutes ago, Colonel X said:

I already hear it.

Exactly.

I also heard a lot of references to it being as bad as FS9 and FSX.   I have vanilla FSX on my system and recently reinstalled FS9.  A sim, which IMHO was the pinnacle of what MS offered.  I absolutely LOVED FS9.  Booted it up and was struck by how bad it looked.  The "blurries" were back, but even worse, the quality of the cockpit was ridiculous.  

Memory is a weird thing.  I would have SWORN that FS9 never looked "that bad", but there it was.  Proof in front of my face.
 

People are posting screenshots of LOD pop in and other things, which quite frankly have been in the Sim since day one.  And even in the official forums there is heated debate as it is not settled that there is a global problem.  Almost just as many people are noticing no issues at all.  (I am at LOD 100 and am completely satisfied).  I notice extreme pop in at LOD 50 and 25, but not at 100 or 200.

Any LOD testing should be done in very controlled conditions, and that can only be done with offline mode, using base scenery.  It looks awful, but you're not depending on your internet connection to load LOD levels of terrain.  Which has to be loaded and rendered prior to autogen taking place.  So if the bottleneck is the download of the higher elevation DEM around the plane, you can get pop in regardless of the slider setting.

I'm not doubting some people have issues, but it is much easier to believe that the issues are not based on some nefarious developer patch issue, but rather on changes in perception over time, and network connectivity.  

Otherwise, you wouldn't have just as many people stating they don't have a problem as you have people complaining that they do.

 

[Carlosx 48]

40 minutes ago, wthomas33065 said:

Or your perceptions are changing because you are noticing imperfections you overlooked before.  Classic "new car" syndrome.  The longer we use the product, the more we note it's imperfections.  Imperfections that were always there, yet we missed because we were in awe with what we were first noticing.  

Oh come on. The official forum shows before after screens. Just go and fly, look at the water.
Waves are dumbed down (you need way more wind to get the same level of detail compared to release version).
And with the latest patch they also reduced reflection quality of the water.

Either this is done intentionally or by mistake.
But it is real.

[Ixoye 1,821]

1 hour ago, fppilot said:

Anyone?

 

Terrain Level of Detail

[Biggles2010 343]

26 minutes ago, wthomas33065 said:

Any LOD testing should be done in very controlled conditions, and that can only be done with offline mode, using base scenery.  It looks awful, but you're not depending on your internet connection to load LOD levels of terrain.  Which has to be loaded and rendered prior to autogen taking place.  So if the bottleneck is the download of the higher elevation DEM around the plane, you can get pop in regardless of the slider setting.

I'm not doubting some people have issues, but it is much easier to believe that the issues are not based on some nefarious developer patch issue, but rather on changes in perception over time, and network connectivity.  

Otherwise, you wouldn't have just as many people stating they don't have a problem as you have people complaining that they do.

 

I take your point about testing only in offline mode, but it is unrealistic when the entire basis of MSFS is that it should be run in live connected mode.

The LOD issues began after the first patch, and became worse after the second patch. There is nothing nefarious about users observations. From day one there have been many users who have chosen to close their eyes to anything others were reporting. Refusing to accept there could be any faults in this sim, because they had already decided it was perfect. Thankfully many of those have now exceeded their attention span and moved on to other games or different forums. The issues may not affect all areas, but they are much more than just false user perceptions, and are a disappointing indication of the direction of travel.

[Will Fly For Cheese 1,710]

I have just spoken to a friend who has worked as a game developer for some of the biggest gaming studios over the last twenty years and after telling him about the patches and the effects on graphics he said there is only one reason why that would happen; Server bandwidth is having to be restricted at the servers due to too high demand.

[Carlosx 48]

4 minutes ago, Will Fly For Cheese said:

I have just spoken to a friend who has worked as a game developer for some of the biggest gaming studios over the last twenty years and after telling him about the patches and the effects on graphics he said there is only one reason why that would happen; Server bandwidth is having to be restricted at the servers due to too high demand.

I doubt that wave quality and water reflection quality has anything to do with server bandwith.

[Steku 158]

A theory: Maybe they added much more detail to Japan scenery, they focused so much on Japan, tried to optimize the quality/performance just for Japan and neglected the rest of the planet? 

[Will Fly For Cheese 1,710]

Just now, Carlosx said:

I doubt that wave quality and water reflection quality has anything to do with server bandwith.

Agreed I was referring to the LOD issues. I don't why the did what they did to the water.

[Steku 158]

And the tall buildings 

[gore54 73]

I agree I believe this is a server issue and microsoft trying to save bandwidth

[Ricardo41 5,949]

19 hours ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Anyone else think that the LOD draw distance is diabolical?

No, I don't think it's "diabolical".

[Biggles2010 343]

37 minutes ago, Carlosx said:

I have just spoken to a friend who has worked as a game developer for some of the biggest gaming studios over the last twenty years and after telling him about the patches and the effects on graphics he said there is only one reason why that would happen; Server bandwidth is having to be restricted at the servers due to too high demand.

If this proves to be the case then perhaps we should hope the novelty of MSFS wears off quickly with lots of users, to reduce bandwidth demand. But then there would be much less incentive to develop MSFS to the level the marketing hype suggested, and providing much greater bandwidth is probably not in the MS budget. Not a happy situation.

[andy1252 3,864]

2 hours ago, fppilot said:

3 hours ago, fppilot said:

I have missed something.  Where is the LOD setting?  Is that a reference to either or both of Terrain Level of Detail and Object Level of Detail?  And to what degree is altitude a factor? 

Anyone?

Hi Frank, apart from the basic sliders in the graphics settings, you can also set Terrain LoDFactor and ObjectsLoD in the "UserCfg.opt" file in the LocalCache directory. Values in there are in the form "2.000000" where this value represents the 200 in the sliders. Apparently you can set these as high as you can take, but it will eat CPU/GPU cycles. Don't ask me for technical details - above my pay grade as they say. I got this from another post somewhere in here.

After the first patch that killed the LOD for me, I tried running with both set at "9.000000" which is equivalent to 900, and the detail went out as far as I could see. But my frames dropped to around 10-12 fps. I'm not an FPS obsessive, and I could even live with that on the occasions I really felt I wanted the Lod available, but now I've settled on 500 for both as an acceptable compromise. On my system that gives me acceptable LoD, and around 20 fps. And it's smooth, which is what matters to me. I'm running 4k on a 3950x and Titan RTX PC, but I would have thought these parms would be well capable of sorting a 1080 HD display setup with a reasonable CP.

Basically, if you were getting good LoD before the patches, you should be able to get back to that with a bit of experimentation with these parms.

(Until they remove them!)

cheers,

Andy