So I had my son in law build a over the top system that exceeded the hardware specs recommended for the best performance even before the sim was available.  I have been flying sims for along time and felt pretty excited to see the updated terrain details we were promised.  I mean looking back at the FS 2004 details, then the FSX improvements to that set my hopes very high for the FS 2020 realism.  Boy, what a let down.

I loaded the sim up, grabbed the yoke and after a few horrible takeoffs and climb out of some of my favorite airports I found the details very lacking.  For instance, I have flown (In real life) from Honolulu International around the various other islands and airports and was really upset by the lack of details around HNL.  I have seen and flown around Pearl Harbor, the Arizona Memorial and other landmarks visible in FSX but didn’t see any such scenery in 2020.  
 

I loaded up other areas familiar to me and was also disappointed.  I departed KLAS and flew toward the strip.  Even FSX had details familiar to me from having been to Vegas so many times.  I could take slow Cessna flight down the strip and read the billboards, watch the Bellagio fountain dance and see the iconic but cheesy Luxor statue out front.  All of this, gone.  
 

One after another flight had so many details missing it seemed like I was flying over a foreign land for the first time.  Each time the realism was gone.  So someone please tell me if it’s just a settings issue I’m having or not.

Being able to fly IFR is fun in its own right, but VFR from KLAX to KLAS on a clear day is a special treat.  
 

Where are the details?  I actually found myself booting up an old laptop with FSX loaded up, plugging in my yoke and pedals and flying back into a scenery rich familiarity.  
 

Is it just me?  Please advise.

 

Could it be that I have the terrain settings wrong?  Someone please advise.  I’m hoping that’s it and my ingnorance is making the hard core simmers and pilots laugh at me.  

Short answer - sounds like the settings are to blame. See below for more info.

If there is one thing nobody really doubts, it is that MSFS 2020 is a real looker, but there are a few caveats to this. First up, in spite of the marketing hype, not everywhere has enjoyed the benefits of a really detailed photogrammetry 'study'. To get really good scenery from that method, you need a few things to have occurred, usually some (mostly top down) satellite image data from either Landsat 7 or Landsat 8, plus maybe some lower altitude images from an aerial reconnaissance plane. Then, to really seal the deal, some of the data from one of those little cars with the CCTV rig on the roof which you see driving around gathering imagery (often used for Google's street-view).

One of the issues is that MSFS use their own Bing map data rather than Google's street view data, and they simply haven't been gathering data in those little cars for as long as Google have, so their data is not as complete. This will change, but it's not going to happen overnight. All of the various ways that data is gathered and the images which result from it are then analysed, colour-corrected and so on, and from that, the scenery is generated. This scenery info is then streamed to your computer. Or not if your settings are not correct.

So an important part to note here is the 'streamed to your computer'. You can set the levels of streaming and detail etc in the flight sim's options, and you should definitely look at this because it sounds like it is not set up to pick up much in the way of information. The sim (when it installs) does a bit of an analysis of your computer and takes a guess at what are sensible settings, but it will quite often err on the side of caution when it makes that guess, since some people are on limited bandwidth connections on the intertron and not everyone wants their computer's graphic processor hammering away doing loads of work and using lots of electricity.

You should also note that there is a setting to clear the data too in a rolling fashion, so be careful with that as well, as this means you could have had the data streamed to you, but then had it 'binned' from your cache to make way for other stuff if your overall size allocation for this stuff was set fairly small. There are plenty of videos on youtube etc about setting all this malarkey up if you are unsure, so I won't reinvent the wheel here.

Now the plus side of all this if you are in the US, is that typically there is more data for there than anywhere else on our planet, because when the US government flies a space satellite or an aerial reconnaissance plane and gathers data, unless it is some kind of classified spy mission the thing is on, they take the view that since the US public paid for the satellite or plane doing the information gathering, the good citizens of the US should be able to have the data for themselves, which is fair. Not every other country is quite so philanthropically enlightened in this regard unfortunately.

Beyond this, keep in mind that there are some places where the satellite or aerial reconnaissance data is not fully available even when a photo recon missions has been flown over that place, if for example it has a secret or sensitive military base or some such located there, so this might include things like nuclear power stations, research facilities etc.

Welcome to Avsim!  Also, keep in mind that MSFS is still very much a work in progress.