4 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Still, I decided to create my own comparison videos because it appears that some people are still (deliberately?) not paying full attention to my posts.

There's some serious cognitive dissonance with some posters on these forums regarding MSFS. Any fault with the sim is dismissed as a minor inconvenience, or that the refrain "MSFS is better than the default versions of any other sim" is used, and/or the poster with a problem is belittled.

 

4 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

If anyone wants to tell me that I should just upgrade so that I can push the slider to 200 and "avoid" the issue, please spare me such comments. Terrain LOD at 25 looked way better before Sim Update 2, and not as bad as FSX/P3D at LOD_RADIUS=6.500000 when it comes to the pop-in. I really wish I had saved some similar footage from before that patch. If you are lucky enough to own a high-end system or purchased one before the pandemic and mining boom, good for you, spend your time flying in the simulator and let me complain. It does not affect your enjoyment in any way.

I can see a significant improvement with Terrain LOD at 200 compared to 25 in your videos.
There's nothing more distracting that seeing an obvious error through the cockpit window, whether that's a terrain morph, a terrain spike, or AI traffic behaving weirdly.

 

There's plenty to like about MSFS, but that doesn't mean that someone with a problem should be dismissed.
Just because MSFS is good enough for some, doesn't mean everyone else has to wax lyrical about it.

20 minutes ago, crimplene said:

In the LOD 25 video the morphing is terrible, though. But even when I had an old i5 and a gtx 1060 gpu i did use LOD 100+ with no problems. I compromised with rendering resolution which is not good for sharpness but at least gives no morphing.

I really would recommend to set LOD higher and other settings lower.

Well this is exactly what I was talking about. Turning up the graphics settings to reduce a problem that did not exist before is brute force, not an actual solution.

Turning up the Terrain LOD slider also greatly increases bandwidth requirements. Even if someone has a bleeding-edge system, they cannot do that if they do not have access to a high-speed connection or are restrained by a data cap.

I would prefer if Asobo just fixed the problem and made all Terrain LOD settings look great again. And don't worry, it won't make 200 look worse. In fact it will look even better, considering there is evidence in the very same thread that some specific areas can look wrong from a distance no matter how high the slider is set. Everyone wins.

6 minutes ago, F737NG said:

There's some serious cognitive dissonance with some posters on these forums regarding MSFS. Any fault with the sim is dismissed as a minor inconvenience, or that the refrain "MSFS is better than the default versions of any other sim" is used, and/or the poster with a problem is belittled.

I know right. It's as if they don't realise that pushing for improvement is what got us here. Or somehow they think we've reached the end of the line and there's no potential for improvement. In a few years the simulator would look antiquated, just like all the previous ones, if it were frozen on launch state. Maybe we should ask Asobo to call off cirrus clouds, seasons, DirectX 12 and ray-tracing as well?

If I were satisfied with Flight Simulator X and Prepar3D I wouldn't be here complaining, trying to help make this simulator even better. Or rather, to fix a visual regression that did not exist only two months ago.

It has been like that for me since release. I always had LOD issues and have been annoyed by low resolution terrain at higher altitudes. I hope they improve LOD over time.

@erick, don't know if this adds anything to the discussion, I suspect not, but it does seem to confirm that the LOD settings affect this a fair bit. I just saw your post and took a trip out there, and was getting a similar effect but at different distances. I have my LOD set at 500 via the config file, and I run with a 40 inch 4k monitor and ultra settings. I'm not seeing the "little triangles" effect here, my first sighting of this island kicks in at the equivalent of one of your later pics, and then I get the better resolution at a greater distance.

Other folk here have suggested a possible tradeoff between LOD and sharpness, and that may well be your solution for now, but this problem/situation is real, for sure. My setup is nearly as good as you can get for graphics, and I'm still aware of these issues on my system, although in most areas (cr*ppy PG aside) they are sufficiently mitigated to be more than compensated by the other benefits of the sim.

But yep, scenery still pops and crackles on approach, and it still seems like it doesn't matter what hardware you've got, there'll still be issues.

3 hours ago, andy1252 said:

@erick, don't know if this adds anything to the discussion, I suspect not, but it does seem to confirm that the LOD settings affect this a fair bit. I just saw your post and took a trip out there, and was getting a similar effect but at different distances. I have my LOD set at 500 via the config file, and I run with a 40 inch 4k monitor and ultra settings. I'm not seeing the "little triangles" effect here, my first sighting of this island kicks in at the equivalent of one of your later pics, and then I get the better resolution at a greater distance.

That certainly adds to the discussion. Wow, now that is something I have not tried yet. LOD at 500 via config is interesting. At the very least it helps narrow down the cause of this issue and something I can tinker with. I really hope this gets sorted, along with all of the other terrain & object related issues introduced with these patches. Cheers

I followed @andy1252 's suggestion to set Terrain LOD to 5.0. Contrary to my expectation, the machine kept performance. However, the Gabriola flaw is still the same, at least I can't tell the difference. I made sure the setting was retained during flight (sometimes usercfg.opt settings are reset), but perhaps someone can try to confirm this result.

A couple of more observations: I turned West to Tofino next and flew cross Vancouver Island and I didn't see any single morphing despite that's a quite hilly region. This was kept - until I arrived close to the beaches around Tofino which were heavily morphing again, with some of them looking not unlike Gabriola.

I am less and less inclined to believe in a performance issue. Rather it seems to be certain structures triggering morphing, which ever.

As a sidenote: I made a systematic search through all Prepar3d slider settings a couple of years ago to find one to eliminate or at least minimize morphing in high-res terrain. The only one I found was shifting the terrain resolution slide fully to the left making terrain essentially flat. This says a lot. 

Also, while I understand Asobo uses the ForzaTech engine for display, including Atmosphere, Weather, Lighting, etc., I think terrain shaping is basically still using the FSX engine. But that's just a conjecture, perhaps some expert can tell better.

Kind regards, Michael

On 2/21/2021 at 11:07 AM, erick said:

I really hope this gets sorted, along with all of the other terrain & object related issues introduced with these patches. Cheers

Another thing to try, is to get Mappamundi's shoreline fixes:

https://flightsim.to/file/7543/coastline-glitch-fix-mediterranean

After unzipping, you can delete all the bgl files, except for the PNWBC one.

Also set Terrain LOD to 200 in the MSFS Graphics settings.

It does not totally fix the issues, but it does make them better... try it! 😉

Edited February 24, 20215 yr by Bert Pieke