Does anyone know how to increase only the ortho ZL in-sim, aka the resolution of the ground textures? After SU6 they are pretty blurry at 200 lod. Increasing to 400 lod increases the ortho ZL but also increases lots of other things like object draw distance, which in turn bombs out FPS.

I want to simply increase ortho ZL (which should have minimal impact on fps) while keeping everything else the same. Haven’t been able to find a way to do this…

From what I understand the ZL is locked to whatever Asobo have decided to process into MSFS. I think it’s determined by availability and quality / performance balance speed wise. I might be wrong and they just stream whatever ZL quality is in that area in BING. 

Just now, Ridvan Celik said:

From what I understand the ZL is locked to whatever Asobo have decided to process into MSFS. I think it’s determined by availability and quality / performance balance speed wise. I might be wrong and they just stream whatever ZL quality is in that area in BING. 

so you're saying the LOD setting doesn't effect ortho texture quality at all?

17 hours ago, dresoccer4 said:

so you're saying the LOD setting doesn't effect ortho texture quality at all?

What I’m saying is no matter what you do if Asobo only has up to ZL 19 for example you will not get anything better than ZL 19. No matter what setting you change. 

5 hours ago, Ridvan Celik said:

What I’m saying is no matter what you do if Asobo only has up to ZL 19 for example you will not get anything better than ZL 19. No matter what setting you change. 

ok yeah that's for sure the case. but what they also do is draw back the ZL depending on distance. if you're at FL420 then they lower the ground textures as to not fry everyone's systems to what looks like something like ZL5 . 

from what it looks like to me with scenery LOD also affects how close you have to be to get the highest ZL. for example when flying in the Alps, the mountains a couple miles away seem to have much blurrier textures on 200 vs on 400. 

From what I understand, the 'Buildings' and 'Trees' settings of Off, Low, Medium, High and Ultra are all percent coverage settings where the distance to be covered is determined by the Terrain LOD slider.  So I think what you would do is first set Buildings and Trees to Medium or High and then set Terrain LOD to 400 and then adjust Buildings and Trees up to where you want.

2 hours ago, sightseer said:

From what I understand, the 'Buildings' and 'Trees' settings of Off, Low, Medium, High and Ultra are all percent coverage settings where the distance to be covered is determined by the Terrain LOD slider.  So I think what you would do is first set Buildings and Trees to Medium or High and then set Terrain LOD to 400 and then adjust Buildings and Trees up to where you want.

thats an interesting theory. ill try it out. i thought those settings were for the details for the buildings and trees and not necessarily the draw distance.

but all the graphics settings are very murky on what they actually do

In the most recent Dev Q&A, Sebastian Wloch said he didn't understand why people were requesting an autogen distance slider because "the sim already had one".  He said the Low Medium High Ultra slider was the distance slider and it acted as a scalar in conjunction with the Terrain LOD slider.

It would be awesome if they would definitively describe ALL graphics options uses/consequences because you're right and I thought it was just detail also.

 

Edited October 23, 20214 yr by sightseer

let's see if this works

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1182115253?t=01h05m30s