I went to have a look round the default CYEG and the surrounding area to see how I felt about picking up the FsimStudios version of the airport (which I have since done), and ended up playing around with my settings again. I've been finding the sim pretty jerky and LOD-restricted lately. I used to run full ultra and LOD 400 but since SU9 that's been a no-no for me and I've been running TLOD at 300 and a lot of the scenery settings on high instead of ultra. But when I looked around over Edmonton, in what it's fair to say is pretty flat countryside with a good horizon, I was really disappointed to find that I only really have any detail out to about 6 miles (according to LNM, which I always have running on a second monitor), and then there was a fairly obvious false horizon beyond which I seem to be in FSX.

So I thought - s*d it, let's try a big LOD again and see how it looks. I knew I'd lose frames and get even more jerky but I wanted to check it out. So the first two pix here are with a TLOD of 600, but Objects LOD of 100 and the same mix of high and ultra as before

And you know what? It didn't feel any better to me, plus I dropped down to about 20fps and got the jerks. So I thought about it and decided to try a different approach. Put my TLOD back down to 300, OLOD up to 400 and restarted the flight (replay). Or tried to. I could get msfs to load trhe flight with that OLOD. So after a couple more tries I set the OLOD to the max in the panel options (200), left the TLOD at 300 but put all my previous HIGH settings back to ULTRA. Loaded ok, and looked like this -

Which actually looked a whole lot better to me. So that's where I've stayed for now, until hopefully SU10 gives me back some of the LOD I lost last time round. And before anybody launches into one about having realistic settings, my spec includes an R9-3950X, a 3090ti with 24gb vram, 64gb system ram and a PCIe/NVMe monster SSD with a 6gb/sec read speed. So I figure I've got a right to expect better than I seem to be getting, and even more so since I initally rn the sim when it first came out at LOD 500 and full ultra, with a Titan instead of the 3090ti, and got a pretty consistent 30fps and a horizon further than you would probably get in real life.

But while I was there, I grabbed a few more shots, with a bit more murky weather though. One of the interesting things I spotted was what looked like the remains of an airfield in the middle of town that wasn't marked up on LNM. Haven't got around to Googling this yet but I will do

On the way back to CYEG, I spotted this and it triggered a memory. Back in the early 1990s I discovered the Mall Of America in Minneapolis on a trip there, and on looking it up it turned out to have recently (at that time) been overtaken as the biggest mall in the world by this - the West Edmonton Mall.

Hence the "shopping" bit in the title. I wondered if it was still the biggest so went off to Google and then Wiki to find there's quite a few much bigger ones now, mostly in China and similar, but the biggest is actually in Tehran! Which kinda surprised me. I thought such things would be severely frowned upon out there, but maybe they only sell prayer mats?

So guess where I went next <grin>. But I'll post those tomorrow now. Maybe I'll shop my way around the world.

Excellent shots, lots of crisp detail. I admire the way you're always thinking about what you're observing, and how one thing leads to another...sometimes in unexpected ways.

John

Awesome shots! 🙂 

Fine set of shots Andy .