Flying at low altitude in GA aircraft over any photogrammetry city (ex. London, or New York) the buildings look awful.  It looks like the cities got nuked and are now a wasteland of wrecked, melted, or destroyed buildings.  It truly does look like wreckage.  Sometimes, as I fly, when you get really close or are passing them SOME (not all) of them "crisp up" and suddenly appear correct.  The vast majority remain awful.

I googled this and I see alot of people in various forums talking about "Melted Buildings" for years now.  However, I wasn't able to find any good solutions.  Some posts blamed certain updates.  Others just recommended turning off photogrammetry.  Some say it works fine for them.  Some say it works sometimes.  At this point most of the information I've found isn't really current anymore.

I've had this problem for a long time now and just assumed that my PC just wasn't fast enough (5950X, 3090, all SSD's).  However, I recently swapped the CPU to a 5800X3D to see if that 3D cache might handle the demand a bit better and upgraded my GPU to a 4090.  I was hoping that would fix it.  Nope.  Still a nuclear wasteland.

This occurs for me in VR but I posted here in the general forum as this seems like its something common to VR or non VR.  I've tried deleting and recreating my Rolling Cache.  I've never run many addons, but the few I do I've removed so MSFS is in completely "stock" state and no luck there either.  My FPS is in the 50's and I have my game options set pretty modest.  My Terrain Level of Detail is set at 150.  I've tried it at 100 and that didn't help either.

Outside of turning Photogrammetry off, has anyone found any possible solutions for this?  I haven't tried creating a manual cache yet so maybe that might fix it?  Is there a particular option or options that control how and when these photogrammetry buildings draw?

Thanks!

For me, it seems to be related to my internet connection speed and/or wifi speed. If I throttle it back, the buildings begin to look worse. I'm guessing our PCs are assembling the photogrammetry on the fly based on how quickly it can obtain the data. However, flying at very low altitudes always looks apocalyptic regardless of my connection, even using my place of work's 500mb/s connection.

Some cities are worse than others for me but London is always the worst and looks like a melted wax hellscape. It looks dreadful and I have noticed the problem is worse than it used to be generally.

I have now turned it off when flying airliners but turn it back on if flying GA.

Given my internet speed, the hardware I use and the settings I apply and endless testing I have concluded that this is related to their crappy servers.

Faster internet and use of the manual and rolling caches can certainly help, but even then, London still looks like it has been hit by a nuclear strike.

A lot depends on the quality of the raw images available to asobo as much as the way they process them.

Also remember that as a flight simulator, we are not meant to be viewing cities from 50 feet.  1500 feet plus seems to be the best height to be looking at photogramnetry to me.

2 hours ago, cianpars said:

Also remember that as a flight simulator, we are not meant to be viewing cities from 50 feet.  1500 feet plus seems to be the best height to be looking at photogramnetry to me.

True. But there are a lot of airports within a PG area so we will be seeing bad PG just outside the airport's fence.
And helicopters can land everywhere... 🙂

Edited February 21, 20233 yr by bvdboomen

I recently upgraded to a fibre optic internet service which is 1.5Gbps download and 940Mbps upload. I was curious to see if this helped the melted photogrammetry. My flight sim PC is on a wired 1GB Lan and I am getting full download and upload speeds consistently for the infrastructure I currently have. Unfortunately it made zero difference whatsoever so I just continue with it turned off as I mostly fly airliners.

The only thing I haven't tried is changing from the East Coast USA server to a different location.   

I've found it's more about your system specs.   But internet speed matters too.  When I swapped to my 12700K especially I noticed PG loads a lot more clearly.  I have a 300 down connection fwiw.

Thanks to everyone for the replies.  That really helps alot and you guys saved me a TON of troubleshooting and headscratching.

8 hours ago, dogmanbird said:

For me, it seems to be related to my internet connection speed and/or wifi speed. If I throttle it back, the buildings begin to look worse. I'm guessing our PCs are assembling the photogrammetry on the fly based on how quickly it can obtain the data. However, flying at very low altitudes always looks apocalyptic regardless of my connection, even using my place of work's 500mb/s connection.

 

1 hour ago, RJC68 said:

I recently upgraded to a fibre optic internet service which is 1.5Gbps download and 940Mbps upload. I was curious to see if this helped the melted photogrammetry. My flight sim PC is on a wired 1GB Lan and I am getting full download and upload speeds consistently for the infrastructure I currently have. Unfortunately it made zero difference whatsoever so I just continue with it turned off as I mostly fly airliners.

The only thing I haven't tried is changing from the East Coast USA server to a different location.   

Same exact thing here.  I have blazing fast internet service here.  Similar to RJC68.  True Fiber Optic (Entire neighborhood is Fiber Optic, including the lines to the home, and fiber modem), faster than 1Gbps up and down.  I have the exact same results as you.  That fast internet doesn't seem to help one bit.  Zero difference.

I have no idea where my server is located though and so I haven't attempted to change that.  In all honesty, I didn't know where to see that information or that I could change it.  Or maybe I'd seen it poking through the options and just didn't notice it.  I live in the midwest USA so whatever server that would hook me to is what I was probably using.

6 hours ago, Jazz said:

Some cities are worse than others for me but London is always the worst and looks like a melted wax hellscape. It looks dreadful and I have noticed the problem is worse than it used to be generally.

I have now turned it off when flying airliners but turn it back on if flying GA.

Given my internet speed, the hardware I use and the settings I apply and endless testing I have concluded that this is related to their crappy servers.

Unfortunately, for me, I never fly airliners (at least not yet) and only GA.  So I'm starting to think you must be right and maybe I'm chasing my tail and there isn't much I can do...maybe its just their servers.  Whatever the case, that blows 😉

6 hours ago, cianpars said:

Faster internet and use of the manual and rolling caches can certainly help, but even then, London still looks like it has been hit by a nuclear strike.

A lot depends on the quality of the raw images available to asobo as much as the way they process them.

Also remember that as a flight simulator, we are not meant to be viewing cities from 50 feet.  1500 feet plus seems to be the best height to be looking at photogramnetry to me.

I'm going to try a manual cache next and see if that makes any difference.

For the record, the flights I'm seeing this are all 1500-3000 feet.  I'm flying GA aircraft 1500-3000 feet over the city to explore.  For example, I was running through the "FS Academy - Navigator" AddOn.  One of those lessons takes you around 1500 feet give-or-take down the Hudson River over New York City and its like flying through something out of the world of "Mad Max".

internet speed does not matter for London, I have 1000 GB/S ping of 7 or whatever it is called and still a nuclear show. Asobo confirmed London needs a update. If you fly slow and keep circling in the end it will become better, but London is some how broken.

5 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

I've found it's more about your system specs.   But internet speed matters too.  When I swapped to my 12700K especially I noticed PG loads a lot more clearly.  I have a 300 down connection fwiw.

System Specs are:

5800X3D with cores optimized via PBO2 curve, AIO water cooled with NZXT Z73, temps almost never hit 80.  MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X 24G (The air cooled one, not the liquid).  Temps stay in the 70's.  MSFS & Windows 10 running of PCI Gen 4 M.2 SSD.  64 Gigs of 3600 RAM.

Prior to a month ago I was running a 5950X and RTX 3090 but the photogrammetry issue seems pretty much unchanged.

Unless even with the 5800X3D, the photogrammetry is just so absolutely CPU intensive that it can't keep up.  Unfortunately, on my AM4 board the 5800X3D is the best I can do.  I'm not at the point of swapping to the AM5 platform or intel to take advantage of the new faster generations of CPU.

7 minutes ago, pilotter said:

internet speed does not matter for London, I have 1000 GB/S ping of 7 or whatever it is called and still a nuclear show. Asobo confirmed London needs a update. If you fly slow and keep circling in the end it will become better, but London is some how broken.

New York City doesn't look any better than London for me at least 😕

6 minutes ago, 1Wolf said:

New York City doesn't look any better than London for me at least 😕

same, slightly better but still not how it should be. Tokyo is excellent so it shows it's something else in my opinion.

SamScene NY is worth the money..

I have commented on this topic before, but will throw in some thoughts based on my current experience with photogrammetry in MSFS. For a long time, I flew with PG turned off because it made the sim unflyable (in PG regions) if the plane was anywhere near ground level (some of us had this issue, others didn't). Since most cities looked fine without PG, I got accustomed to doing without it. Then, a few months ago one of the mandatory updates fixed this problem, and suddenly I had a choice -- I could fly with PG if I wanted to. As soon as I tried it, I was hooked -- PG made the areas where it was implemented so much more realistic, as long as I flew well above the ground.

Reading about the problems many are having has led me to check out in detail a flew places that are often cited as looking terrible (melted buildings, etc.) with PG turned on -- such as New York, London, and Paris. While there are some minor variations, basically what I see is that PG in most places looks great at 1000 ft. or more AGL, and often very good even at 800 feet. At lower altitudes I do start to see melted buildings, and at ground level it is pretty bad. For me, this is not a problem except on approach or takeoff in PG areas. So, in those areas I simply turn it off until I am above a thousand feet, and then turn it back on, so I can enjoy the tremendous detail afforded by PG textures. As I said, I am hooked! As nice as the autogen is, it does not approach the realism that PG offers. London, NYC, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, etc. look good without PG, but with it they look far better, at altitude.

My guess is that in time PG will improve to the point that even near ground level it will look reasonably good. In the meantime I am taking advantage of what it offers right now. For information, I have pretty good internet service (220 mbs) and this certainly helps. 

Alienware Aurora R11, 32 GB ram, Intel i7-10700F, GeForce RTX 2080 Super, Ultra graphics settings

 

 

1 hour ago, 1Wolf said:

I have blazing fast internet service here. 

This won't be much help if the Microsoft servers are the bottleneck.  Microsoft has millions of customers and I'd be surprised if those who pay for a service don't get priority over us freeloaders.

I get very patchy results here (southern Europe).  Places I visit for the first time are sometimes fine on the first run and sometimes take several minutes to load through.  The cache definitely works, though.  Eventually even London ends up looking pretty good.