2 minutes ago, Aglos77 said:

But if it's the strength of MFS, it's like telling us to disable the X-Plane flight model and replace it with ace combat.

Sorry but no, it's not. 

The photogrammetry in MSFS is covering a very tiny area and is totally optional, since you do get a very nice scenery rendering already with traditional autogen only. The photogrammetry is nice if you don't plan to fly too low, but that's it. Using an helicopter to land in a photogrammetry city is as horrible in MSFS2020 as in MSFS2024. If you want to land in a city, you turn photogrammetry OFF and enjoy nice looking buildings, may they be generic or scenery-based.

True, you do get Terrain only streaming with Photogrammetry OFF … something we got for decades thru MegaScenery Earth, Orbx, etc. etc. (just not streaming and it costs $$$)

It’s landclass … so the buildings will not be accurate to real world, they’ll be an approximation that is selected from the landclasses available (how it’s been for decades).

I’m actually very pro Landclass as it can deliver pretty close approximations IF there is enough variance in the landclass objects and they are good high resolution objects and place and scaled correclty.  The issue with a huge variety of landclass is lookup performance.  

Still need the city specific buildings and POI which is again how it’s done going back decades.  Unfortunately MSFS will sometimes put a skyscraper in place of a radio tower, but with careful pruning those issues can be resolved.  Photogrammetry is just visual garbage down low, yet survey after survey, the majority of users (like 90%) enable Photogrammetry.  

So the push is now for Photogrammetry which is the wrong direction for today’s bandwidth and server limitations.  Unless everyone has 1G+ bandwidth and Microsoft fork out the cash to service all concurrent users on which ever server is being used at the time and guaranteed 1Gbps rather than throttle it … I don’t see that happening within 10 years from now and certainly NOT “part of the original sales package”. 

MSFS also needs to drastically improve terrain resolution, it’s way behind from XP and P3D. 

Edited February 23, 20251 yr by CO2Neutral

3 minutes ago, CO2Neutral said:

MSFS also needs to drastically improve terrain resolution, it’s way behind from XP and P3D. 

Terrain resolution ? Do you mean the ground texture (not local scenery related) resolution ? Or mesh resolution .

For the mesh resolution, MSFS2020 was already outstanding, and it was visible for example in Switzerland in some areas. Even bigger boulders would get a  terrain bump, so the mesh resolution was higher than was FSX and P3D could do (max there is 1m resolution, if I'm not mistaken). I have no idea what is the maximum mesh resolution in XPlane but I do remember how heavy XPlane meshes can become. I have yet to see a very high resolution mesh in XPlane though, and the highest I've seen in P3D/FSX was the Mount St.Helens which was advertised as being the only part in the sim where the mesh reached the resolution of 3 meters (from FSX Acceleration if I remember correctly).

For the ground texture resolution, the default textures res is already higher than 50 cm/pixel, since you can see the white lines on roads (so it's definitely below 1m/pixel). I know as well that you can get higher ground texture resolution by using "MSFS Map Enhancement" which has an option to download higher resolution from Google Maps or so. Concerning FSX and P3D, I know for sure they can go down to 7 cm/pixel and I don't remember about XPlane. I think some OrbX True Earth "HD" sceneries have that 7cm/pixel resolution, but I'm not sure if it's everywhere.

Then there's the ground textures for local sceneries, which is a totally different topic.

1 minute ago, Daube said:

Do you mean the ground texture (not local scenery related) resolution

Ground texture resolution … not the limits, but what is actually provided.

Yes, custom ground textures is a different topic.

The PG thing was sarcasm, I in 2020 already had it disabled It  and most simers I know don't use PG either despite the fact that many in Avsim and on the net despise all other sims precisely because of PG considering them archaic.