1 hour ago, mikeymike said:

Well they should have gave us option to update or roll back 

As su15 was fine and no ctd 

This is what I want too. But it would be quite naive to expect it from the devs, who haven’t yet made a single statement over their last downgrade called SU16 in weeks.

Once an amazing flight sim, it is now officially turned into a game to please Xbox gamers.

 

Edited September 12, 2025Sep 12 by sarp_79

I still do not understand these "downgrade" comments regarding SU16. I have not really noticed a difference, but some people keep saying that the terrain textures are now lower resolution??

Some nerdy flight simmers can easily notice it, and it’s something technically proven by a world-famous third party developer when he published a changelog that stated the sim no longer supports hi res aerials just a few days before the SU16 official release.

It is my understanding that those "hi res aerials" were even higher resolution textures than normal that could only be accessed via the Map Enhancement mod. If that is the case, then I would not see a difference, because I have never used that mod.

It’s related to the zoom level (ZL) factor of the sim, or better call it a game now. It was ZL20 before SU16, now it’s ZL19 or lower.

Edited September 12, 2025Sep 12 by sarp_79

It's been reduced to zoom level 18 and the tile sizes have been reduced from 512X512 to 256X256. What they've done to the former sim is an absolute disgrace and highly noticeable on high end PC's that are running the game in 4K with maximum settings on RTX 4090's. Those playing FS 2024 never noticed it as you've been capped at Zoom Level 18 since that game was released. In FS 2020 For example, before SU16 the south of France was being streamed in at Zoom Level 20, not all places were, many were Zoom Level 18 and 19. However popular areas like European alps, New Zealand, South Western California, The U.K., etc were streamed in at Zoom Level 20. 

The disgraceful silence from the developers is the most telling and off putting, I paid for a simulation that looked better in 2021 than it does now in 2025.    

Is this just not very noticeable at 1080p resolution on a 24" monitor? 

2 hours ago, Jocko Flocko said:

The disgraceful silence from the developers is the most telling and off putting, I paid for a simulation that looked better in 2021 than it does now in 2025. 

*2019 actually 

 

I must be living in alternate world. MSFS2020 looks and runs excellently for me.

Having said that I use an AMD   CPU and GPU. 

So no NVIDIA driver issues. 

Edited September 25, 2025Sep 25 by Peterwk
Wrong word

33 minutes ago, Peterwk said:

I must be living in alternate world. MSFS2020 looks and runs excellently for me.

Having said that I use an AMD   CPU and GPU. 

So no NVIDIA driver issues. 

There are no nVidia driver issues, there has been a reduction in the terrain texture max resolution (Bing tiles "zoom level") that is visible in certain places and certain circumstances.

People who play in 4K resolution notice it more.

There is a very long thread on the official forums: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/msfs-su16-aggregation-of-complaints-about-poor-lod-bad-colour-low-resolution-blurry-terrain-textures/731741

Personally I haven't noticed any degradation, but it might be due to different factors (I fly 99% in Europe, I have a 1440p screen, I fly mostly IFR). 

On 9/25/2025 at 5:52 AM, Jocko Flocko said:

It's been reduced to zoom level 18 and the tile sizes have been reduced from 512X512 to 256X256. What they've done to the former sim is an absolute disgrace and highly noticeable on high end PC's that are running the game in 4K with maximum settings on RTX 4090's. Those playing FS 2024 never noticed it as you've been capped at Zoom Level 18 since that game was released. In FS 2020 For example, before SU16 the south of France was being streamed in at Zoom Level 20, not all places were, many were Zoom Level 18 and 19. However popular areas like European alps, New Zealand, South Western California, The U.K., etc were streamed in at Zoom Level 20. 

The disgraceful silence from the developers is the most telling and off putting, I paid for a simulation that looked better in 2021 than it does now in 2025.    

https://forms.microsoft.com/r/73WCVtJEwS

Ask them via that link and see what excuses they come up with during the next Q&A, if the question gets asked at all.

Can I just clarify something here? Were the standard Bing terrain textures being displayed at up to Zoom Level 20 prior to the SU16 update, or are we just talking about textures that could be accessed via the Map Enhancement mod?

23 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Can I just clarify something here? Were the standard Bing terrain textures being displayed at up to Zoom Level 20 prior to the SU16 update, or are we just talking about textures that could be accessed via the Map Enhancement mod?

Standard, nothing to do with the Map Enhancement Mod;

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/msfs-su16-aggregation-of-complaints-about-poor-lod-bad-colour-low-resolution-blurry-terrain-textures/

Micro/Asobo are preparing to land on Playstation platform on winter 2025/2026. 

The path to downgrade is now clear. Now I ask myself: does it still make sense to invest thousands of €/$ in high-performance hardware to get higher resolutions and performance that are then lowered?

https://flightsim.to/news/microsoft-flight-simulator-2024-lands-on-playstation-this-winter

Edited September 26, 2025Sep 26 by LIML2020

This comment in that thread really puzzles me.....

"even at just 3000 feet with high texture resolution and 200 TLOD the ground just looks so bad compared to before. everything is way too green and artificial looking, the extreme blurryness of ground textures just makes me no longer enjoy this sim. every time i take off and look outside i instantly see blurry ground textures it just puts me off, was not like this before, textures were crisp. i’ve lost most of my motivation to fly in msfs 2020, and msfs 2024 is unplayable so thats not an option."

If it were this bad on my PC, then I would also be complaining........but it really is not. Why is the situation so different for a lot of users?