1 hour ago, Bigmack said:

I keep PG on. For some reason the screen shot came out kind of washed look instead of what the actual screen

It's not just the colors. Look at the parking lot on the bottom towards the left of my PG OFF picture. It has no cars in it and it is not in the PG ON image. Your image has it as well. Same with the two white rectangular shapes to the right of that lot that look kind of like semi trailers. I wonder if PG might have gotten turned off by an update?

Anyway, thanks for trying to share your view. That was exactly what I was trying to see.

Just an FYI, for anyone that didn't know, the ground textures in both FS2020 & FS2024 are now capped at Zoom Level 18 since FS2020's Sim Update 16. Both sims now use the exact same ground imagery source data from Microsoft Azure, Flight Simulator 2024 NEVER supported source ground imagery beyond Zoom Level 18. Before Sim Update 16 FS2020's ground imagery textures were streamed in at Zoom Levels of up to 20, Asobo/Microsoft DELIBERATELY disabled the coding to allow zoom levels beyond 18 because it bottlenecked inferior consoles that can't handle those texture sets in the same way PC's are able to. For this reason I refuse to even consider purchasing FS2024 and haven't even fired up FS2020 in over 6 months.

Yes, it's had that massive of an impact on my flight experience. Before SU16 flying at 4K on my PC with my RTX 4090 in FS2020 was absolutely remarkable and gorgeous, it was like a dream come true. Now FS2020 is nothing but a shadow of it's former self, the graphics quality doesn't even resemble anything close to what the product was when I purchased it. Downgrading a product in the way Asobo/Microsoft has must violate some U.S. and/or International laws that are supposed to protect consumers, however I would assume the people now pandering to the massive console market will hide behind their pathetic EULA's and other excuses.

Edited Tuesday at 11:33 PM3 days by Jocko Flocko

6 hours ago, Jocko Flocko said:

Asobo/Microsoft DELIBERATELY disabled the coding to allow zoom levels beyond 18 because it bottlenecked inferior consoles that can't handle those texture sets in the same way PC's are able to.

I believe you, and it’s obvious from seeing the degradation. Is there a statement they made that shows this is the case?

On 6/8/2026 at 8:51 AM, V1ROTA7E said:

Yeah, that was kinda my suspicion. Just knowing how good it can look, and how 2020 looked towards the end, it's just a bummer. I get it, it's a flight sim...but it's like flying on Frontier vs flying on Cathay Pacific. They'll both get you where you need to go, but one is definitely a better experience lol.

I was reading somewhere yesterday that they no longer use Bing as their provider and everything has been moved to Azure. Not sure if this is true, but i guess the Bing stuff expired a while ago. Could explain the degradation, coupled with the LOD nerfing.

Let’s be honest. Even after all that nerfing the PS and Xbox still struggle. I’d expect more downgrades before end of life for msfs2024

11 hours ago, Jocko Flocko said:

Just an FYI, for anyone that didn't know, the ground textures in both FS2020 & FS2024 are now capped at Zoom Level 18 since FS2020's Sim Update 16. Both sims now use the exact same ground imagery source data from Microsoft Azure, Flight Simulator 2024 NEVER supported source ground imagery beyond Zoom Level 18. Before Sim Update 16 FS2020's ground imagery textures were streamed in at Zoom Levels of up to 20, Asobo/Microsoft DELIBERATELY disabled the coding to allow zoom levels beyond 18 because it bottlenecked inferior consoles that can't handle those texture sets in the same way PC's are able to. For this reason I refuse to even consider purchasing FS2024 and haven't even fired up FS2020 in over 6 months.

Yes, it's had that massive of an impact on my flight experience. Before SU16 flying at 4K on my PC with my RTX 4090 in FS2020 was absolutely remarkable and gorgeous, it was like a dream come true. Now FS2020 is nothing but a shadow of it's former self, the graphics quality doesn't even resemble anything close to what the product was when I purchased it. Downgrading a product in the way Asobo/Microsoft has must violate some U.S. and/or International laws that are supposed to protect consumers, however I would assume the people now pandering to the massive console market will hide behind their pathetic EULA's and other excuses.

Absolutely. I don't do any VFR flying any longer and have consistently been disappointed by what I see out of the window in MSFS 2024. Flying into Pafos just now looked very disappointing and low res. Yes there are global variations in terrain texture quality, but Cyprus isn't exactly Timbuktu is it.

I've got Rex Atmos going so I can't see the rubbish very distant terrain, as it creates a bit of a haze. I also zoom out loads to make things fairly acceptable.

Very disappointing. The sim has never looked worse in my opinion, (since 2020).

I've been tempted to get X-Plane, but then that has poor autogen and SayIntentions wouldn't work properly.

Edited Wednesday at 11:28 AM2 days by Langeveldt

On 6/8/2026 at 2:05 PM, Bigmack said:

I stopped using the Map Enhancement app. Whether I'm at 40000 ft or 1000 feet, I get great sharp textures and sharp distant mountain views. I saw no reason to keep subscription paying for textures when in game 2024 look so great. Waaay better than 2020.

Exactly my experience I haven't a clue what the complaints are from here in this thread.

On 6/17/2026 at 1:30 AM, Jocko Flocko said:

Yes, it's had that massive of an impact on my flight experience. Before SU16 flying at 4K on my PC with my RTX 4090 in FS2020 was absolutely remarkable and gorgeous, it was like a dream come true. Now FS2020 is nothing but a shadow of it's former self, the graphics quality doesn't even resemble anything close to what the product was when I purchased it. Downgrading a product in the way Asobo/Microsoft has must violate some U.S. and/or International laws that are supposed to protect consumers, however I would assume the people now pandering to the massive console market will hide behind their pathetic EULA's and other excuses.

Map Tile Server kh.ssl.ak.tiles.virtualearth.net - HTTP request error: The SSL connection could not be established, see inner exception.

I am still using the Map Enhancement, but I have yet to upgrade my sim to 24. Unfortunately the state of the program as of now is nothing more than a dissapointment in my case, since after the last updates I get an error whilst running the network diagnostics where it does not manage to get some sort of response from one of the servers, and for the program a very important one. This error has made it not useable for me as of now since I am a "set and forget" simmer and for me thats "bing latest maps" and google maps fallback, but with this error I dont get any photogrammetry in the sim while using the program, but if not using it, the PG loads exactly as it should so I have somewhat concluded that it has to be something that has changed in the program itself, but it would be nice to get it confirmed by someone else still having 2020 or both sims installed. Run a simple network diagnostics and feel free to share the result and it might be confirmed on other systems as well. Hosts file are all good and is being reverted as it should etc, so any confirmation from others is much appreciated, and to top it off, dev is active on other parts of his github, but my post that I created in regards to this quite urgent issue has gotten no attention.

On 6/16/2026 at 5:30 PM, Jocko Flocko said:

Downgrading a product in the way Asobo/Microsoft has must violate some U.S. and/or International laws that are supposed to protect consumers, however I would assume the people now pandering to the massive console market will hide behind their pathetic EULA's and other excuses.

I think you're vastly overblowing the 'downgrading' piece. I still see crisp textures almost everywhere I fly and that includes all over Europe, North & South America, Oceana, and it has not changed for me since starting using 2024 around April of 2025, and I used 2020 from Day 1 until then. The move to 2024 then only improved image quality secondary to jumps in polygon objects. Of note I use a Primary Scaling value of 130, and the NVCP sharpness reg edit and AMD FSR. I wonder if something is wrong w/ the traceroute from servers to your PC to leave you with this dour description. If things were as wretched as you imply you would be seeing a bigtime exodus even out of Avsim, but that is not happening, at all.

1 hour ago, Noel said:

I think you're vastly overblowing the 'downgrading' piece. I still see crisp textures almost everywhere I fly and that includes all over Europe, North & South America, Oceana, and it has not changed for me since starting using 2024 around April of 2025, and I used 2020 from Day 1 until then. The move to 2024 then only improved image quality secondary to jumps in polygon objects. Of note I use a Primary Scaling value of 130, and the NVCP sharpness reg edit and AMD FSR. I wonder if something is wrong w/ the traceroute from servers to your PC to leave you with this dour description. If things were as wretched as you imply you would be seeing a bigtime exodus even out of Avsim, but that is not happening, at all.

I thought that NVCP sharpness regedit got nerfed by Nvidia, if I'm thinking about the same one. Remind me a bit about it and how it's working for you?

2 minutes ago, Langeveldt said:

I thought that NVCP sharpness regedit got nerfed by Nvidia, if I'm thinking about the same one. Remind me a bit about it and how it's working for you?

Nope it still works thankfully, the regedit. It's just whenever you update the NV GPU driver you have to re-modify the value and reboot after which you can then use the sharpness slider w/ GPU scaling option in NVCP.

Of course 'sharpness' is not the same thing as resolution, but it does give an opportunity to get the most out of whatever native resolution we are privy to. I can see where perhaps there has been a subtle downgrade in maximum resolution in spots and maybe everywhere (and average resolution in a region) but I'm not certain, and that uncertainty only supports the perhaps qualifier I used above it's just not massive enough to go from a great experience to a major downgrade in experience. It's a bit subtle IOW. Certainly object detail is there for lateral viewing and there must be variance in base texture resolution by region. I have only flown into EDDH once and that was years ago, and just did again an hour ago landed there and was struck by low resolution textures. Immediately after that I took these images, downgraded by postimg.com and this texture detail at this altitude is apply fine. Actually I'm in a drone cam and I don't think all that far up. Standley Lake in the background a few miles from my home on the Colorado Front Range, we've over KBJC, and I play that golf course now and again:

Out of KPGA. So much of long flights in the southwest US look this detailed so it's not just Grand Canyon areas:

I quick pic from just over SABE, Buenos Aires:

And from the mountains east of Santiago, Chile:


Also, on these compression-degraded images above all were done at TLOD 100.

My former PC was Win 10 and I saved quite a few shots from 2021-22 and as I look at these I don't see any improvements over what we have now, but it is a small group of images granted.

Edited Thursday at 07:52 PM1 day by Noel

9 minutes ago, Noel said:

Nope it still works thankfully, the regedit. It's just whenever you update the NV GPU driver you have to re-modify the value and reboot after which you can then use the sharpness slider w/ GPU scaling option in NVCP.

Of course 'sharpness' is not the same thing as resolution, but it does give an opportunity to get the most out of whatever native resolution we are privy to. I can see where perhaps there has been a subtle downgrade in maximum resolution in spots and maybe everywhere (and average resolution in a region) but I'm not certain, and that uncertainty only supports the perhaps qualifier I used above it's just not massive enough to go from a great experience to a major downgrade in experience. It's a bit subtle IOW. Certainly object detail is there for lateral viewing and there must be variance in base texture resolution by region. I have only flown into EDDH once and that was years ago, and just did again an hour ago landed there and was struck by low resolution textures. Immediately after that I took these images, downgraded by postimg.com and this texture detail at this altitude is apply fine. Actually I'm in a drone cam and I don't think all that far up. Standley Lake in the background a few miles from my home on the Colorado Front Range, we've over KBJC, and I play that golf course now and again:

Out of KPGA. So much of long flights in the southwest US look this detailed so it's not just Grand Canyon areas:

Thanks. I'll take another look at it.

You are blessed if you are sticking to the USA though. Fly around Pafos in Cyprus, or even Athens in Greece, and it's not high res at all. Two fairly well known places. Cape Town in South Africa.

Edited Thursday at 04:08 PM1 day by Langeveldt

6 minutes ago, Langeveldt said:

Thanks. I'll take another look at it.

You are blessed if you are sticking to the USA though. Fly around Pafos in Cyprus, or even Athens in Greece, and it's not high res at all. Two fairly well known places. Cape Town in South Africa.

I fly all over North and South America, Europe, some Middle East, Oceana & the Far East and most everywhere it's very much the same as what you saw in those images I posted. But definitely regions do vary in my experience.

And now that I think about it we read in this thread seemingly plausible claims of reduction in resolution to accommodate console platforms and yet you can see in the images I posted, which are compressed, that if the console argument were true we would not be seeing this much detail in many areas of the world--and again I fly over large areas of the planet. Maybe it's more a case of server capacity allocated to MSFS, but it makes no sense to attribute other areas of lower resolution to the console argument.

Edited Thursday at 04:21 PM1 day by Noel

On 6/17/2026 at 7:21 AM, UAL4life said:

Let’s be honest. Even after all that nerfing the PS and Xbox still struggle. I’d expect more downgrades before end of life for msfs2024

More coming in SU5.1 from what I've read.

On 6/17/2026 at 6:59 AM, V1ROTA7E said:

I believe you, and it’s obvious from seeing the degradation. Is there a statement they made that shows this is the case?

Seb acknowledged the "issue" on a Q&A once and he claimed they don't know how it happened and that is was a bug. Of course he was just sweeping it under the carpet as they are known to do, no doubt if pressed again during another Q&A he'll say something different as it's regression I think they've done deliberately as history shows they have previous for exactly this kinda dumbing down of the graphics to suit their needs.

Edited Thursday at 04:28 PM1 day by MarcG

On 6/8/2026 at 2:50 PM, Langeveldt said:

Oh, so ME is still a big gamechanger in 2020 but not 2024? Can you still get good results using the Bing option in ME with 2020? Might tempt me into a reinstall.

In 2020 I thought it was. MSFS 2024 only allows 256x256 tiles, unlike 2020 that could load 512. Your best bet is to use MSFS_AutoFPS and if you have a decent GPU, you can set a max/min TLOD. Sometimes in rural areas I'll run 600 which is pretty nice and more similar to max default (400) in 2020.

I tried ME recently (in 2024) and sadly it didn't help at all. Someone on reddit claimed it was a huge difference but I either suspected it was the developer themselves posting or just a random higher-res area (they do exist). When I asked what area they were flying at they never answered.

Asobo tends to not really answer these questions either... clearly the tile size was reduced to better support Xbox. Just like newer addons that have to reduce the textures to 2k. Shame.

Edited yesterday at 01:18 AM1 day by ryanbatc

25 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

Asobo tends to not really answer these questions either... clearly the tile size was reduced to better support Xbox.

This seems like it could be addressed by having two pathways when streamed data is requested, if coming from console, then 256, if from PC then 512, or what have you. It just doesn't seem impossible to have done yet would have kept everyone happier. I wonder what % of all MSFS 2024 users are on PC v console.