A little comparison from central California in 20 and 24, looking east at mountains that are roughly 50mi/80 km away. Both with same high misty overcast setting at 30,000 feet, at 1 PM. Both grabs taken with devmode on, so that may slightly sharpen.

FS20 TLOD is set to 80

FS24 TLOD set to 200, roughly the same result on the mountains. Ground ortho clearly better

Edited Tuesday at 12:30 PM3 days by Nandengo12

15 minutes ago, Nandengo12 said:

A little comparison from central California in 20 and 24, looking east at mountains that are roughly 50mi/80 km away. Both with same high misty overcast setting at 30,000 feet, at 1 PM. Both grabs taken with devmode on, so that may slightly sharpen.

FS20 TLOD is set to 80

FS24 TLOD set to 200, roughly the same result on the mountains. Ground ortho clearly better

To be fair, I think a better comparison would be if you were a few thousand feet up above mountains and then do a comparison, that way any blurriness can be seen from close to the aircraft into the distance, rather than a range of mountains 50 miles away 😉

3 minutes ago, Rocky_53 said:

To be fair, I think a better comparison would be if you were a few thousand feet up above mountains and then do a comparison, that way any blurriness can be seen from close to the aircraft into the distance, rather than a range of mountains 50 miles away 😉

One of the main complaints in the fs.com thread was that distant scenery gets blurry, so I wanted to see what TLOD was necessary to prevent lack of distant sharpness in each sim. 50 mi seemed far enough

Edited Tuesday at 12:52 PM3 days by Nandengo12

3 hours ago, tttocs said:

My performance, and in particular VRAM usage, seemed dramatically improved on my first flight in SU6, but I did see some degradation in IQ and in the way things seemed to load in. A quick look at settings told the tale. One key thing had changed - dynamic settings had mysteriously been enabled. Turned that back off and things were pretty much as they had been on my system. YMMV and all that.

Curious as to how you're checking this. Things may well have been nerfed a bit, but I'm not seeing anything this noticeable on my system. But as I've noted before, I'm running 1080, not 4K where things may well be more apparent.

Scott

Just with pictures taken from previous SU's, and 2020 previously in the same area.

3 hours ago, Nandengo12 said:

A little comparison from central California in 20 and 24, looking east at mountains that are roughly 50mi/80 km away. Both with same high misty overcast setting at 30,000 feet, at 1 PM. Both grabs taken with devmode on, so that may slightly sharpen.

FS20 TLOD is set to 80

FS24 TLOD set to 200, roughly the same result on the mountains. Ground ortho clearly better

Sadly they pulled the 512 tiles from MSFS 2020 as well... I can't remember when it was done, but it saves them a lot of bandwidth.

30 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

Sadly they pulled the 512 tiles from MSFS 2020 as well... I can't remember when it was done, but it saves them a lot of bandwidth.

SU16 and Seb said it was a "bug"....

Just now, MarcG said:

SU16 and Seb said it was a "bug"....

A permanent bug...apparently

Everyone likes to blame consoles... Take a look at the latest Steam hardware survey:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

Most popular GPU? RTX 3060. The amount of folks that have high-end GPU's is tiny. Asobo is not just optimizing for consoles, they are optimizing for the most popular PC's in the wild. Do I wish they would include additional settings for high-end systems? Of course! But if increasing the LOD to higher numbers fixes blurriness, doesn't that count for something?

1 hour ago, Funky D said:

Everyone likes to blame consoles... Take a look at the latest Steam hardware survey:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

Most popular GPU? RTX 3060. The amount of folks that have high-end GPU's is tiny. Asobo is not just optimizing for consoles, they are optimizing for the most popular PC's in the wild. Do I wish they would include additional settings for high-end systems? Of course! But if increasing the LOD to higher numbers fixes blurriness, doesn't that count for something?

Xbox doesn't run on steam though. Xbox is by far Microsoft's largest platform for MSFS. Every reduction in quality I've seen, in MSFS, has been for console support.

Acorrding to Seb, set your texture resolution to the max and the highest quality textures from the dev will be used. This was added in an early SU.

OTOH you probably don't want to stream too many 8k textures. Use a big cache.

A great solution IMO so I always use the highest setting.

dd

Edited Tuesday at 07:50 PM2 days by Sky_Pilot071

I thought I'd go ahead and post some pics. 2020 on top, 2024 below. The 2020 pics were at least TLOD 200 at the time and I'm pretty sure I ran almost Ultra everything else.

I cranked my 2024 to Ultra and TLOD 400 and tried to match the angle and lighting roughly.

I run 1440p as well... if you're still on the flintstone's res of 1080p some of the clarity differences might be harder to notice... but to me it's night and day less crisp in 2024.

I remember when Allentown PA got that new vexcel TIN in 2020. I was just amazed at how crisp it was. Outstanding. It looks decent in 2024 but it's just not nearly as sharp

Orbx 74S overlaying default scenery

Sadly quite a bit blurrier in 24

11S on the northwestern tip of Washington state

Typically I much prefer 2024 trees... but they massacred this area in 2024 lol - it does use TIN now but I disabled it to show the lower res of base aerials. Not only is 2024 lower res the aerial is lacking contrast big time. 2024 didn't launch like this... well it did with the 256 tiles... but the TLOD has been lowered server side at least twice so far. What is a lot nicer is the atmospherics in 2024 - much more natural colors and sky shading/water shading. Wish we could have 512x512 back!

51 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

I thought I'd go ahead and post some pics. 2020 on top, 2024 below. The 2020 pics were at least TLOD 200 at the time and I'm pretty sure I ran almost Ultra everything else.

I cranked my 2024 to Ultra and TLOD 400 and tried to match the angle and lighting roughly.

I run 1440p as well... if you're still on the flintstone's res of 1080p some of the clarity differences might be harder to notice... but to me it's night and day less crisp in 2024.

I remember when Allentown PA got that new vexcel TIN in 2020. I was just amazed at how crisp it was. Outstanding. It looks decent in 2024 but it's just not nearly as sharp

Orbx 74S overlaying default scenery

Sadly quite a bit blurrier in 24

11S on the northwestern tip of Washington state

Typically I much prefer 2024 trees... but they massacred this area in 2024 lol - it does use TIN now but I disabled it to show the lower res of base aerials. Not only is 2024 lower res the aerial is lacking contrast big time. 2024 didn't launch like this... well it did with the 256 tiles... but the TLOD has been lowered server side at least twice so far. What is a lot nicer is the atmospherics in 2024 - much more natural colors and sky shading/water shading. Wish we could have 512x512 back!

Thanks for taking the time to do that Ryan. The difference is night and day from where I'm sitting.

The question is how much performance (no free lunch) would it require?

dd

7 hours ago, ryanbatc said:

Xbox doesn't run on steam though. Xbox is by far Microsoft's largest platform for MSFS.

My point was the PC users on 4080+ hardware are in the minority. The Steam hardware survey is the best indicator of all the different hardware PC gamers are using, not just the power users.

5 hours ago, ryanbatc said:

Sadly quite a bit blurrier in 24

Blurrier, but which is truer to real life? The 2020 image to me looks like an oversaturated, over-sharpened photograph. Then again, I'm not particularly a fan of the "HD mods" for other games (Cyberpunk comes to mind)... they always seem to over-sharpen every texture in the game, including textures that shouldn't have much texture in real life.

I thought the same of ORBX's KATL when I saw everyone praising it... the tarmac just looks over-sharpened and oversaturated to me.

Out of your 3 sets of pics, I think only the last is significantly worse in 2024. The first in particular just looks like two photos with different post processing performed. You could probably get very close to the 2020 image by using nvidia filters and sharpening. The 2020 image is sharper, yes, but it is also grainier as a result. To me, the first looks like a picture you'd find on the cover of Flying magazine, while the second is what I'd see when actually looking out the window. But my eyesight isn't the best, even with my glasses 😂

12 hours ago, Funky D said:

A todo el mundo le gusta culpar a las consolas... Echa un vistazo a la última encuesta de hardware de Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

¿La GPU más popular? La RTX 3060. La cantidad de personas con GPU de gama alta es mínima. Asobo no solo optimiza para consolas, sino también para los PC más populares. ¿Me gustaría que incluyeran ajustes adicionales para sistemas de gama alta? ¡Por supuesto! Pero si aumentar el nivel de detalle (LOD) soluciona el desenfoque, ¿acaso eso no cuenta para algo?

Optimizing a game is not downgrading it, you are confusing things. It means making the game run better with the exact same graphics settings. I have a 3060 and 16 GB of RAM, so I do not need them to lower texture quality or degrade the LOD for everyone else. That is what graphics settings are for, so I can do it myself, and 2024 has always run fine for me in terms of performance.