Major_Majestic_X

Yes the default aircraft in P3D are also properly mipmapped. For SGSSAA, depends on the clouds in the sky. Active Sky draws a ton of sprites for the full overcast cloud coverage, so there, the SGSSAA hits very hard. In other conditions it's much less hard on performance. As of right now, SSAA or SGSSAA is unusable with Dynamic Lights enabled, even if you've a 2080ti. The Dynamic Lighting is broken with super sampling. But disabling Dynamic Lighting defeats the purpose of using P3Dv4. If you disable that, you might as well go back to FSX, because it really adds to the visuals. With Dynamic Lighting enabled you can only use MSAA, & just bear & accept the shimmers.

P3D has an option to enable mipmapping in Virtual Cockpit. But, so far, apart from PMDG, I don't recall any other payware aircraft having any effect from having that option enabled. Can't enable mipmaps that don't exist in the first place. Yes, you're right SGSSAA is more efficient, but using it in P3D ends up being counterproductive. You see, the clouds in P3D are 2D Sprites. Using SGSSAA and having a cloudy sky will hammer your GPU because it's super sampling those hundreds of sprites in the overcast cloud layers, & thus ends up hitting harder than simple SSAA which just increases the resolution and then down-samples the image. In other games, SGSSAA won't be that punishing.

It's because the old ESP engine & even X-Plane have way too many transparency textures as opposed to geometry surfaces that modern game engines' use. The shimmering is very easy to fix. You simply need to use mipmaps. It's an ancient technique & it simply works. As to why developers refuse to mipmap their textures is simply beyond me. I've read something along the lines "they make textures blurry", I mean yes, that's exactly what should happen, the further a texture is the blurrier it should look. It should lower in resolution the further you're from a texture. That's how real life & your eyes sorta work. The shimmers happen because its rendering a 4096 texture in full resolution at a distance >50nm in the sim. It's way too sharp for that distance, & therefore glitters & shimmers. A properly mipmaped texture will not be very blurry & look a hundred times better than a shimmering glittering mess. Not only that, but put less load on your Graphics Card, & save performance. What's worse is you can't use techniques like MSAA Anti Aliasing on such surfaces to resolve it. MSAA is much more efficient and less resource intensive on modern cards. The only other way to resolve the issue for the average person , who doesn't know graphics design, or how to mipmap the textures themselves, is to use SSAA, or worse yet, SGSSAA. Which will absolutely destroy your performance, & it's not really solving the problem, just steam rolling it. This is also a very popular advice on a lot of forums, including Avsim, using NVInspector. On modern engines with geometry surfaces, the MSAA technique really helps, and I hope Microsoft strictly enforces in their SDK, the use of mipmaps for transparency textures, so we don't have to suffer performance & bad visuals, due part in lapse of 3PD.

Oh sorry, I misunderstood. I guess a lot of places don't have satellite imagery, maybe because they are secret bases and don't want to show the world what they hiding haha. China is a very reserved country in that regards so makes sense to me they'd have some agreement to not map certain places for their own national security. In these cases FS2020 will probably use local data from the sim to fill these gaps in, while azure insures they are as well blended as possible.

You can find examples such as these:

Some personal observations: It appears that the LOD & Mipmaps in Microsoft Flight Simulator scale pretty similarly to Google Earth. Although at high altitudes & over long distances, the Mipmaps used by Google Earth are extremely low poly & of low quality. Maybe Bing 3D does it better, I don’t know, because I didn’t use Bing Maps. I found their app super janky & inconvenient. I’m more comfortable with Google Earth. Regardless, it appears that Microsoft is running some algorithm on top to clean out the low poly buildings, trees, etc. at high altitudes and over longer distances, to make them appear much better and give the impression of better LOD. Of course this is just speculation. Maybe the LOD is actually spectacularly higher, but my opinion is that Azure is doing that for them, thus saving on computation costs. Nonetheless, it’s still incredible. Areas that are not covered under 3D satellite imagery data, The Sim seems to be using good old autogen system, although vastly improved over ESP platforms and seen to blend in well with the rest of the world. FSX vs FS2020 - Screenshot comparison: https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/556466-screenshot-comparison-fsx-vs-fs2020/ Scenery Locations: https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/555678-e3-trailer-scenery-locations/