The Flight Sim Doctor

I've found the main culprit to be VRAM heavy airports. I've had to turn texture size down for those, and turn photogrammetry off. But when random corners of the world that aren't fussed over by Msobo look this good consistently, it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. I just wonder what's going to become of the app. It's a third party guy hacking around and making money off stopping MS/Asobo degrading their product? Feels like taking your supercar to some dodgy backstreet garage to get it mapped for extra power. It's the clarity of the foreground and the midground I like. (And the screenshot absolutely doesn't do justice to how good it looks in sim). Crete would be heavily degraded in the native sim, with muddy, slightly blurred texturing on these steep terrain sections. I could crank it up much further here, but I don't want to be messing around with settings when I'm coming into JFK, so this is definitely on the conservative side.

I use dynamic frame and a constant TLOD of 150 throughout, OLOD of 100. As everything is pretty sharp and sweet I don't feel like I need to be tweaking that value all the time.

Try with the MSFS 2024 default map, and go to between medium and high. You essentially get everything we've become used to and it's a bit sharper. Any other maps just introduce weird tiling, artefacts when they interfere with your base cacheing. It's completely transformed the sim for me, no degredation at all, and decent frames (once you find the right setting) I'm irritated that it shows just how poor the sim looks out of the box now though. We've got used to really poor terrain, and those of us with decent hardware should have better.

Well i took the plunge, and I am not disappointed. What a wonderful app. And how depressing they see fit to degrade our experience over the years when this is how it could look natively. (MSFS default maps. High res within app, building mod on, LOD 150, 4K) - These shots were taken in countries that don't have particularly good textures natively in MSFS 2024. Any compression is because of steam's screenshot degredation. Trust me it is absolutely crisp everywhere. The fact you can use native maps in this app now and just crank it up shows how dreadfully degraded this sim has become. And here is a reminder of how it looked before (granted I am higher, but I'm in a region with the same native terrain quality in the same country)

I've turned off photogrammetry which has helped a lot. Having crisp textures globally is worth the tradeoff. I've managed to crank the res up to high on the app. Being able to use the default MSFS2024 textures now and have them sharper is a game changer. (Or back to where we should have been anyway if they didn't keep degrading everything)

Oh wow, bought the paid licence, massive difference and clarity. Brings the system to its knees though. A few notches above default seems a nice tradeoff.

It just looks a bit sad to me at LTAI. This is LOD 200, MSFS map, the enhancement mod with "extreme" setting enabled (and I haven't hit the 15 minute limit). Not zoomed in. To me this is P3D level of scenery, such is the degradation in texture quality. No different to the default MSFS2024, unless I'm doing something very wrong.

Antalya is one of the places where I see this downgrade at its worst. To the west of the airport are these beautiful mountains that look like slush as they are just the right distance from the airport to be "degraded" (this even at decent LOD). So if I use this app, with the extreme setting, things should be relatively crisp, and I can still use the original MSFS map, right?

Wasn't impressed after quickly firing this up. Yes, do appear to get a very crisp, high detailed ring of texturing around the aircraft, but then 20 miles out absolutely nothing, Roblox stuff. This on the highest level with decent internet, LOD of 250

When people say textures have improved, do they mean the disappointing sort of mushy mountains, even when running LODs of well over 200? I know mileage varies depending on where you are in the world, but I've had to run Atmos with the AB preset 4 just to shield the ugly distant mountains when I'm on the ground. A bit of haze looks better than the FS98 texturing I had on Vancouver Island last month. Perhaps it's to do with the Bing imagery, but even taking off from Milan Malpensa, the Alps were a big white blob of yuck, while things close to the aircraft looked great. Is this what people are referring to?

I'm still getting no improvement on AI traffic landing gears, not that I think it was fixed anyway. Still, the sim is in great shape.

Yeah let's just get an A220 that doesn't stutter before we worry about Clive and Sue getting their Werther's Originals in at the BP garage.

A terrain LOD of 300 is pretty high and you shouldn't be seeing this. It could be related to server problems if it's not what you usually see. The terrain res has been dumbed down in recent years, but you shouldn't see it loading up. It does sometimes quickly sharpen when you change views.

Apart from no landing gear visibility with AI aircraft, and having to use Rex Atmos and a bit of minor sharpening on Reshade, the sim is looking and performing astonishingly well. 9/10

Does raising OLOD help at all?