brinx

I agree, dreadful was my first thought as well. It stuck out like a sore thumb with the large tree blobs in comparison to the trees seen in the non-photogrammetry areas. Microsoft blends their photogrammetry with in-game elements like trees, buildings, etc. Often times blobs tree are covered by the in-game trees. I think this addon looks bad because they are dropping the raw files into Xplane(no post processing). Photogrammetry on its own will not look good, it has to be combined with other assets. It also needs to be cleaned up before injecting it into the sim.

It would be massively expensive, not massively inefficient. There’s a big difference. I’m not expecting X‑Plane to do any streamed ortho, nor did I advocate for that. I’m only pointing out why orthophotos are not the inefficient “stone‑age tech” you believe them to be.

This came across my feed. Jorg was speaking about the update.

Your argument falls flat. It’s not expensive because it’s inefficient — it’s expensive because you need to launch and maintain a constellation of satellites. Only a limited number of companies do this, and Microsoft and Google must license imagery from them, which is not cheap. That’s why the cost is high. But for those companies, the process itself is not inefficient. The real question is: inefficient for whom? If you mean someone sitting at home ripping or downloading terabytes of orthos, processing them, and trying to clean up shadows, clouds, and color issues — then yes, that’s inefficient. If this is what you mean, then you should make that clear. But even in that scenario, the inefficiency isn’t due to “stone age tech.” It is inefficient because you’re ripping tiles from map providers in a way they actively try to prevent. They want to make unauthorized tile‑ripping inefficient, which is why they ban IPs that make too many requests. This is why streaming in MSFS is such a liked feature. For companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, handling orthophotos is not inefficient, and storage is not a problem for them. 2 Petabytes of high resolution orthophotos is nothing when you are talking about their storage capacities of exabytes. Just completely wrong, see above.

Saying orthos are "stone‑age tech" without proper context is simply an attempt to downplay their importance and relevance today. Orthos aren’t mandatory, but they massively improve immersion and are more relevant now than ever before. By your logic, cars, planes, and even transistors (invented in 1947) would also fall into the “stone‑age tech” category. This ignores the fact that the technology behind orthophotos has evolved — and continues to evolve — over the years. Orthos, just like the items mentioned above, have existed for decades, but the technology behind them has advanced dramatically. Ortho images can be color‑corrected, have clouds removed, and have shadows removed using modern techniques, including AI.

The survey results are out, and I was very curious to see how the results for the top 2 sims (MSFS, Xplane) compared to last year. There were 42,000 responses. It looks like things are stable for the most part. The major change being that MSFS 2024 usage is now double that of last year's usage. https://navigraph.com/blog/survey-2026 primary sim usage vs last year: Xplane - 13.9% to 13.6% MSFS - 76.9% to 77.3%

I couldn't find my floppy disk; I must have misplaced it. But booting from my hard drive took 14.5 seconds. Why are you on an insider build of windows unless you love being a beta tester. Insider builds are prerelease bleeding-edge versions intended for testing/feedback. I personally never run an insider build on my primary computer. I'm assuming you are reporting your issues at least.

Are you trying to say I may receive ads based on places I've visited while using the map service😄 I wonder how they figured out when I arrived at home and at work without any additional data. (oh, tracking my location patterns). And I was worried about my anonymized GPU/CPU model being leaked via telemetry😁.

I'm not surprise to see users jumping back to windows after testing Linux. Windows is the best platform for gamers seeking compatibility and simplicity. I'm looking forward to the dedicated game mode coming later this year (Windows 11 only). Windows 11 has become my favorite OS since Windows XP. Fast boot times and I've never had a PC crash (been using since day 1 release). Stability beats windows 10 for me. My second favorite OS is Linux (Ubuntu). My windows terminal defaults to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Anticipating Ubuntu 26 but Linux cannot meet my needs for a primary OS. One shortcoming of Linux is that games that require kernel level-anti cheat systems are not supported. Try running a game like Destiny 2 on Linux and enjoy having your account banned by the developer. Besides that, I have too many peripherals/hardware with no Linux driver support. It's great for my DEV work though.

You are wrong. It is much more sophisticated than a "shader you run on your iPhone when making thumbnails". It was mentioned in the hands-on videos posted above by Baber20 that it uses motion vectors. It uses both pixel color and motion vector. Without motion vector, the lighting in the image produced would not be consistent from frame to frame, resulting in flickering and other issues. In quote below, NVIDIA also makes this clear. The previews look amazing to me. I think the lighting may look amazing in-flight simulation also. If NVIDIA can use frame gen to give us double/triple frames and now with DLSS 5 can produce more natural/realistic lighting, I see no issue. IMO, all the top games will have this in short order. Most talking it down will be on AMD or will be anti-AI on graphics. Some users online are zooming to the Nth degree trying to find issues that will be unnoticeable in Realtime.

Thanks

What stream?

I have it enabled! It's an important feature of the sim for me.

The level of the ridiculous comments is mind boggling. I'm telling myself people can't possibly believe the nonsense that they are spreading. Let's not turn this thread into slander with all the disinformation. I agree with charliearon.

I think you are getting the wrong impression from reading the forums. Linux is still only 3% maybe 4% of the PC market from the latest figures. It is hardly worth the investment for many companies producing commercial software. As a result, it relies heavily on open-source software. While hardware support has improved a lot since I first used it 25+ years ago, many users will find that a lot of hardware still will not work on Linux. Even amongst the 3-4% share, a lot of users will still dual boot to windows. I don't see it approaching 10% any time soon. It's still a good OS for users that understand what they are getting into though.