Grey textures on vehicles when in exterior camera on MSFS 2020

[sjbodnar]

So, all of sudden I'm getting grey textures on baggage cars, loaders and tugs from the normal exterior view, not a drone view. I have to zoom way in for the textures to appear. I even set the LOD slider which I normally have at 150 to 200 and it made no difference, I also don't use any Auto FPS tools. I have never seen anything like this, and I have been using GSX for a while. I actually have been away from the sim for several weeks, so I did the updates, and I noticed this right off the bat. I tried reinstalling and clearing out my community folder, but same results. I have no idea what could have triggered this.

[virtuali]

Your graphic settings are too high, or you have too many add-ons running together ( or both ), so the sim is slow loading the correct LOD for that distance. Also, check the Object LOD slider, to be not less than 100.

[sjbodnar]

Okay. Let me try adjusting the graphics settings. The NVIDIA driver updated before all this, and the NVIDIA App might have optimized the graphics, changing what I had before. I'll get back to you.

Thanks,
Steve.

[sjbodnar]

Hi Umberto,

So, I was able to do more testing this past week and I came to the same results. I used a default A320, no addon sceneries nor other addons. The LOD was set to 150. Also to note, I have high end CORSAIR Vengeance system using an Intel i9 chip and NVIDIA RTX 4090.

Once I got the same results stripped down, I decided to dig deeper, and I turned on the Debug LODs. What I discovered is that the grey textures I am seeing are around LOD 5 and above of the models. Once I get to LOD 2/3, we obviously look much better, but you really have to zoom in. It also seems to be mostly an issue with the baggage cart tug and the baggage belt loader. Again, the issue is not with using a drone camera flying around. It is simply switching from the cockpit view to external camera.

As I said before I've been using GSX for quite a while now, and what you have done to provide immersion for airliners and airports is wonderful. I have never had an issue, until all the FS24 compatibility updates and optimization began rolling out. As I have searched through this forum and Discord for answers, I think there are other people seeing this change as well, we are all just referring to it differently. All these posts seem to come after late November as well.

I fully understand this not an easy situation for any of the developers trying to make products work on different platforms (FS20 / FS24). It's an unenviable situation, especially when Asobo early on seemed to indicate there would be good compatibility. Knowing from the PMDG forums, that is not so much the case, and I believe I read somewhere that scenery developers say the LOD optimization is a bit different in FS24. I could be wrongly remembering that. I've done a lot of searching this week.

Unfortunately, I think GSX visually has taken a bit of knock in FS20 because of this. I know visually that screenshots of what I have shared are not what I have seen from GSX until now. I wish had before screenshots to show; however, I am more of a flyer and less of a screenshot taker. For now, I am staying in FS20, until more of my favorite aircraft are functional in FS24. I don't know if there is anything that can be optimized to help bring back the look in FS20. I have numerous more screenshots, which I can share, I just don't want to flood this post with them.

Thank you again Umberto.
Steve.