Finally got some decent DL speed going. Still took longer than I would like using a 500MBS internet connection, but definitely better than what we started with. A little over an hour from KCHS to KJAX. Used the Cessna SkyCourier, which was one of the two new aircraft I was really interested in. Got enough commands mapped to my X52 that made it an okay controls experience.
Setting things up I turned all the graphics settings that had "Ultra" to that setting. In this shot, the Gamebar widget was showing CPU 3%, GPU 99%, VRAM 55%, RAM 56%, FPS 72. Live weather is on, but it's a beautiful day.
I forgot and was surprised while looking around in the cockpit that the passengers I loaded on the tablet, were actually back there. Thought that was pretty cool.
The propspin effect is terrible at some view angles and at all angles of the sun, the individual prop blades cast shadows on the aircraft. When the sun is straight ahead, the blade shadows run the length of he aircraft. Makes it very difficult to get an exterior view screen shot where the prop shadows don't spoil it.
This is a shot coming into north Florida. I didn't see scenery anywhere along the flight path that made me go wow, or that I thought was better than 2020. But, I also wasn't bush hopping to see how good the foliage was down low. This unblended textures area was probably the worst I saw along the way.
Another odd effect was the engine heat blur. definitely a huge step backwards from 2020.
Approaching KJAX, there were no aircraft showing around the terminal until I was almost on top of the airport. Then they started warping in. Sometimes by bits and pieces until the entire aircraft was there. Also, all generic paints or blank aircraft. Never saw a real-world airliner even though I could hear ATC talking to them at KJAX. One real world carrier took off while I was taxiing along the runway. The accelerating engine sound was there but no aircraft. All the buildings at both airports are pretty bland. All ground vehicles warped in also.
While in flight, even with my band width, I got the error accessing live traffic message. Then later the Azure speech thing was unavailable affecting how the AT voices sounded.
The ATC menu and function is completely whacked. The delay between picking one of the comms options in the drop-down menu and getting a response was very long. The reply back from ATC was so long I couldn't tell if I had actually hit it. There was also so much "generic" airline calls that the options I needed to pick weren't available long enough to be useful. Finally coming into KJAX on IFR, it got so frustrating that I canned the IFR flight plan, but each time I hit the "Nearest Airport Option", ATC would immediately redirect me to Orlando, before the airport list to pick from even came up.
The last oddity of the flight was after ending the flight and then exiting out of MSFS2024, to find that the sim had apparently decided to blitz my keyboard. Got that back by unplugging and re-plugging it in.
So the good thing about today is that I finally got past the initial connection issues. Better but still slow to go from sim start to being in the aircraft, even at 500mps. At least I can explore the sim to see what potential it has without that headache. But, for now, I haven't seen anything so far that makes me think this is an improvement over 2020. It's going to take some serious "wow look at that moments" to get over the streaming concept itself, the long time between sim start and cockpit, worst GUI ever, and even that stupid personal avatar in the ATC comms window. I'm not at all saying it's bad or that I won't keep flying it, but it's most certainly not making think I won't go back to 2020 yet.
Forest
Setting things up I turned all the graphics settings that had "Ultra" to that setting. In this shot, the Gamebar widget was showing CPU 3%, GPU 99%, VRAM 55%, RAM 56%, FPS 72. Live weather is on, but it's a beautiful day.
I forgot and was surprised while looking around in the cockpit that the passengers I loaded on the tablet, were actually back there. Thought that was pretty cool.
The propspin effect is terrible at some view angles and at all angles of the sun, the individual prop blades cast shadows on the aircraft. When the sun is straight ahead, the blade shadows run the length of he aircraft. Makes it very difficult to get an exterior view screen shot where the prop shadows don't spoil it.
This is a shot coming into north Florida. I didn't see scenery anywhere along the flight path that made me go wow, or that I thought was better than 2020. But, I also wasn't bush hopping to see how good the foliage was down low. This unblended textures area was probably the worst I saw along the way.
Another odd effect was the engine heat blur. definitely a huge step backwards from 2020.
Approaching KJAX, there were no aircraft showing around the terminal until I was almost on top of the airport. Then they started warping in. Sometimes by bits and pieces until the entire aircraft was there. Also, all generic paints or blank aircraft. Never saw a real-world airliner even though I could hear ATC talking to them at KJAX. One real world carrier took off while I was taxiing along the runway. The accelerating engine sound was there but no aircraft. All the buildings at both airports are pretty bland. All ground vehicles warped in also.
While in flight, even with my band width, I got the error accessing live traffic message. Then later the Azure speech thing was unavailable affecting how the AT voices sounded.
The ATC menu and function is completely whacked. The delay between picking one of the comms options in the drop-down menu and getting a response was very long. The reply back from ATC was so long I couldn't tell if I had actually hit it. There was also so much "generic" airline calls that the options I needed to pick weren't available long enough to be useful. Finally coming into KJAX on IFR, it got so frustrating that I canned the IFR flight plan, but each time I hit the "Nearest Airport Option", ATC would immediately redirect me to Orlando, before the airport list to pick from even came up.
The last oddity of the flight was after ending the flight and then exiting out of MSFS2024, to find that the sim had apparently decided to blitz my keyboard. Got that back by unplugging and re-plugging it in.
So the good thing about today is that I finally got past the initial connection issues. Better but still slow to go from sim start to being in the aircraft, even at 500mps. At least I can explore the sim to see what potential it has without that headache. But, for now, I haven't seen anything so far that makes me think this is an improvement over 2020. It's going to take some serious "wow look at that moments" to get over the streaming concept itself, the long time between sim start and cockpit, worst GUI ever, and even that stupid personal avatar in the ATC comms window. I'm not at all saying it's bad or that I won't keep flying it, but it's most certainly not making think I won't go back to 2020 yet.
Forest