Find which MSFS 2024 photogrammetry cities and areas are covered, plus how to fix missing, blocky or melted streamed 3D scenery.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 includes streamed photogrammetry in more than 500 TIN cities and over 100,000 square kilometres of countryside. It covers many major centres, including New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, San Francisco and Honolulu, but coverage is selective, has irregular boundaries and changes through simulator, World and City Updates.
TIN means triangulated irregular network: aerial photographs are converted into a textured 3D mesh of buildings, trees and terrain. This is different from the aerial imagery and automatically generated buildings used across the simulator's whole-planet map coverage.
Which major MSFS 2024 cities use photogrammetry?
Coverage reaches hundreds of cities, so these are representative, well-established examples rather than a permanent master list.
| Region | Examples with photogrammetry coverage |
|---|---|
| United States and Canada | New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Las Vegas, Honolulu, Toronto and Vancouver |
| United Kingdom | London, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge and Oxford |
| Continental Europe | Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona and Rome |
| Japan | Tokyo, Yokohama, Sendai, Utsunomiya, Takamatsu and Tokushima |
| Australia and New Zealand | Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington and Queenstown |
Coverage does not necessarily include every suburb or every building within a named city. It may stop abruptly at the edge of an aerial survey, and separate districts can use imagery captured at different dates or quality levels. Other regions also contain TIN cities; the table is deliberately a practical sample, not a claim that unlisted cities have no coverage.
City data is also revised. For example, the United States city-detail refresh covering San Francisco and Honolulu enhanced locations that simmers may already have known from earlier world data. An update can replace or refine an existing mesh rather than add a completely new photogrammetry city.
What countryside areas have photogrammetry?
MSFS 2024 contains over 100,000 square kilometres of selected countryside photogrammetry, but that figure is an aggregate rather than one continuous region.
Rural coverage appears in selected survey zones and around some urban captures, coastlines and detailed terrain areas. The simulator does not provide a dependable boundary-level catalogue of every rural tile, so users may see 3D mesh transition into ordinary aerial ground textures and generated vegetation part-way across an area.
Does every World Update area have photogrammetry?
No; a World Update can improve a country or region without turning the entire area into photogrammetry.
- Photogrammetry produces an irregular textured mesh based on aerial image captures.
- Autogen buildings are generated from building footprints and use repeated roof and wall textures.
- Handcrafted landmarks are individually modelled points of interest, not proof that the surrounding city uses photogrammetry.
- Terrain and aerial-image improvements can sharpen mountains, coastlines and ground textures without adding a 3D photographic mesh.
A common mistake is to install a regional update and assume every town inside it should become a TIN city. Our guide to updating streamed scenery and World Updates explains how the simulator, optional content and online world data interact.
How do I check whether photogrammetry is working?
A known photogrammetry city should show uniquely shaped buildings and terrain rather than rows of repeated generic structures.
- Update the simulator and world content. An old or incomplete content state can leave updated city data unavailable.
- Enable online world data. In the online or data settings, switch on Online Functionality and the Bing world-data and Photogrammetry options presented by your version.
- Check data restrictions. A bandwidth limit, exhausted data allowance or unstable connection can prevent the higher-detail mesh from loading.
- Test a known location. Fly over central New York, London or Tokyo at normal sightseeing altitude. Allow time for the detailed tiles to stream before deciding that coverage is absent.
- Rebuild the rolling cache if available. Stale or damaged cached tiles can cause missing sections, sudden low-detail patches or mismatched scenery.
Why do photogrammetry buildings look melted?
Melted roofs, distorted walls and trees fused into buildings usually mean the photogrammetry mesh has loaded, but its source capture lacks close-range detail.
Photogrammetry is intended to look convincing from the air, not to reproduce every façade at street level. Blocky scenery that gradually sharpens points to streaming or level-of-detail behaviour; permanently distorted geometry is usually part of the source mesh. On PC, higher terrain and object detail settings can retain detail farther away, but they cannot repair flawed source data.
Can photogrammetry be downloaded for offline use?
There is no single package containing all MSFS 2024 photogrammetry for permanent offline use. The simulator primarily streams the mesh and may retain some tiles in its cache, but a cache is not a complete or permanent archive.
Without online world data, MSFS falls back to less detailed scenery. Installed World or City Update content can add local assets and improvements, but it does not convert the complete photogrammetry layer into an offline world.
Can I add photogrammetry to an uncovered city?
PC users can install compatible city or regional scenery where the default world lacks suitable coverage. Our MSFS scenery add-on library includes downloadable city and regional enhancements.
Imported meshes can consume substantial storage and graphics memory, and their colour, night lighting or edge blending may not match the default scenery. Avoid running two packages for the same city at once. Xbox and PlayStation users cannot install loose PC Community-folder packages, so console availability depends on compatible in-simulator content.