[initplus]

The thing I find strange about MSFS is that the 3D visualisation is in many cases much worse than the Google/Apple maps. It seems to replace many buildings with generic models - they have the same shape, but the textures and style is obviously just a generic sculpted to fit. Apple/Google maps use the actual textures of the buildings themselves.

For my home city for example Apple maps has full 3d for every single building and it looks amazaing, but in MSFS most of the buildings are replaced with generic copy paste American suburbia style structures.

[blooalien]

It's likely to help keep the size of the game data "under control" vs the map data streamed at you by Apple Maps or Google Earth / Street View bein' streamed in small(ish) chunks from a massive database of texture data stored on corporate server disk pools.

[Stevvo]

You get much a much higher LOD in the simulator than on Google; gaming GPUs have a lot more to work with than integrated/consumer GPUs. Google Earth just looks better sometimes because the source data and reconstruction is better. They are really dedicated to in-house photogrammetry for many years, when Microsoft/Bing have just been buying data from 3rd parties.

[initplus]

The game actually streams in much of its contents also. They still stream in the satellite ground textures, but they don't use these to texture models in the same way as Google/Apple maps.