I have recently purchased the Intense pack version of FS Elemental and I find the add on to be ok, I haven't seen much improvement in the clouds, still more gray clouds showing than white I find the water textures to be very good. I just want to know what the difference between the Intense and Natural packs? I find the descriptions to be the same. I also want to know if you change a setting in Active Sky does it over write the textures of FS Elemental?

Changing a setting in AS itself does not overwrite textures. But if you go into AS Graphics and update there, they your weather textures will be updated according to whatever you pick.Someone else can comment on FS Element as I use Flight Environment

I was very high on this add on initially but it may very well be the cause of my out of memory problems, read on other forums that it's a memory hog. Needless to say I regret my purchase. Unless you have a 64 bit machine I feel scenery enhancements represent a certain risk.

What's going on is the cloud textures are too large. Like suggested to me in another thread you have to convert the cloud textures to DXT3 format before you use them in FS9. Just the same I found my performance seriously degraded after updating my textures to FS Elemental so there's something else going on besides the clouds. I rolled everything back and currently doing a test flight out of KLGA to see if things have truly returned to normal. I have a pretty beefy system for FS9 and wasn't too happy seeing a texture add-on compromising my performance. I'm done with that kind of headache...

One thing I noticed about FS Elemental is the lightning sometimes happens no where near a cloud, looks nice but thats about it. I think I will be getting REX when it comes out.

I have to change my tune on elemental. I figured out that my active sky graphics were still being generated. So I had to uncheck all AS graphic sky settings and re inject elemental. I must say it was much improved and worth the $15.00