after reviewing all officially released videos, I haven't noticed any shimmering like what I saw in other sim official videos, is it due to new rendering engine/technique, good video drivers/profiles if any or a combination of both?

What monitor are you viewing them on? All the official videos are rendered at 4K which by itself reduces aliasing, but viewing them on a monitor with a smaller resolution performs additional downsampling. If you view the videos at full size on any monitor, there is still quite some aliasing and shimmering to be seen.

Probably thanks to a temporal anti-aliasing. 

It's because the old ESP engine & even X-Plane have way too many transparency textures as opposed to geometry surfaces that modern game engines' use. The shimmering is very easy to fix. You simply need to use mipmaps. It's an ancient technique & it simply works. As to why developers refuse to mipmap their textures is simply beyond me. I've read something along the lines "they make textures blurry", I mean yes, that's exactly what should happen, the further a texture is the blurrier it should look. It should lower in resolution the further you're from a texture. That's how real life & your eyes sorta work. The shimmers happen because its rendering a 4096 texture in full resolution at a distance >50nm in the sim. It's way too sharp for that distance, & therefore glitters & shimmers. A properly mipmaped texture will not be very blurry & look a hundred times better than a shimmering glittering mess. Not only that, but put less load on your Graphics Card, & save performance.

What's worse is you can't use techniques like MSAA Anti Aliasing on such surfaces to resolve it. MSAA is much more efficient and less resource intensive on modern cards. The only other way to resolve the issue for the average person , who doesn't know graphics design, or how to mipmap the textures themselves, is to use SSAA, or worse yet, SGSSAA. Which will absolutely destroy your performance, & it's not really solving the problem, just steam rolling it. This is also a very popular advice on a lot of forums, including Avsim, using NVInspector.

On modern engines with geometry surfaces, the MSAA technique really helps, and I hope Microsoft strictly enforces in their SDK, the use of mipmaps for transparency textures, so we don't have to suffer performance & bad visuals, due part in lapse of 3PD.

1 hour ago, Major_Majestic_X said:

On modern engines with geometry surfaces, the MSAA technique really helps, and I hope Microsoft strictly enforces in their SDK, the use of mipmaps for transparency textures, so we don't have to suffer performance & bad visuals, due part in lapse of 3PD.

Interesting. I wasn't aware that mipmapping wasn't implemented for transparency textures, though I'm not sure how often those are used outside of autogen trees. I don't know about X-Plane, but I recall that Flight Simulator 2004 did have an option that controlled the strength of mipmapping, I think that affected only the terrain textures though.

Any of those anti-aliasing methods wouldn't work today though, and it has been confirmed that they have now switched to a deferred rendering engine, which makes post-processing methods and resolution scaling the only way to reduce aliasing. By the way, if you were comparing OGSSAA and SGSSAA before, SGSSAA is actually a lot more efficient than the former because of the sparse (rotated) grid, and it was great while it lasted (no proper support for DirectX 10 and newer game engines, and it uses MSAA to create the samples).

20 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Interesting. I wasn't aware that mipmapping wasn't implemented for transparency textures, though I'm not sure how often those are used outside of autogen trees. I don't know about X-Plane, but I recall that Flight Simulator 2004 did have an option that controlled the strength of mipmapping, I think that affected only the terrain textures though.

Any of those anti-aliasing methods wouldn't work today though, and it has been confirmed that they have now switched to a deferred rendering engine, which makes post-processing methods and resolution scaling the only way to reduce aliasing. By the way, if you were comparing OGSSAA and SGSSAA before, SGSSAA is actually a lot more efficient than the former because of the sparse (rotated) grid, and it was great while it lasted (no proper support for DirectX 10 and newer game engines, and it uses MSAA to create the samples).

P3D has an option to enable mipmapping in Virtual Cockpit. But, so far, apart from PMDG, I don't recall any other payware aircraft having any effect from having that option enabled. Can't enable mipmaps that don't exist in the first place. 

Yes, you're right SGSSAA is more efficient, but using it in P3D ends up being counterproductive. You see, the clouds in P3D are 2D Sprites. Using SGSSAA and having a cloudy sky will hammer your GPU because it's super sampling those hundreds of sprites in the overcast cloud layers, & thus ends up hitting harder than simple SSAA which just increases the resolution and then down-samples the image. In other games, SGSSAA won't be that punishing.   

1 hour ago, Major_Majestic_X said:

P3D has an option to enable mipmapping in Virtual Cockpit. But, so far, apart from PMDG, I don't recall any other payware aircraft having any effect from having that option enabled. Can't enable mipmaps that don't exist in the first place. 

Yes, you're right SGSSAA is more efficient, but using it in P3D ends up being counterproductive. You see, the clouds in P3D are 2D Sprites. Using SGSSAA and having a cloudy sky will hammer your GPU because it's super sampling those hundreds of sprites in the overcast cloud layers, & thus ends up hitting harder than simple SSAA which just increases the resolution and then down-samples the image. In other games, SGSSAA won't be that punishing.   

That sounds bad. I don't use any of the newer payware aircraft with high-resolution textures so this hasn't been an issue for me. Well at least it looks like all default aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator are properly mipmapped, same as the previous versions.

Is that an issue with Prepar3D only, because in Flight Simulator X I didn't notice worse performance with SGSSAA compared to OGSSAA when testing. I own v2 but I haven't bothered testing that one.

15 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

That sounds bad. I don't use any of the newer payware aircraft with high-resolution textures so this hasn't been an issue for me. Well at least it looks like all default aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator are properly mipmapped, same as the previous versions.

Is that an issue with Prepar3D only, because in Flight Simulator X I didn't notice worse performance with SGSSAA compared to OGSSAA when testing. I own v2 but I haven't bothered testing that one.

Yes the default aircraft in P3D are also properly mipmapped.

For SGSSAA, depends on the clouds in the sky. Active Sky draws a ton of sprites for the full overcast cloud coverage, so there, the SGSSAA hits very hard. In other conditions it's much less hard on performance. As of right now, SSAA or SGSSAA is unusable with Dynamic Lights enabled, even if you've a 2080ti. The Dynamic Lighting is broken with super sampling. But disabling Dynamic Lighting defeats the purpose of using P3Dv4. If you disable that, you might as well go back to FSX, because it really adds to the visuals. With Dynamic Lighting enabled you can only use MSAA, & just bear & accept the shimmers.

On 12/25/2019 at 1:50 PM, ChaoticBeauty said:

What monitor are you viewing them on? All the official videos are rendered at 4K which by itself reduces aliasing, but viewing them on a monitor with a smaller resolution performs additional downsampling. If you view the videos at full size on any monitor, there is still quite some aliasing and shimmering to be seen.

The only time I see shimmering is when I watch the videos at 4K on my 1080p screen with the smaller YouTube screen. Once I change it to fullscreen mode, all shimmering is gone. I have never once seen aliasing since they started showing us videos and have always been impressed with the AA solution they're using.

One thing I have noticed is dithering on some of the reflections. Early on that tipped me off that they weren't using the ray tracing we've been used to. The fact that it was running so smooth at 4K was another clue.

On 12/25/2019 at 4:05 PM, Sethos said:

Probably thanks to a temporal anti-aliasing. 

This would be my guess.  TAA is all the rage in game development these days, because it delivers good results at an extremely low performance "cost", and the only real trade off is a little bit of softness to the image..