Clouds are very pixelated and grainy - Asobo listen please

[wim123 758]

clouds look fantastic here, i dont see any pixelation, maybe thats only on ultra?

[pstrub 998]

1 hour ago, Concorde79 said:

It's sad that in 2020 an entirely new simulator DOESN'T use DX12. but instead uses the dated DX11....

I don't get why everyone is so hung up on DX12... Yes, It's newer, but it's also a very different approach to handling graphics rendering. The main difference is that DX12 is a low-level API that burdens a lot of the complexities of graphics programming on the developer, whereas DX11 handles most of the stuff under the hood without the programmer needing to know about the nitty gritty details. That opens up a large range of possible optimisations to the game developer, but at the cost of having to deal with a lot of technical details such as memory handling and tailoring the code to a specific GPU. That not only means a lot more work, but also a whole new source of errors that are highly dependent on the hardware you're using (i.e. also a lot more difficulties for testing).

DX11.3 is still fully supported and even recommended by Microsoft as an alternative when a low-level API is not required. This way Asobo was able to get MSFS started quickly without spending too much time in the beginning just for developing a new DX12 engine. Remember how long it took P3D to get their DX12 engine up and running properly? The fact that it uses more VRAM than DX11 is not so much because DX12 needs more GPU RAM, it's because there's a lot of hard work involved to implement a good memory handling system, which in DX12 is up to the programmer, but previously was handled automatically by Direct3D.

Many games still support both DX11 and DX12, giving the user the option to choose. Still the amount of graphics glitches reported for games running on DX12 is higher than on DX11, and most of the time, the recommended solution is to switch to DX11. That's why the list of DX12-only games is very short (mostly the ray-tracing titles), and it still seems a good idea for most developers to keep a DX11 rendering path as a fallback. 

So yes, I'm anxious to see DX12 coming to MSFS too - but I expect it to have its own share of problems in the beginning, and I'm sure it's going to take a while before all glitches are ironed out.

 

 

Edited November 27, 2020 by pstrub

[SierraHotel 974]

31 minutes ago, pstrub said:

The fact that it uses more VRAM than DX11 is not so much because DX12 needs more GPU RAM,

That's not totally correct, DX11 allocates i.e. once your vRam is full DX11 stops allocating. DX12, on the other hand, just keeps filling the pot until it overflows and your GPU throws up a warning. So, yes, you do need a larger cache of vRam, but theoretically DX12 would still continue to fill the space until overflow occurs again.

[Epgd 134]

2 hours ago, SierraHotel said:

Did you miss the announcement that said the grainy clouds would not be fixed until they introduce DX12?

I heard about it, but why then the clouds from release looked fantastic and did not have such disadvantages as now?? 

Can you explain it to me why could they look prefect and still on dx 11??

Edited November 27, 2020 by janda

[Epgd 134]

11 hours ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

To be honest, I too noticed this.

please report it to ZENDESK as me, more to report better for us 

[Epgd 134]

10 hours ago, bendead said:

Yep, and the further they are the uglier they look, like the "grain" is not really changing size with distance.

I just don't get why they can't see it

please report it to ZENDESK as me, more to report better for us 

[SierraHotel 974]

Just now, janda said:

I heard about it, but why then the clouds from release looked fantastic and diud not have such disadvantages as now?? 

Can you explain it to me why could they look prefect and it` s dx 11??

Without knowing what adjustments the devs made I can't explain to you why they could look perfect. My experiance with all builds has been, sometimes they look great and other times they look s***.

[SierraHotel 974]

Just now, janda said:

I heard about it, but why then the clouds from release looked fantastic and diud not have such disadvantages as now?? 

Can you explain it to me why could they look prefect and it` s dx 11??

Without knowing what adjustments the devs made I can't explain to you why they could look perfect. My experiance with all builds has been, sometimes they look great and other times they look s***.

[Epgd 134]

9 hours ago, BijanStudio said:

I used to see them then  changed the sharpen from 1 to 0 in UserCfg.opt  file and marked the file as "read only" so it won't change back every time the flight sim starts.

I don't see pixels anymore.

The video quality is not great though.

 

this clouds after messing in settings still don`t even looked as good as before....sorry, far from that

and IMPORTANT NOTICE - if you change anything in the settings graphics in the sim after launch- all yours corrected files such as - "film grain" or "Sharpen" are back to its original values - !!!

Edited November 27, 2020 by janda

[pstrub 998]

1 minute ago, SierraHotel said:

That's not totally correct, DX11 allocates i.e. once your vRam is full DX11 stops allocating. DX12, on the other hand, just keeps filling the pot until it overflows and your GPU throws up a warning. So, yes, you do need a larger cache of vRam, but theoretically DX12 would still continue to fill the space until overflow occurs again.

I think you're commenting on implementation specific behaviour, probably in P3D - please correct me if I'm wrong. On DX11, when you keep allocating, the driver/API begins swapping out textures between GPU and system RAM, on DX12 this doesn't happen automatically, but the program can still check to know whether it's getting low on VRAM. If the GPU throws up a warning, the program didn't handle memory allocation well.

[SierraHotel 974]

3 minutes ago, pstrub said:

I think you're commenting on implementation specific behaviour, probably in P3D - please correct me if I'm wrong. On DX11, when you keep allocating, the driver/API begins swapping out textures between GPU and system RAM, on DX12 this doesn't happen automatically, but the program can still check to know whether it's getting low on VRAM. If the GPU throws up a warning, the program didn't handle memory allocation well.

The way I read it, was that this is a problem with DX12 and affects all applications. I think the programmers are working on the assumption that vRam in general is on the up and so will not affect that many users. DX11 was programmed in such a way that was not possible to overfill vRam, this was obvious in P3D once they made the switch to DX12. I think the API using sys Ram is generic with all of the API's.

[CFIJose 5,485]

I see the pixelated look when I use a weather theme. Clouds seem much better with live weather, but that doesn't work all the time. Another reason why I prefer to fly with the live weather feature. I'm going to try the tweak posted here.

Edited November 27, 2020 by DJJose

[CaptBillyBob 51]

They already started working on the cloud textures without a time frame of when it will be fixed though.

[bendead 1,085]

22 minutes ago, janda said:

please report it to ZENDESK as me, more to report better for us 

Agreed, I will take a couple of shots

[pstrub 998]

8 minutes ago, SierraHotel said:

The way I read it, was that this is a problem with DX12 and affects all applications.

Well yes, that's what I meant by saying, DX12 requires more work on the programmers' side, this affects all applications. They have to take care of stuff they didn't have to worry about up to DX11 - but it's possible to do so, and it's documented in the API docs.