How to disable cloud reflections on water?

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

Disabling reflections in the settings only affects ground reflections on water, not the clouds'. Is there any way to disable them?

I play with Ultra settings except LOD sliders at 100, anyway regardless of the settings the cloud reflections on water look like this.

I posted this some time ago and for some users it looks normal, but I really can't accept it, it hurts my eyes.

Thank you

[Colonel X 1,430]

I'd recommend uninstalling your GPU drivers with DDU and reinstalling the newest version. Those reflections are clearly a bug, I haven't seen that.

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

I'm trying now and will update you. Thanks

EDIT: I uninstalled the drivers with DDU in Safe mode, reinstalled 457.30 nVidia drivers without Geforce Experience in clean mode but it looks the same.

I will continue investigating.

Edited November 27, 2020 by MrFuzzy

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

This guy has the same issue along with the coastline bug, it's not me.

Do the Alaska bush trip and you will see it: Coastline glitch - water creeping up coasts/cliffs - Self-Service / Bugs & Issues - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

[Concodroid 84]

That's seriously not normal. Whomever you're talking to is pulling your leg.

I can only tell you to reinstall for right now, FS2020 hasn't been out long enough for I or anyone else to have a very quick answer to most issues.+

Not your graphics driver though, it's a sim issue AFAIK

[BijanStudio 896]

Temporary fix: Set your wind speed to 10 kts or above.

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

6 hours ago, Concodroid said:

That's seriously not normal. Whomever you're talking to is pulling your leg.

I can only tell you to reinstall for right now, FS2020 hasn't been out long enough for I or anyone else to have a very quick answer to most issues.+

Not your graphics driver though, it's a sim issue AFAIK

I have reinstalled the sim yesterday and it did nothing. I opened a Zendesk ticket.

I'd also be curious to understand how those reflections work: they are not the typical "raster" reflections because they are visible also when clouds are not on the screen, in fact the Reflections setting in the graphics options does not affect them: they are present even when Reflections is set to OFF.

5 hours ago, BijanStudio said:

Temporary fix: Set your wind speed to 10 kts or above.

Yeah, but you cannot modify the weather parameters in bush trips... I finished the Alaska bush trip this morning, it was a pain and at the end there isn't even a Steam achievement, unlike the other bush trips.

Thanks 🙂

[AnkH 2,262]

Could it be that those are some "generic" reflections on the water surface that appear as soon as the cloud coverage is above a certain level and depending on the LOD slider? Means: the higher your LOD setting, the further out those "generic" reflections will be replaced by the "true" reflections of the actual clouds? How does it look like, when you are closer to the water surface? Do you see "true" reflections then, maybe in a defined circle around your plane? Because the more grey cloud closer to your plane does not seem to have the same low resolution reflection... 

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

4 minutes ago, AnkH said:

Could it be that those are some "generic" reflections on the water surface that appear as soon as the cloud coverage is above a certain level and depending on the LOD slider? Means: the higher your LOD setting, the further out those "generic" reflections will be replaced by the "true" reflections of the actual clouds? How does it look like, when you are closer to the water surface? Do you see "true" reflections then, maybe in a defined circle around your plane? Because the more grey cloud closer to your plane does not seem to have the same low resolution reflection... 

I tested the LOD sliders up to 200. I continued the bush trip with LOD @ 200 because Alaska is not demanding for my system and ran at 50 fps with Ultra preset.

Getting closer to the water, they don't look much better, and nobody flies at 300 ft.

However in the first screenshots I posted they are close enough to the plane to be rendered in a decent way. 

I don't know, maybe they are generic representations of cloud reflections, not related to the actual clouds in the sky, but they look awful and I really don't understand why they implemented them in this way. Definitely something that needs to be fixed.

[AnkH 2,262]

On this screenshot I see again the same "phenomenon": the grey cloud just in front of the right wing tip is a good reflection, no blocky edges, more or less what you probably have in the sky above you. But the brighter clouds further away show again the same blocky edges, now they even seem to be cut off in half of the cloud and your terrain reflection seems to show the same bugged blocky shape. Now I am pretty sure that this has something to do with the draw distance (LOD). But don't ask me what... LOD draw distance is something I really do not like with MSFS, it is just totally off and bugged as such that even people digging into details still did not find any solution for draw distance of trees for example...

Did you play around with your water quality setting to see if this does anything?

Edited December 4, 2020 by AnkH

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

This is reproducible in the Alaska Bush Trip, though I have not seen it anywhere else yet.

Also the poorly reflected clouds do not seem to match the full set of cloud layers it is like only some cloud layers are reflected.

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

54 minutes ago, AnkH said:

On this screenshot I see again the same "phenomenon": the grey cloud just in front of the right wing tip is a good reflection, no blocky edges, more or less what you probably have in the sky above you. But the brighter clouds further away show again the same blocky edges, now they even seem to be cut off in half of the cloud and your terrain reflection seems to show the same bugged blocky shape. Now I am pretty sure that this has something to do with the draw distance (LOD). But don't ask me what... LOD draw distance is something I really do not like with MSFS, it is just totally off and bugged as such that even people digging into details still did not find any solution for draw distance of trees for example...

Did you play around with your water quality setting to see if this does anything?

Just tried now: none of the graphics settings seem to affect them, not even render scale at 200%. They are just as blocky.

29 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

This is reproducible in the Alaska Bush Trip, though I have not seen it anywhere else yet.

Also the poorly reflected clouds do not seem to match the full set of cloud layers it is like only some cloud layers are reflected.

Surely they don't match the clouds in the sky, otherwise it would be real time (ugly) ray tracing.

I finished the bush trip and really hope I won't see them anymore. I will begin the East Coast tour now.

Cheers 🙂

[bobcat999 8,476]

It is just the way they implement some reflections for speed.  I notice the reflections on the undersides of the wings on the C152 and C172 are like this also.  As others have said, setting a low level wind speed to show waves breaks up the reflection and makes it look better - this is the only way I have found.  The glassy water without the wind doesn't look right anyway.

The other thing that gets on my mammary glands it the way the reflection on the water is disrupted by parts of the aircraft being near it, such as the window uprights or the backup compass - just sad! 

I am hoping DX12 will fix a lot of these issues. 

Edited December 4, 2020 by bobcat999

[AnkH 2,262]

1 hour ago, bobcat999 said:

The other thing that gets on my mammary glands it the way the reflection on the water is disrupted by parts of the aircraft being near it, such as the window uprights or the backup compass - just sad!

This! Also always bothers me, you also get the same close to the edges of the monitor. I read once that it is related to the way how those reflections are rendered and that if things obstruct the reflections or it is simply not in the visual image anymore (edge of monitor), it gets not rendered anymore. Just one of the many little things that are included into MSFS but not finished or done properly. DX12 will only change this, if the way how reflections are rendered are changed as well when switching to DX12, otherwise it will stay like this. 

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

56 minutes ago, AnkH said:

This! Also always bothers me, you also get the same close to the edges of the monitor. I read once that it is related to the way how those reflections are rendered and that if things obstruct the reflections or it is simply not in the visual image anymore (edge of monitor), it gets not rendered anymore. Just one of the many little things that are included into MSFS but not finished or done properly. DX12 will only change this, if the way how reflections are rendered are changed as well when switching to DX12, otherwise it will stay like this. 

DX12 with DXR (ray tracing) will fix this, not DX12 alone. You need DX12, DXR implementation in the game and a DXR capable graphics card.

With the current implementation (raster), only what's visible on the screen generates reflections. So if a part of the aircraft is between the observer and the object supposed to generate the reflection, or the object is out of the field of view for any other reason, the reflection will not occur.

There is a long way to go, but in the next years we will experience an evolution of the graphics like we never imagined before.