My settings are all ultra.

Again, my clouds looked horrible before the update I do still get pixelated clouds in the distance but they sort them selves out when they get closer.

On 12/25/2020 at 12:53 PM, Bandyka said:

I am also noticing color banding that was not apperent before the update.

me too, less pixelated though, and much better looking, just like I remembered.
They look a bit flat when you are above them though.

5 hours ago, EmaRacing said:

me too, less pixelated though, and much better looking, just like I remembered.
They look a bit flat when you are above them though.

Do you notice the banding? I see them on some instruments as well as on water and thick fog/clouds.

Clouds still grainy and popcorn looking to me in latest version.  They may have gotten a smidge better I dunno might be placebo.

What card do you have?

31 minutes ago, highflyer2020 said:

What card do you have?

1070

I noticed nasty pixelated clouds now especially in VR. Anything less than Ultra settings and I’d rather just turn them off. They look horrible compared to release day build.

 

Edited December 26, 20205 yr by blueshark747

I’m at Ultra and they look pixilated...

It's got to do with lighting and reflections the way I see it, I was flying in sunset away from the sun and when the sun was behind me and the clouds in front I got horrible looking grainy clouds, like they were covered in poppy seeds. Pan the camera around so it faced the sun the clouds were fine.

Clouds have been grainy since day one and haven't changed much to be fair. This happens because of a method called "temporal reprojection" - in short, volumetric clouds are too resource intensive to be rendered real-time. However, there are various ways to overcome this limitation. As clouds are rather static, only a portion of the fragments can be rendered each frame instead of all fragments. Rest of the fragments are just re-used from the previous frame and re-positioned based on how much the camera has moved between frames. However, this method is not flawless and introduces lots of noise. Even though TAA does a good job at hiding these artifacts, depending on the lighting some graininess is inevitable.

Here's the rule of thumb with volumetric clouds, you can't have all of these three things at the same time: High performance, high details and lack of artifacts. If you need high details and lack of artifacts, performance will suffer. If you need high performance and lack of artifacts, you'll have to give up on detail. If you need high performance and high details, artifacts are inevitable.

trueSKY on P3D goes with the high performance & lack of artifacts route, therefore it lacks detail. xEnviro on X-Plane goes with the high performance & high details route, and it has many rendering artifacts. MSFS seems to go with the high performance & high details route too.

Edited December 27, 20205 yr by BiologicalNanobot

Me too, mutch better now as it was before the Update..

 

cheers 😉

I've noticed some ugly clouds when using "live weather." I might just start using my themes until Active Sky is released. I don't have any confidence that ASOBO will ever get the live weather feature right. Others have tried and failed in P3D & XP11, so I will not be surprised if it happens in this sim.

Those pixelated clouds are totally immersion killer. They were heavily introduced with Xbox version release. After that time msfs weather never has been same... Good old days. 

7 minutes ago, spitzer45 said:

Good old days

Speaking of the good old days, so is this thread. 

I think clouds are pixelated and certainly are far worse now than they have been in previous SU versions. They look fine from a distance but pixelation gets really obvious when flying close or through the cloud layer. My clouds are set to high but I see little or no improvement on Ultra. I’m all for clouds that don’t tank FPS but they need to look a lot better than they do currently.