21 minutes ago, jrw4 said:

There was a discussion of how to turn off the sharpening some months/weeks ago (who can keep track of time anymore?). There's a setting in a global config file. This artefact may be dependent on resolution and anti-alias settings, but it should go away if you turn off the postprocess sharpening.

Unfortunatly, setting 0 for Sharpen in UserCfr.opt doesn't work anymore in 1.13.16.

Edited February 23, 20215 yr by vbazillio

10 hours ago, vbazillio said:

Unfortunatly, setting 0 for Sharpen in UserCfr.opt doesn't work anymore in 1.13.16.

I update my own post. I totally forgot that if MOTION BLUR is activated, sharpen is forced by MSFS to 1. The only way to keep SHARPEN to 0 is to de-activate MOTION BLUR.
 

Edited February 24, 20215 yr by vbazillio

Seeing it here too.

15 hours ago, jrw4 said:

Classic over sharpening.

There was a discussion of how to turn off the sharpening some months/weeks ago (who can keep track of time anymore?). There's a setting in a global config file. This artefact may be dependent on resolution and anti-alias settings, but it should go away if you turn off the postprocess sharpening.

 

This has nothing to do with sharpening.

Volumetric clouds are simply too resource intensive to render at real-time with current hardware. In order to reduce performance impact, developers have to use various tweaks, which will inevitably introduce artifacts.

Here are the two most common ways to optimize volumetric clouds:

• As clouds mostly stay the same between frames, it is unnecessary to render them from scratch each frame. Instead, rendered results from previous frame can be reused by calculating the camera movement between frames and moving fragments in the opposite direction to compensate for the motion. This approach is known as temporal reprojection - while it is really effective at reducing rendering times, it introduces lots of noise due to small inaccuracies caused by limited floating point precision. MSFS used this approach to render those gorgeous clouds at real-time, however people were annoyed by the grain noise. Here is a paper if you want to know more: http://umu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1223894/FULLTEXT01.pdf (pages 34-37)
• As clouds inherently do not have much definition, it is possible to reduce cloud rendering resolution without causing a noticeable impact. In fact, this is exactly what I did with Enhanced Cloudscapes for X-Plane: I was able to cut the resolution by more than half with no serious degradation in looks. However, this approach causes the artifact you all are currently experiencing - clouds have to be rendered after all "solid" objects are rendered. Therefore when cloud rendering resolution is reduced scene (depth buffer) comparisons will also be low-resolution, which essentially means clouds from a low-resolution scene will be overlayed on top of a high-resolution one. These gaps around objects are exactly caused by this. Prepar3D's new volumetric clouds have the exact same artifact.

In short, there is no way to completely get rid of artifacts while maintaining the same amount of definition with today's hardware. People have asked Asobo to get rid of the artifacts, which is simply not possible, and they did the best thing that could be done - they traded one artifact with another. You all are going really too hard on Asobo by asking something which is simply not possible.

People have to settle on what artifact they want - outline around objects or grainy clouds. It is also possible to just give up on definition for less artifacts, which is something probably not many people wants.

I think Asobo should clearly announce that there isn’t much can be done in this case.

Edited February 24, 20215 yr by BiologicalNanobot

51 minutes ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

People have to settle on what artifact they want - outline around objects or grainy clouds.

I’d choose grainy clouds, if having a choice was an option. 

1 hour ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

People have to settle on what artifact they want - outline around objects or grainy clouds. It is also possible to just give up on definition for less artifacts, which is something probably not many people wants.

While your explanation regarding the temporal method is correct, this new artifact has nothing to do with how grainy the clouds appear.

People started reporting excessively grainy clouds after patch 1.10.7.0, which introduced a new TAA solution that was sharper and yielded a cleaner image. With 1.13.16.0 we are back to the old blurry TAA, and the grainy clouds are "fixed". It's all about the denoising component.

Before 1.10.7.0, or any other patch for that matter, this new outline artifact did not exist.

5 hours ago, vbazillio said:

I update my own post. I totally forgot that if MOTION BLUR is activated, sharpen is forced by MSFS to 1. The only way to keep SHARPEN to 0 is to de-activate MOTION BLUR.

Setting Sharpen and Fringe to 0 is still working fine for me, with Motion Blur enabled. I think the trick is to make sure that the graphics preset is "Custom".

Edited February 24, 20215 yr by ChaoticBeauty

6 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Setting Sharpen and Fringe to 0 is still working fine for me, with Motion Blur enabled. I think the trick is to make sure that the graphics preset is "Custom".

What does this actually do? Make the image clearer? 

2 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

What does this actually do? Make the image clearer? 

It removes the post-process sharpening filter (FidelityFX CAS since 1.10.11.0). It makes for a smoother and less artificial image, but now that we're back to the old TAA, without it the image can look blurry and it makes the cockpit instruments harder to read. Previously it also worked well at reducing halo ringing and the appearance of grain in the clouds and reflections, which is something that sharpening filters usually exaggerate.

I would recommend experimenting with it. It is mostly a matter of taste, and it depends highly on the rendering resolution as well. At 1080p, I found that with the new TAA and the sharpening filter off, the image looked exceptionally clean and mostly free of grain. But now the cockpit instruments are too hard to read so I'm forced to keep it on and put up with the artificial look.

21 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

While your explanation regarding the temporal method is correct, this new artifact has nothing to do with how grainy the clouds appear.

People started reporting excessively grainy clouds after patch 1.10.7.0, which introduced a new TAA solution that was sharper and yielded a cleaner image. With 1.13.16.0 we are back to the old blurry TAA, and the grainy clouds are "fixed". It's all about the denoising component.

This new artifact has nothing to do with TAA. I still believe it is caused by newly introduced low-resolution rendering optimization, which is completely different than the previous temporal reprojection optimization. While TAA is able to reduce the amount of noise introduced by temporal reprojection, it can not eliminate the noise completely. Even before patch 1.10.7.0 clouds have been considerably noisy (a lot more than they currently are), which again indicates they started to use low-resolution rendering optimization, which has this characteristic artifact.

Edited February 24, 20215 yr by BiologicalNanobot

20 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Setting Sharpen and Fringe to 0 is still working fine for me, with Motion Blur enabled. I think the trick is to make sure that the graphics preset is "Custom".

The above fixes the issue for you? I'm assuming custom preset in MSFS?

Please elaborate. I'd love to fix this annoying issue. Thanks!

11 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

without it the image can look blurry and it makes the cockpit instruments harder to read.

No good for me then in VR. 

1 hour ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

This new artifact has nothing to do with TAA. I still believe it is caused by newly introduced low-resolution rendering optimization, which is completely different than the previous temporal reprojection optimization. While TAA is able to reduce the amount of noise introduced by temporal reprojection, it can not eliminate the noise completely. Even before patch 1.10.7.0 clouds have been considerably noisy (a lot more than they currently are), which again indicates they started to use low-resolution rendering optimization, which has this characteristic artifact.

I know the artifact does not have anything to do with TAA, I'm just saying that it seems to be a different issue and not related to what they did to improve the grainy clouds, even if it is related to the cloud system.

To me the clouds now have about the same amount of grain as before. There is still a fair amount of pixelation as well, especially in motion. Considering that the new TAA also sometimes failed to denoise certain shadows in the cockpit (mostly noticeable in the Icon A5), I think that this was the culprit. Besides, why would the TAA be reverted if it was not the cause, considering it was a much superior anti-aliasing method?

Even Sebastian said in an older Q&A, when answering the question about the grainy clouds, that they had not changed anything in the cloud algorithm that would produce more noise, but instead they would be looking into the denoising component. So the reduced appearance of grain being attributed to the TAA reversion makes sense.

While this new artifact seems related to the cloud system, I don't think it has to do with their attempt to reduce grain. People reported seeing more natural cloud patterns and lighting after this patch so it could be that. Either way, I hope they revert both changes. I really dislike this artifact and the TAA degradation, and did not mind the grainier clouds.

1 hour ago, DJJose said:

The above fixes the issue for you? I'm assuming custom preset in MSFS?

Please elaborate. I'd love to fix this annoying issue. Thanks!

If you mean this outline artifact no, but it makes it slightly less noticeable. This sharpening filter is very strong and as such exaggerates harsh outlines like these, as well as grain. I would recommend giving it a try. And yes, you need to make sure the preset is set to "Custom" by changing at least one graphics setting so that your configuration does not conform to any of the presets. If you have everything set to Ultra and don't want to lower graphics settings, I would recommend dropping Ambient Occlusion down a notch.

1 hour ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

No good for me then in VR. 

If your headset has a very high resolution I would still recommend giving it a try, but yeah, I imagine cockpit readability is paramount in VR. Such a shame they reverted the TAA. Despite keeping the sharpening filter off the cockpits looked really clean even when zoomed far out, and that was at just 1080p.

EDIT: This is what it looks like for me with the sharpening filter disabled. Still noticeable, but not as harsh.

Edited February 24, 20215 yr by ChaoticBeauty

Tried the old tricks but artifact is still there. I hope ASOBO can address and fix this ASAP.

Excellent discussion, especially

3 hours ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

In short, there is no way to completely get rid of artifacts while maintaining the same amount of definition with today's hardware. People have asked Asobo to get rid of the artifacts, which is simply not possible, and they did the best thing that could be done - they traded one artifact with another. You all are going really too hard on Asobo by asking something which is simply not possible.

I really appreciate the detailed information regarding cloud rendering and the potential for artefacts at the boundary with foreground objects, a problem that is never encountered, of course, in real world imaging.

49 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

This is what it looks like for me with the sharpening filter disabled. Still noticeable, but not as harsh.

It may be that sharpening interacts with those boundary artefacts, and makes them more noticeable. 

To what extent might screen resolution impact this problem?

Marketing noobs. They should have just said the sim now models St Elmo's Fire, and then everyone would have been praising this to the skies. 🤣