Poster at the MSFS forum compared screenshots from release to current.   Can see much difference if at all in his shots  The only scenery bug on my system is I find clarity degradtion above FL330

Comparison Shots: 2020 (Initial Release) vs 2021 (SU5 1.18.14.0) - Community / General Discussion - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

 

Edited August 2, 20214 yr by joec63
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Clearly proving most of the supposed "degradation" in SU5 is really the effect of being accustomed to MSFS now, while in August 2020 everything was so new and so much better than anything else.

These screenshot proves the sim doesn't look any worse now, in some cases looks even better ( tree draw distance has improved, for example ) and it surely runs faster.

Edited August 2, 20214 yr by virtuali

4 minutes ago, virtuali said:

Clearly proving most of the supposed "degradation" in SU5 is really the effect of being accustomed to MSFS now, while in August 2020 everything was so new and so much better than anything else.

These screenshot proves the sim doesn't look any worse now, in some cases looks even better ( tree draw distance has improved, for example ) and it surely runs faster.

If you can overlook morphing mountains, moving reflections (in VR), and objects popping in as you fly a few feet away from them.....sure...

Or volumetric lighting or texture degradation or colour saturation…I run ultra on a 3090 as well. Really wonder if there’s a configuration setting bug that is lowering settings on some systems in the background.

Edited August 2, 20214 yr by DylanM

Well that's it then - Conclusive!

Except...  from the digital foundry interview, they admit it themselves...

We tuned the distances, the draw distances, of objects and the way the LOD’s are being used in order to minimise the number of meshes and textures in memory at the same time.”  

So with this in mind, why do the pictures look so good?  And why do we all not see that?

Still pictures don't tell the whole story of course, because when moving, even at 300 LOD I am still seeing object and texture pop-in, and my environmental lighting is borked, as I don't have an HDR monitor.  So, how do those photos look so good, because mine don't in SU5.  Is that from an HDR monitor, and even if it is, do the screen captures filter out any processing?

Edited August 2, 20214 yr by bobcat999

Just now, Ianrivaldosmith said:

If you can overlook morphing mountains, moving reflections (in VR), and objects popping in as you fly a few feet away from them.....sure...

Morphing mountains always happened before, everybody talked about that well before SU5.

Performance is so much butter than is possible to increase settings a lot in VR, which wasn't possible before.

You make it sound as every object "pops a few feet away". There are some, which simply has been programmed with the wrong LOD settings, like the default taxiway blue light fixtures. Before SU5 they had *NO LOD* at all, which was also a mistake.

1 minute ago, DylanM said:

Or volumetric lighting or texture degradation or colour saturation…

Color saturation is very subjective, nobody seem to agree about this, see post about real world being even more washed out than SU5.

Apart from pop ins, most of the complaints are about the degraded clouds and the washed-out colors, the rest of the graphics are probably the same.

3 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

Except...  from the digital foundry interview, they admit it themselves...

We tuned the distances, the draw distances, of objects and the way the LOD’s are being used in order to minimise the number of meshes and textures in memory at the same time.”  

That doesn't mean there has been a visual degradation. Many default library objects before SU5 didn't had ANY LOD levels, and this was a mistake, because the object would either being drawn at its full polygon count ( eating fps for no reason ), or it was cut entirely.

Now, many default LOD objects ( I checked many of them before and after so please trust me on this ) have been added LOD levels when they didn't had any before, and this means tuning draw distances because, when an object has several LOD levels, its drawing distance can even be increased, while before it has to be culled automatically, and that's what "tuning" really means, it's doesn't automatically mean degradation.

 

13 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

Well that's it then - Conclusive!

Except...  from the digital foundry interview, they admit it themselves...

We tuned the distances, the draw distances, of objects and the way the LOD’s are being used in order to minimise the number of meshes and textures in memory at the same time.”  

So with this in mind, why do the pictures look so good?  And why do we all not see that?

Still pictures don't tell the whole story of course, because when moving, even at 300 LOD I am still seeing object and texture pop-in, and my environmental lighting is borked, as I don't have an HDR monitor.  So, how do those photos look so good, because mine don't in SU5.  Is that from an HDR monitor, and even if it is, do the screen captures filter out any processing?

No one is saying it's conclusive . At least I'm not. Only a data point that refutes the claim the graphics were intentionally downgraded on PC. I do believe there are other issues at play resulting from the patch that borked lighting , shadows, and clarity at altitude amonng other things. The morphing I've occasionaly experienced since day one. I have a 3090 so my hope is they push the graphics even further for future growth. Even if I have to downgrade the resolution. Currenlty running in 4K. I've been comparing a lot of MSFS release  Aug 2020 youtube videos and I dont see a great deal of difference to my PC currently. 

Edited August 2, 20214 yr by joec63

I wish I could say the same for me - it's as if someone laid a piece of gauze over the entire landscape and removed most of the detail.  Clouds that are close to me are especially bad - now like rolling swarms of pixels.

I never had any cloud issues before and the terrain was beautifully detailed.

2 minutes ago, RandallR said:

I wish I could say the same for me - it's as if someone laid a piece of gauze over the entire landscape and removed most of the detail.  Clouds that are close to me are especially bad - now like rolling swarms of pixels.

I never had any cloud issues before and the terrain was beautifully detailed.

My clouds are also like this now.  Doesn't matter whether I set high or ultra, they look terrible up close. 

Even the transparency has changed.  And I never saw the purple and orange colour banding underneath before.  I sure hope we can solve this.

if they want to save processor cycles, maybe they should start by slowing down the cloud animations.  They do seem to form and evaporate quickly compared to real life.

Sim update 5 looks better.

These screenshots demonstrate that all this talk about "image degradation" is just that: talk. 

1 hour ago, joec63 said:

 

Poster at the MSFS forum compared screenshots from release to current.   Can see much difference if at all in his shots  The only scenery bug on my system is I find clarity degradtion above FL330

Comparison Shots: 2020 (Initial Release) vs 2021 (SU5 1.18.14.0) - Community / General Discussion - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

 

Certainly an interesting post....