15 minutes ago, Nemo said:

Sorry David, I don't understand now. It sounds all a bit confusing for me. Which settings do I set where to get better visuals in the UI Graphic Settings or in the UserCfg.opt.

I would try the LOD changes in the CFG set to 3-4, and disable Color Grading. Then in addition, there are numerous settings in the NVIDIA control panel you can experiment with to override the in-game settings. Perhaps try changing Anistropic Filtering in the NVIDIA control panel.

Though as others have noted there could be an intentional or unintentional limiter on the LOD. Certain changes will increase texture memory in most games, yet in many cases the changes are NOT having the expected change in memory in MSFS. 
 

 

Edited August 4, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

39 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

XPlane, DCS, IL2, P3D have all entered the chat.

Xplane has a stable build. As does DCS. 
No ideas about IL2 or P3D as I don’t use them. 

Edited August 4, 20214 yr by Ianrivaldosmith

25 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

I know this response is suppose to mean something, but it escapes me. 

He’s trying to say none of them have stable builds 🧐

8 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

He’s trying to say none of them have stable builds 🧐

I am not an expert in any but P3D, but if any of them release an update, some users find that the update has bugs,  they can delay installing it. 

MSFS, on the other hand, releases an update, early reports are that the update has major problems and post that on forums  Then the rest of the people knowing  that the next time they start up the game, they will have the faulty update rammed down their throats, are screwed. Once SU5 was dropped, many of use saw it was a major downgrade, but there was no possibility of avoiding this downgrade. Now we are all stuck with it, and no possibility of rolling back to the previous version. 

Edited August 4, 20214 yr by Bobsk8

2 hours ago, Nyxx said:

1) Set Texture Resolution in the MS2020 graphics menu using this setting table:

 

     Desired Setting      Set Texture Resolution in Graphics Menu to 

        Low                                                Ultra
        Medium                                         High
        High                                               Medium
        Ultra                                               Low 

Sometimes I wonder, how they could messed up such stuff in that way? Thanks @Nyxx, going to test it today as well. 

 

Oh, I misread his post, I thought he said try setting it all to LOW, but nah --- ONLY Texture Resolution. I will try it as well.

 

Aside from the LOD differences where everyone is experiencing different results, there are also two major differences everyone is likely experiencing the same way.

The first one is loss of light shafts - aircraft no longer have volumetric lighting to them. I really don't know how they managed to break this, but I don't think this was done for performance reasons. Ray marching a volume when its density can be expressed mathematically is not performance heavy at all, as its optical depth can be pre-calculated and baked into a table.

The second one is different lighting - lighting looks quite different compared to before. Overall, everything is brighter and eye adaptation seems to work differently. I believe the main difference is the HDR tonemapper used. Basically, physically based rendering calculations often result in luminance values way above the usual standard dynamic range. In order to map those HDR values back into SDR values that our monitors can display, a mathematical function called tonemapper is used. Tonemappers have profound impact on the final result, so this might explain the extensive differences in colors, lighting and shading. Similarly, this is likely not done for performance reasons at all. Tonemappers are nothing more than rather simple mathematical functions, they are also usually really fast to evaluate and therefore have no performance impact to begin with.

So far the only positive of this new HDR tonemapper seems to be the fact that volumetric clouds no longer look overly gray / like volcanic ash, but other aspects seem to be affected rather badly.

Edited August 4, 20214 yr by BiologicalNanobot

I tried one of the landing challenges, the one with snow on the runway in the Cessna 152. I tried it in VR. It was so bright, it was like a nuclear bomb had gone off….

2 hours ago, Nyxx said:

Here is a test I just did to see what the guys at Orbx have pointed out.

 Anisotropic filtering is indeed broke.

MSFS Ultra

Nvidia added Anisotropic filtering 16x

This was not needed before.

 

Wow, what a difference!

Thank you very much for posting the info Nyxx. With that I'm basically back to the image quality I had before (maybe even sharper). The distant blurries gone. The odd pop-ins still being there plus some extra fps 👍

For VR, the anisotropic at 16 through nvidia CPL has little or at least less fps hit which is great. I've found that in other games too in the past and Asobo may have done us a favour leaving this out.

 

Edited August 4, 20214 yr by dogmanbird

So if we want the graphics preset to be ultra, we have to set it as low? I'm confused.

18 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Xplane has a stable build. As does DCS. 
No ideas about IL2 or P3D as I don’t use them. 

Sorry, I probably should have asked what you mean by ‘stable’ before replying. If it’s ‘doesn’t cause ctds’ or ‘not prone to changes which break previous addons’ then I don’t think either XPlane or DCS has those (well, XPlane 11 is unlikely to be patched any further but…)

Well I just fell over laughing. I started in a hangar, it is snowing in the hangar, almost no snow in the grass, and a rainbow in the background. All the objects are displaced a few feet as well and in the wrong spot. The apron texture looks weird, from the snow i guess.

Edited August 4, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

I did the Anisotropic filtering 16x trick in Nvidia, and well, still looks almost the same. I surrender to reality, this is what we have. Period. I hope tomorrow , Thursday, Asobo releases some kind of Q&A, announcement or statement of some sort regarding all this.

I'm quite confused with the Orbx post about Texture Quality setting reversed. 

Not confused about the reversal order of the value (0 = ULTRA and 3 = LOW) because I've written about this already a few pages back yesterday evening, but because:

1. I thought this setting is only about aircraft textures (and most likely aircraft cockpit textures)

2. When I set it to ULTRA and restart the game, I do get ULTRA cockpit textures (and UserCfg.opt value is 0)

3. When I sett it to MED (didn't try LOW yet) and restart the game, I do get MED cockpit textures.

In other words, the value is reversed in the file, but the setting still does what it is supposed to do. It shouldn't matter the value is reversed as long as the code reading and the code writing the value do it with the same reversed value table.

However the Nvidia Anisotropy override is a good find which I'll try ASAP in VR.

Edited August 4, 20214 yr by RXP

edit - sorry, wrong thread

Edited August 4, 20214 yr by dogmanbird