we really want clouds looking 1:1 with real life with the technology available to us.........Matt from WT already explained why this is currently impossible. Why are we going on and on about this for weeks???

32 minutes ago, Alvega said:

If you see them with raymarching perhaps try disabling it and see if you can still see them.

You can't disable ray-marching for the cloud rendering. It's an integral part of the technique.

47 minutes ago, March Hare said:

Ray-marching has always been used since launch. Any differences you perceive are something else, as ray-marching is fundamental to the volumetric cloud rendering method.

I can take your word for it because I don't know but the term 'raymarching' appeared in options at SU7 I think.  heres a pic showing original options on top and current on bottom

12 minutes ago, March Hare said:

You can't disable ray-marching for the cloud rendering. It's an integral part of the technique.

Oh, didn't know that. My GPU doesn't support raymarching, do you think that's why I don't see those pixelated clouds as in Noel's screenshot?

48 minutes ago, sightseer said:

I can take your word for it because I don't know but the term 'raymarching' appeared in options at SU7 I think.  heres a pic showing original options on top and current on bottom

Yep. That was to do with water reflections.

1 hour ago, Alvega said:

Oh, didn't know that. My GPU doesn't support raymarching, do you think that's why I don't see those pixelated clouds as in Noel's screenshot?

You're thinking of "classic" (for want of a better term) ray tracing, which is done in the GPU on RTX cards. Although technically your GPU can do ray tracing, it will just likely be really bad at it (I enabled ray tracing on my GTX 1070 just for fun in a Tomb Raider game: it worked, but I couldn't play the game any more haha).

Ray marching is a type of ray tracing, but works differently. I'm going to say something now that might pique Noel's interest: I would quite confidently guess (educated) that the ray marching is done on the CPU, as will all the cloud simulation algorithms. This is why my system, with its GTX 1070, can render ultra clouds and everything else on ultra. The GPUs shaders (CUDA cores, in NVIDIA's case) will "simply" be turning the screen pixels on and off and colouring them based on the work already done by the CPU.  The GPU is not doing all the hardest work. That's why talking about headroom remaining on the GPU becomes a moot point.

Edited August 2, 20223 yr by March Hare

2 hours ago, sightseer said:

the delicate shading that we had when the sim was released has been replaced with more harsh shading with fewer shades

That is an apt description I can relate to that picks up some of the subtleties that make it difficult to nail down.  To me as well the detail, for example how much micro-shapes, sprites, or what have you is displayed is, is just too far still from acceptable within the context of the rest of the sim's visual quality:  scenery, airplanes, building objects, lighting, clear sky etc.  Right now they're not quite there and I don't know exactly what can be altered to regain and improve upon cloud depiction detail.  I have assumed it starts with resolution:  the tighter the voxel grid the greater the level of complexity afforded.  And as I say there are already resources to exploit. In case you missed it this photo was from within a few months after initial release when I was using this CPU, but an RTX 2070 Super, instead of the 3080Ti I now am using.   The weather in the screenshot cost that GPU 90% utilization roughly--but since well under 100% it could still muster the solid smooth 30fps by Vsync.  And this:  clouds were set on Ultra.  It was only rarely I needed to turn volumetric clouds to High to cope with clouds and oddly that was only with very thin homogeneous diffuse fog-like clouds.  Right now I'd probably see only 48-50% utilization with the 3080Ti in this screenshot, giving all of that headroom to power improved detail in cloud rendering.  

Here is where an end point looks like from our real world.  If we can nudge what we have now towards this level of detail, even 20% closer, we will be in decent shape in terms of having the cloudscape in MSFS match the level of quality in scenery, airplanes, buildings, etc we have in the rest of the sim.  RIght now, it's a big mismatch to me.  Again, for an initial run at this, great progress has been made already.  When MSFS first released I opinined it was already in the ballpark and was really only a matter of fine tuning.  If release cloud depiction was 100 then, current is somewhere around 78 or so.  Seems doable--again, not at 100% of this image, but maybe 20% closer to it is a good goal.  Remember:  there are resources to exploit, today:

 

Edited August 2, 20223 yr by Noel

1 hour ago, Noel said:

If we can nudge what we have now towards this level of detail, even 20% closer, we will be in decent shape in terms of having the cloudscape in MSFS match the level of quality in scenery, airplanes, buildings, etc we have in the rest of the sim.  RIght now, it's a big mismatch to me.

The clouds in a new X-Plane YouTube video may shed light on what we can expect as far as resolution is concerned in MSFS.  The clouds in this video certainly look softer than what is in MSFS now - with two modern flight sims using a similar technique to produce the clouds maybe we can't hope for a quick increase in resolution.

It is clear they dumbed down the clouds because of the Xbox release. That's also most likely why they won't open the weather engine up to third parties. They don't want to make the Xbox version look poor in comparison.

30 minutes ago, steve310002 said:

It is clear they dumbed down the clouds because of the Xbox release. That's also most likely why they won't open the weather engine up to third parties. They don't want to make the Xbox version look poor in comparison.

No, it isn't clear at all. Your theory is a tired and dead one that has been dis-proven multiple times in multiple ways. Let's not go down that rabbit hole again.

2 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

maybe we can't hope for a quick increase in resolution.

I'm not sure what would constitute an "increase" since that could be anything. If most of the burden is on the CPU for increasing cloud resolution/quality/complexity, and my CPU which has headroom for sure already with how I'm set up, an I9-12900K is going to be around 30% faster for single thread performance.  This tells me there is headroom, right now, for improving the load on the CPU if that is what is demanded for improving cloud resolution or complexity.  And more, we read and have confirmed DX12 improves CPU multicore use and accesses more VRAM.  But again and importantly:  what constitutes an "increase"?  Is it 5%, 10%, 30%?   My guess, with the amount of headroom on my 2.3y/o CPU now, it should be an increase in resolution/quality that will be quite visually apparent  at the far right of this slider.  Hopefully by the time I upgrade CPU (in about 2+ years) this will have become a reality and I think it will.

Edited August 2, 20223 yr by Noel

17 minutes ago, Noel said:

an I9-12900K is going to be around 30% faster for single thread performance

There's definitely headroom, no doubt about it. I'm getting excellent multicore/multithread utilization on my 12900KF in SU10 beta with DX12. Total CPU usage rarely exceeds 30% with all settings maxed out in 4K. In terms of increased performance, SU10 has been very promising so far, at least with my system. 

11 hours ago, Alvega said:

So what about the pixelization on your screenshot? Why don't I have it? That's what I'd like to know. 

Your persistence prompted me to see what was causing it, and I discovered it was NVCP's Sharpening tool which I had set on 0.50.  Once off, the little hatchmark grids disappeared.  Thanks!   Still, the detail isn't there which is why we want folks who can to be able to dial up the complexity/resolution or what have you.  I think with the current way this done we won't see the kind of detail we could see.  Look at Cpt Piett's awesome report of how low his CPU usage is.  This bodes very well for increasing complexity in cloud rendering.

3 hours ago, Cpt_Piett said:

I'm getting excellent multicore/multithread utilization on my 12900KF in SU10 beta with DX12. Total CPU usage rarely exceeds 30% with all settings maxed out in 4K. In terms of increased performance, SU10 has been very promising so far, at least with my system. 

Rarely exceeds 30%--and look what it's already doing w/ everything.  Double that is 60%.  That is massive headroom!  Just a matter of when, not if, that we will see cloud depiction improve.  My fantasy is largely it's a table of variables they will tweak and perhaps assign another slider to it.  Because small changes might be costly it makes more sense perhaps to use a slider, rather then LOW/MED/HIGH/ULTRA.

18 minutes ago, Noel said:

Your persistence prompted me to see what was causing it, and I discovered it was NVCP's Sharpening tool which I had set on 0.50.  Once off, the little hatchmark grids disappeared.  Thanks!   Still, the detail isn't there which is why we want folks who can to be able to dial up the complexity/resolution or what have you.  I think with the current way this done we won't see the kind of detail we could see.  Look at Cpt Piett's awesome report of how low his CPU usage is.  This bodes very well for increasing complexity in cloud rendering.

I noticed your screenshot seemed a bit too sharp and was going to tell you to try decreasing the sharpening, but then got distracted with our small disagreement an totally forgot about that.

Glad that you managed to fix it. 👍

10 hours ago, Krakin said:

No, it isn't clear at all. Your theory is a tired and dead one that has been dis-proven multiple times in multiple ways. Let's not go down that rabbit hole again.

My theory is tired and dead? Jeez, relax a little.

Personally, I don't see anything but logic in what I said. They are not going to upstage the Xbox version with better clouds in the PC version. Games manufacturers have been doing this for years with dumbed down PC versions. For example, up until recently EA used to release an inferior version of FIFA on the PC so as not affect sales of the console versions. Why would this not be the same reasoning here? Microsoft want to shift units of XBox at a time when the best PC GPUs are already several times faster than what is powering the Xbox itself (and about to get several more times faster). If they make the PC version look too good (as it once did), it will make the latest Xbox look dated and 'old tech' or 'tired and dead' as you'd say. They can't get away with 'doing a FIFA' as there would be too much backlash, so they make a few PC consessions like allowing mods etc. but don't want it to get too far ahead of where the Xbox is at.

There is nothing at all bizarre in common sense business strategy (albeit ridiculous and unfair to us PC users). Maybe you don't want to hear that 'theory' but it doesn't make it any less plausible or probably. Why on earth else would MSFS clouds that looked better in beta testing now look far worse 2 years on, and even more obvious, whose degradation coincidently coincided with the Xbox release? I would say it's kind of obvious.

Edited August 3, 20223 yr by steve310002