Murmur

Clouds in XP12 (and AFAIK also in the other sim) use "ray marching", it sounds similar to ray tracing but it's a different technique which does not require ray-tracing capable GPUs.

No, 4x MSAA + FXAA. My ancient 1660ti does almost 40fps at 2x MSAA + FXAA @ 2560x1440 (which looks quite good to me), so any modern GPU should handle 4xMSAA at that resolution, and many GPU's even @4K:

Not trolling at all. 🤷‍♂️ I am referring to AA (you mentioned AA in your last posts), not shimmering. Do you think the AA in my screeshots is unacceptably bad? Regarding shimmering, which is another issue: I think this plays into the subjective realm. For example, as I said, I'm not bothered by shimmering at all. Infact, I am not aware of it when using X-Plane. In flight sims, I'm bothered a lot more by things like scenery pop-in and blurries. But I reckon many people are bothered by shimmering. Possibly, it's going to get better with the upcoming improvements in the visual engine.

AA looks fine to me. Certainly it could be further improved, but I find it hard to agree with those saying it looks unacceptably bad. Wonder who the denier really is? 🤷‍♂️

In settings.txt, change the last three "hdr/use_post_aa 0" to "hdr/use_post_aa 1". Be advised that editing the settings.txt file is strongly discouraged by LR, because it could mess things up, but this simple edit should be harmless. In any case, running the X-Plane updater will restore the original "settings.txt".

With a little trick (editing settings.txt to enable FXAA for each AA setting), I get very satisfactory results in terms of AA. I think it's also a subjective matter: for example, I'm not bothered at all by the so-called shimmering (infact, I wouldn't even be able to tell if I have shimmering or not in my X-Plane). In a flight sim, I find blurries and scenery pop-in much worse in terms of immersion.

Or for computers that require max performance and reliability! 😉

In the 2 most demanding computer applications though, it holds 80% (web servers) and 100% (supercomputers).

Great news!

WOOOW! Those are the most real looking pics of a sim I've ever seen! They make X-Plane lighting shine (pun intended). I don't think that can be done worldwide for the default scenery though. But surely, there's potential for global add-ons for better trees/bushes and maybe other elements of the scenery.

That's interesting. Do you also have stutters when running only 1 copy on 1 computer on 1 4K screen? Depending if it happens or not, it could help pinpoint where's the issue.

Have you tried this? H

I looked at the two screenshots again side by side. Let's say we agree to disagree. Trees dimensions look decidedly different between the two sims. I wonder whether X-Plane trees are to small, or the other sim has unrealistically oversized trees. It must be one or the other.

I don't think it's the photogrammetry. X-Plane 12 is pushing a lot more objects a lot farther:

I don't think that is the case. Indeed, both scenery density and distance are way higher in X-Plane. Hopefully LR won't downgrade it at the level of the other sim! Same location, same FOV: VS P.S. Settings in the other sim were "VERY HIGH" IIRC.