Murmur

Yes Portland, I think it was 5 or 7 or 10 SM visibility. Scenery is not default though. I think in these conditions XP12 has a much more realistic visibility model. In comparison, the other sim almost looks like Google Earth. I actually tried to edit the XP12 shot, but all the filters I tried were actually making it less realistic! I think it mirrors quite well the real contrast in lowish visibility conditions, e.g.:

The main difference in the scenery between these two pair of screenshots is the vegetation (different polygons and textures). I think this could be a good starting point for LR to improve default scenery. A lot of bang for the buck (i.e. good visual improvements with little development time necessary).

Recently I've finally got a new GPU, so I had the chance to try the latest MSFS SU10 in all its glory. I have to say the scenery is incredible! Here's a real life pic vs MSFS at high settings:

I got some kind of halo, don't know the specific name of it. Looks like a rainbow, but white:

Yeah they strived to implement very accurate visibility, I reckon that's because XP12 is also to be used for FTDs and full flight simulators.

Apparently the controls for pressurization are missing or are not operable (from the touchscreen). Possibly a bug to report.

I know this question might lead to a locked thread (hopefully not!), but I'm genuinely curious to know the reasons that brought you to that choice.

Agree, but it's not that FXAA is better than MSAA. What is happening is that MSAA at a lower original res (FSR active) produces worse results (and performance) than FXAA at a higher original res. It's mostly FSR the culprit of bad results. With FXAA and no FSR I get good image quality (for me), but I understand that most people are looking for better AA, hopefully it will come.

Correct. If you're presently not using FSR "Off" and are using some AA other than "FXAA", you can get better results (both in image quality and performance) if you set FSR "Off" and use "FXAA".

If your bottleneck is the GPU (likely if it happens near clouds at high resolutions and AA levels), this could possibly help. I just tried on my PC where the GPU is definitely the bottleneck, so your mileage may vary.

Waiting for LR to improve AA quality, I found the following method. It works best if you are using an FSR setting other than "Off" (i.e. if your FSR slider is NOT full right). In this case, set your FSR to "Off" (slider full right), and set AA to "FXAA". You should get better image clarity with better performance. I made a comparison in the following images. Note in particular the clarity of aircraft gauges, the yellow runway line and the trees in the cockpit image. And the tail leading edge and aircraft shadow in the external image. EDIT: Of course you should watch the images back to back in full resolution to better appreciate the difference.

MSFS doesn't take long to download streaming scenery the first time it's loaded.

Isn't it possible to use overlay textures in XP? That way, it would be possible to code an add-on that would stream satellite scenery on the fly, just like that MSFS mod that allows streaming Google maps satellite scenery instead of the default Bing maps.

Maybe LR should partner with ORBX for default scenery. XP12 is gonna have the most realistic lighting, the most realistic weather and the most realistic flight operations, so once all the warts and bugs of the early release are solved, the only thing dragging it down is the current default scenery.

So is it using modified datarefs/etc?

So true. If they prioritized TAA and motion vectoring instead, people would have complained: "LR focus on the wrong things, they should have modernised the lighting before doing TAA!" LR implemented Vulkan (=DX12) years ago, when every other sim was running at most DX11. I think they made miracles doing what they did with vastly inferior resources (and this apparently irks some people, who only give "likes" to every post critical of XP. 🤭) This is early release, they also announced some of the improvements in the road map. Let's see how they improve AA, performance, scenery, etc.

With your expertise, you should try to bring the topic to LR developers. It's possible that they're interested in the matter since, as I reckon, they are aiming to do an accurate model for lighting and visibility for XP12.

In XP, one would model VGs by modifying directly 2D airfoil properties. So, if the stall speeds of the simulated aircraft are correct, then probably the aircraft designer took into consideration the VGs effect in modeling the max coefficient of lift of wing airfoils.

I think I read from Ben that improving AA is in their roadmap.

The default C172 requires right rudder during takeoff and climbout, and flies approximately coordinated at cruise power and speed. Regarding turn coordination, the ball moves in the right direction (right in a right turn and viceversa) if using only ailerons and not using pedals, but maybe less than it should, because the adverse yaw seems to be quite weak (although some C172 expert pilot might make a more accurate comparison). Anyway, the free demo lets you try it.

Agree, they should improve the AI system. Ben says AI calculations are not heavy on a modern PC (and probably it's true, especially if using optimized AI aircraft available for XP11), but the limit of 19 AI aircraft and the fact they roam around randomly makes AI in XP unrealistic.

True and also what you see in a photo not always matches what you see in real life because of different optical characteristics of cameras/displays vs human eyes: dynamic range, etc.

Maybe what's happening is that the visibility of runway lights in XP12 is correct from a strictly technical point of view (e.g., with XXX RWR, you must see X rows of runway lights), but the relative light intensity is lower than it should be (compared to ambient light levels for a given visibility). So they appear dimmer than they should be in RL, albeit being equally visible as in RL, if the explanation makes sense. That could be a case for a bug report, but it needs very precise comparison photos between matching conditions of RL vs sim (like those photos above).

This should be a similar situation in your photo with high visibility: Apparently, in low visibility (I think I set 2 miles in the following pics) the runway light visibility during dusk appears to be less than during night with the same conditions. Don't know if it's a bug or what (or if for some strange reason it would be the same in RL, I don't know), but if you have a case, you could report it to LR. EDIT: looks like the links were not working well, I put the direct links to images but unfortunately this reduces their resolution.

The devs confirmed that it's gonna be optimized for better performance, so let's see what they can do.