Tom_L

Imho it WAS a good start. I remember seeing screenshots from the release version and having to look twice to tell if it was a real photo or a screenshot. And I considered it "New-Tech", being based on data from professional weather forecast models and thus creating a lively, belieavable weather environment. Not nearly perfect, but a good start. Unfortunately two things happened: visuals were sacrificed for performance with Sim Update5, in which the lighting and rendering of the clouds changed dramatically for the worse. Sim Update 7 changed the data and their interpretation by the sim in the attempt to increase the accuracy by implementing METAR synthesis. That is what I consider "Old tech", as it was the way to display weather since the very early FS days: reading METAR reports and trying to place clouds into the sky accordingly. The result was hilarious: overcast, multilayered cloudscapes, stratiform clouds - all lost. What remained was "Some weather (TM)", displaying mostly wildfire smoke instead of clouds, and not remotely more accurate than before. Thankfully with SU11 Live weather is mostly reasonable again and accurate enough, but it lacks liveliness and fidelity. It has a generic look and feel, and every screenshot is immediately identifiable as coming from a game. But the sad truth is that the respective threads in the official forums see little participitation which results in repetitive discussions between the same individuals instead of constructive feedback by many - which is a shame, as many of those threads are tagged "feedback logged", meaning the contributions are fed into dashboards to enable forum staff to identify bugs and flaws and forward the information to the developers.Those could be and not limited to true overcast still missing multiple layers not overly convincing cirrus clouds/stratiform clouds underwhelming cloud density unsatisfactory cloudscapes in Live weather too cumulus heavy TCU and CB in Live weather look like wildfire/Storm depiction underwhelming aerosol density in Live weather generic look and feel in Live weather ...

There's a huge thread over at the official forums, as this plagues quite a few users since SU10. Although there seem to be a lot of potential causes, it also seems that reverting any overclock on your GPU, lowering the graphics settings in the sim and/or turning Hardware accelerated graphics (HAGS) to off in the Windows Control Panel may be the most promising solutions. HAGS off did it for me.

There's an announcement in the official forum: 1830Z on Nov. 18

Exactly! Synthesizing weather from METAR reports is old tech, MSFS has taken the revolutionary approach to generate Live Weather based on a forecast model, thus creating a living, breathing weather environ.... Wait! Wasn't there a Sim Update 7 roughly one year ago introducing weather synthesis based on METAR reports by user demand, thus creating cumuliform clouds everywhere, sacrificing stratiform and overcast layers in the ongoing attempts to plausibly "blend" those synthesized data into their Live weather simulation, giving us sudden transitions and disrupting the plausibilty of Live weather ever since? Must have dreamt that one, because why would they if there are several third parties like this one who have done so for a long time and have proven that this approach is not trivial and comes at the cost of a ton of compromises? Oh how I wished you were right!

According to the relevant thread in the official forums, it comes down to these possibilities (Summary by DensestSnail693) MSFS is very sensitive to gpu memory overclocks even if there’s no heat issues. Undo them. In Windows Hardware Accelerated Graphics is turned on by default and may still be turned on after a Windows update. Turn it off. The latest GForce driver causes problems for some. Install either the studio driver or revert back to something more stable, 517.48 seems to be the most recent of them. For me, turning HAGs to OFF seems to have done the trick.

As there's another topic describing similar problems it might have to do with recent faulty updates in Microsoft Store. "Gaming Services" has been the culprit for me quite some times. I made a suggestion in this topic, not sure if it helps though:

I didn't encounter your specific problem, but I had my fair share of issues with "gaming services" up to the point where my system suggested MSFS wasn't installed (although it was!) and I couldn't access the installation directory. Check in MS Store ("Library") for any issues with Gaming Services. Try updating first. Unfortunately It doesn't always show problems even if there are. Applying the following procedure cured the issues every time so far for me. Open your Registry Editor then go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE section, then to SYSTEM then to Current Control Set then to Services. In that bit you will find two things - Gaming Services and Gaming Services.Net - delete both of those two things completely and then restart your pooter. Back to MS Store and install Gaming Services. Sorted. Alternative: In the Windows search bar, type Windows PowerShell In the menu, select "Run as administrator." In the Administrator: Windows PowerShell screen, type the following command and press Enter: get-appxpackage Microsoft.GamingServices | remove-AppxPackage -allusers -------------- (the following part is unexplored by me, the above sufficed so far. I installed Gaming Services via MS Store after that) -------------- In the same window, type the following command and press Enter: start ms-windows-store://pdp/?productid=9MWPM2CQNLHN Click Get to install Gaming Services (select Yes if you receive the User Account Control (UAC) prompt) Restart your device, and try to install or update Microsoft Flight Simulator again. Good luck!

What bothers me most (apart from not preparing thoroughly for questions well known beforehand) is that - assumed that despite of their demonstrated lack of knowledge the essence of what they said is accurate - the clouds are coming from Meteoblue after there has been some blending of METAR data and recomputing of their weather model. That would mean that the puffs of smoke that resemble clouds since SU7 are the result of changes made in the dataset provided by Meteoblue. It is not clear if Meteoblue is working on refining these data in order to achieve a cloud depiction we have seen before SU7, but the statement that nothing has been done in regards to the clouds in recent updates - apart from the revised layering to be introduced with SU10 - is not reassuring.

Yep!

Here's what I heard from the Q&A: Seb: "I can talk a little bit about it, even though I don't know how the entire system works" That's all I needed to hear. And again, the question I have since SU7 immediately popped up: where the hell did the guy go who knew? Because if there's anyone left who knows how to master said systems - why not ask him when you know you gonna have to answer that particular question?

Same here with a 2080, that's why I was optimistic at first when they mentioned "additional headroom" for PC users. But looking at their botched attempts to get Live weather back to a reasonable state I struggle to be as optimistic as you are, especially when it comes to the timeframe. Let's hope you are right...

In one developer Q&A Seb made very clear that cloud rendering (and I can only guess that the same goes for the lighting) has a huge impact on performance, so I highly doubt it. Pretty obvious: the first one is SU10, the second is release version. SU5 introduced a whole different rendering of the clouds and the lighting, that's where a good part of the performance gain stems from. It is most obvious in the colorscape and the harsh contrasts and doesn't end with the sun bleeding through solid cloud coverage. You may argue that it is a matter of personal preference if one likes it or not, which it surely is. But the changes are not deniable.

The revolutionary and in my opinion most outstanding feature of MSFS was (yes, past tense!) LIVE WEATHER: a simulation based on a forecast model. Granted, it was not matching exactly what we see outside of our windows (it did so on a larger scale, but it took some basic meteorolgical knowledge to notice). Instead you could see clouds forming leewards of the mountains of the carribean islands in an otherwise clear sky, just as in real life! It should probably have been named "Dynamic Weather" to avoid the situation we are facing now: "The community" not only disliked the night lighting, "we" also disliked the weather for not being "accurate" to the METAR reports. And "we" all know that a good flight simulator has to display a ceiling with exactly 6/8th coverage in exactly 2300ft AGL if some momentary report from 25 minutes ago says so - because it has always been that way in FSX and P3D. And "we" obviously expect a robotic wind also matching exactly the report, not taking any gusts or magnetic variation into account. Consquential ASOBO and Meteoblue have made an attempt with SU7 to synthesize weather according to METAR reports around the reporting stations as in the old days (that's how Active Sky and REX generate their weather and yet they are kept out because MS considered their weather simulation different - is it still?) and integrate that into their dynamic, forecast based simulation. And they failed big time! Remember the TRON-like night lighting after their first attempt of "fixing" the issues outlined by "the community"? It took more than a year to get to the state we have now. We are still within a year since SU7 and I hope they will get the weather right some day, but unfortunately they also sacrificied rendering and lighting for performance, so some things will be gone for ever. And I'm also not so sure what "right" means in this context. I am under the impression that they are way over their head at the moment, as the best they seem to be able to do is some tweaking to get an incremental better, yet still inconsistent weather depiction displaying mostly cumulus clouds. And they have been very unspecific not only in terms of a timeline, but also about their objective, which seems to be reduced to incremental "improvements" over an unspecified period of time ("several sim updates"). Thus many users will probably get the impression that the weather is indeed getting better although it may never be as lifelike again as it was until SU5 (that's when changes to the lighting and cloud rendering started). Why can MS/ASOBO get away with it? Because the truth is that the weather related threads on the MS forums don't get much attention, let alone votes, as most gamers seem to be satisfied with the mediocre weather depiction introduced with SU7 or are too complacent to take the effort to participate. Take a look at the screenshot threads over there, where since SU7 you can see the same boring cloud patterns in every single post, and nobody seems to care. And then there are the subscription-driven Youtubers/Twitchers, who could make a difference by calling a spade a spade, but continue to "aaaah" and "ooooh", although they must realize the loss of fidelity in the sim. But who subscribes to a channel pointing out flaws in the product? I hope they sometimes give honest feedback to MS, at least when asked. Unfortunately, I think we have seen the best of MSFS Live Weather, if there's not a much broader user base demanding to deliver what the engine is capable of.

I have nearly the same specs as you and I have a buttery smooth sim. Here is how I achieved that: My monitor is natively running at 60Hz. In the Nvidia Control panel I have set a custom resolution with the same values as the default settings, but with a refresh rate of 30 Hz. I am lucky that my monitor supports that, but you may give it a try too: Go to Nvidia Control panel - Display/change resolution - beneath the list box of standard resolutions select "Adjust" - in the dialog box select "create user defined resolution" - change refresh rate to "30 Hz" - then "Test". If your monitor can handle the refresh rate, save these settings. And everytime you run MSFS, change to this custom resolution in NVidia Control panel first, then start the simulator. Inside MSFS, make sure to activate "Vsync" and adjust your settings so that you achieve more than 30fps in all conditions - and there you are: smooth as silk! I am running a non-english system, so maybe the menu items are named a bit differently, but youl'll figure it out...

I am 100% sure that the "one size fits all" approach is the reason for the huge regression we have seen with Live weather since SU5. And the size that has to fit us all is obviously defined by what the XBox can handle. Before SU5 (that's the XBox sim update last summer) they promised huge performance gains, and it has to be conceded that they delivered on that promise. They didn't talk much about the costs - naturally - but instead promised there would be "headroom" for high-end pc users, indicating more options in the settings - at least that was my impression. Sadly that has not come to fruition yet in regards to lighting and weather depiction. It must also be noted how mum Jorg Neumann has become regarding the weather, when before SU7 (the METAR sim update) he promised to "blow us away" until the end of this year. Go figure....