Hmm, do you mean voxels? It seems like XP 12 uses voxels for the clouds:
The latest X-Plane 12.1.0 Beta 4 update brings significant enhancements to the weather system, including voxel-level cloud blending to eliminate unnatural shapes
And this quote by Ben Supnik on how LR wanted to use voxels in the past, and I assume they ended up using voxels in XP 12:
Ben then went onto say, “when we did the V10 clouds, almost 9 years ago, we looked at them and said this is the last particle billboard we will ever write. This isn’t the greatest way to do it and we could always see that voxel clouds were a better idea. When we wrote the code in V10, we couldn’t do voxel clouds as people didn’t have the hardware for it. Most of our users wouldn’t have been able to run it at all. We knew that something much better was coming. So, once we get Vulkan done, we can get working on this in earnest.”
I’m going to assume MSFS clouds are also using voxels based on what this person said:
Well, it’s been explained 100 times by Seb and here in the forum - but I’ll do it again - the engine consists of a kind of voxel engine - why ? Because this is the only way to display this number of clouds in 3D without exceeding the performance.
So I suppose I need to correct my comment about polygons, and that it’s actually voxels used to generate the clouds.
Then Ben Supnik must be implying that XP 12 has to limit the voxels, to help with the performance? Here is Ben Supnik’s quote again:
Clouds – we are working on the shaping and quality of clouds, improving resolution, fixing artifacts, and improving performance. Clouds are probably the single most expensive part of the renderer, so they are a constant tug-of-war between quality and speed.
Either way, if you can improve base performance of the flight simulator, you have more headroom to improve the graphics. It’s always a tug of war between graphics and performance. If there exists a computer that can calculate an infinite number of calculations per second, and render an infinite number of voxels/polygons/pixels/(whatever graphics unit you can imagine), then the graphics that computer can yield will be unparalleled. Of course, no such computer exists, all computers have limitations, and programmers have to work off those limitations.
Thus, I think we have to give credit for the MSFS team for being able to render the graphics in MSFS 2024 with the hardware available on the market today, and even find ways to squeeze more performance out of SU4 beta.