exactly the clouds are nice but it does not reflect the reality
Furthermore, the “other” simulator is much more accurate in relation to the reality of the conditions in the area.
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The clouds are fine, but I live here and there aren’t any giant cumulus clouds anywhere. Right now there are stratus clouds and it’s practically overcast. I imagine those cumulus clouds are based on the information provided by MeteoBlue, but that information isn’t accurate.
I often see that data on meteoblue about convective clouds when in reality there are stratus clouds.
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LR likely went with the more blurry approach because it saves on compute power. Ben Supnick from LR said that clouds have a huge impact on performance. That’s probably why the clouds are more blurry in XP 12, because LR is trying to keep the performance of XP 12 reasonable.
And Torsten from Toliss has outright said MSFS has better performance than XP 12 because MSFS uses a more asynchronous architecture, I have posted this comment from Torsten earlier in this thread: 5 years in and pretty much zero improvements to clouds - #1770 by gadwin777
Here is the quote from Torsten in that video:
the classic thing of asynchronous computation, which is the key reason why MSFS, the FPS are better than in X-Plane, because MSFS they use multiple cores, X-Plane is going that way now but previously they didn’t, and it made life for me a lot easier than everything was one serial computation, but it made the FPS slower
What Torsten said, tells me how much more impressive the architecture of MSFS is, especially MSFS 2024, because the performance of MSFS 2024 is simply better than XP 12, especially after SU4 (and if you don’t believe the performance of MSFS is better than XP 12, then you are contradicting Torsten). This allows MSFS to have sharper clouds, and sharper clouds make the clouds more realistic because clouds in real life are not as blurry as the XP 12 clouds.
Hi, you might try playing with some of the shadowing settings in MSFS. They cost performance but I thing they act not only to enhance terrain but also clouds.
I have everything at maximum even the shadows at 2040 (I don’t remember the value exactly) I have an rtx 5090… in my opinion they just need to implement the lighting in an optimal way now…However, after a certain altitude, the shadows disappear. This is a limitation to increase performance.
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I think the problem with live weather is that instead of generating layers, it generates a single cloud with the lower METAR layer as the base and the upper METAR layer as the top.
As seen in these images, the weather from a single cloud is very similar to that generated by live weather.
Ideally, the live weather forecast would be able to generate cloud layers, but they are difficult to find.
Yes, you may be right on the altitude. I have a 5080 and usually fly a B-787 from RENO to SFO daily to look at my local weather. But I only climb to 16000’. Here is a shot of a recent storm.
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I see shadows like you too… but when you climb above 30,000 ft everything looks the same, especially during the day… it’s a LUT and performance problem… they should at least get to a hybrid between ray marching and raytracing or at least fix the lighting… I hope now that the sim is very fluid they can maybe work on the weather and atmosphere in general in the sim update 6-7… maybe who knows, a nice presentation at Expo 2026 in June of what the weather engine can do… we’ll see…
edit… for example this gray that is seen unnaturally… but because the rays are not filtered properly or rather there are few light ribalds… you don’t go into this but I’m confident that the guys at Asobo can really improve all of this….
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Most layer data involving specific cloud types and their thicknesses can really only be derived from modeling. And modeling has a lot of drawbacks in terms of resolution and spatiotemporal divergence as you get farther away from the initial run.
I wonder what’s driving the XP12 modeling and how accurate it is as well. Could be a similar story in terms of (in)accuracy, but they at least provide some realistic-looking layers to correlate with what the models are showing, despite that.
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I am familiar with high dynamic range issues, which may be at play at altitude (maybe the range gets constricted). I will take one of my other canned California flights from LAX to SFO that gets me up to FL350 and see what the clouds look like. We still have a lot of real weather here.
I have not fooled with the relevant settings here because even with the 5080 I have to be very careful about workload or things slow down. I believe somewhere in the settings there is a HDR switch but I suspect I have it turned off. All my shadow stuff are at a minimum. With a 5090 you should be able to get away with a lot more (I hope).
OK, hope this is not overload but I took a full flight from LAX to SFO in the 787 and there were lotsa clouds. Put in a couple of cockpit shots if anyone is interested in VNAV. To me these clouds are not bad.
It’s not just X-Plane that’s pulling ahead of Flight Simulator. These tornado simulations are apparently being developed inside of…
Roblox:
Flight Simulator 2024 for comparison:
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Roblox, however, is a terrible flight simulator.
That’s true, but it is interesting to compare video games when they have some shared features even when they’re different genres.
I imagine GTA6 may also be substantially ahead in its volumetric atmospheric effects, as well as many other interactive environmental features that Flight Simulator also tries to implement. It’s neat to see what’s possible in games now.
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with “live weather” 50km apart.
XP12
i mean seriously what’s that supposed to be? Both LOWI area, same “live weather”
XP12
and now some FS2020 from 5 years ago:
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the discussion about MSFS, being it either 2020 or 2024, depicting weather nowhere near as XP12 does, is nice and all, but the regression from what even FS2020 once looked like is the real bummer here.
FS2020 release version:
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Regarding blurry clouds, I took this picture yesterday afternoon from the top floor of where I work. I was passing, and happened to think the clouds looked interesting. I’ve hosted it elsewhere to hopefully avoid any compression at the forums end:
Those clouds have a milky quality to them, which is similar to what I have seen in XP12. Like an image that has had a smear process run over it. There is very lilttle fine detail to be seen, at this range at least.
I haven’t ran 2024 like this at all, but I did try it out in 2020 a few times, and once inadvertently as graphics settings got reset during an upgrade, but it kind of looks like the sim clouds when it is set lower than Ultra.
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