In MSFS 2020, there was a way for you to edit the usercfg.opt file where you could disable film grain I think it was called and also sharpening. Which did improve things at least to some extent.
In MSFS 2024 though, I haven’t been able to find those parameters and there doesn’t seem to be an option anywhere in the UI which would allow you to do the same.
When having volumetric clouds set to Medium, that improves things a bit but instead you end up with clouds looking very “cartoonish”. Going to High, you get more life-like looking clouds but instead, you also increase the pixelated look. I suppose this is even more visible in VR where you’re part of the scene and everything is in natural size. Rather than in 2D where you’re looking at a flat screen in front of you.
I’ve seen this both when using TAA as well as DLSS.
The clouds just seem to have issues, especially with DLSS + VR. A lot of the time, especially in specific lighting scenarios, they just do weird things and (in spots) look terrible. Nothing to do with Film grain or sharpening though imo.
Now that the sim is stable and quite performant, I wish they would look into making clouds, roads, bridges and car traffic look better, as well as improving autogen buildings (which they said a year ago they would reboot completely).
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I’ve sometimes seen cloud pixelation when I push the “AMD FidelityFX Sharpening” setting quite high. It impacts the rendering of clouds.
Asobo lowered the graphical quality of clouds back with SU5 for 2020 (evidenced plastered all over this forum back then), unfortunately they’ve seemingly used the reduction of quality of clouds to help boost performance and we’ve not since go those “old” clouds quality back. Even on Ultra I can see very bad pixelation up close, it’s painfully obvious yet little has been done to bring those original clouds back.
So there’s not much you/I can do really, some settings may help improve slightly, but the overall basis needs to be changed by Asobo.
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Over the years I’ve been pretty adamant about my belief that we need a massive change in the way the sim is coded and sold.
Instead of this:
- Standard = a bunch of aircraft and airports.
- Deluxe = more aircraft and more airports.
- Premium Deluxe = even more aircraft and airports.
We need this:
- Standard = coded to run lower-fidelity ‘Ultra’ settings perfectly on Xbox, PS5, and low-end PC’s.
- Deluxe = coded to run higher-fidelity ‘Ultra’ settings well by taking advantage of increased processing power on mid-range PC’s.
- Premium Deluxe = recommended only for the most powerful PC’s. 7 large monitors displaying ‘Ultra’ settings that include massive LOD curves, realistic clouds everywhere, and all the improvements that people wish for, but sometimes don’t understand the computing power required to achieve.
I know I’m an old man yelling at clouds, and what I want will never happen. But I truly believe that those of us with more powerful computers suffer from compromises in the base code. Xbox users suffer as well from Microsobo’s desire to make one-size-fits-all.
Not eveyone wants, or can afford, premium hardware. Not everyone wants baked-in lower fidelity from their high-end PC’s. Those are the niches I’m most concerned with.
I’ve been working with computers for over 30 years, and there’s one truism I’ve learned:
Hardware and software are two ends of the same snake chasing its tail. Better software tends to demand better hardware, and better hardware allows for more powerful software, which then demands more powerful hardware, and so on…
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