Shimmering/AA downgrade since SU5 (in-game, not menus/overlays)

It seems to me that the antialiasing problem is actually down to lighting within the sim, I’ve noticed that shimmer is an absolute minimum when in low light conditions like sunset and sunrise also, when visibility is low, i’m not getting shimmering of buildings at all. It only happens in certain lighting conditions.

Maybe that’s where attention should be focused to reduce this annoying effect.

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Some people have said it might be due to an issue with HDR?

However, other games also have this problem, so I’m not sure if it’s just lighting?

I’ve also noticed this in normal (non-vr) too.

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Voted, hope they fix graphical downgrade

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In a year of 2021 in a game which supposed to support 4k I can still see lots of jaggies. Thanks. I certainly hate this Xbox implementation. It just screwed up most of the major things on PC side. Shading is far from good, resolution jaggies are everywhere, clouds and textures are pixalated. Hey Asobo Xbox users wont be here after some time but we long time simmers certainly will be. Please dont disregard us.

Daytime lighting should certainly be visited and optimized again. All bright all saturated. Far from real. (All settings default nothing special on my side)
Shadows are really killing immersive. Please god. Let DX12 flow in and we may have good visuals then.

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Advice from the dev team came on this subject so we have un-merged to keep the AA issue in VR vs non-VR topics separate. Unfortunately, we lost the votes here and are unable to manually add them back. Please re-vote on this topic if you did prior and many apologies as that’s on me. It had about 71 votes at the time.

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This is not the VR-specific topic, that one still has its votes.

The separation of these issues was advised by the developers as noted in the post above yours, so I’m sure both are on their radar anyway.

Okay. Thanks for the information :pray: let us hope that the broken Antialiasing is on their radar.

But the broken Antialiasing in VR is not only in the menu. There is also a lot of more shine and shimmer in game…

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I see, although this new shimmering is not a problem only in VR but in standard 2D mode as well, so it had to be moved to the correct section.

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You know folks, all of that is nice and dandy like…to fix the AA, horrible stutters on camera pan, scenery popping in, pixelated/lowres clouds, ugly aliasing of mapped shadows, subpar screen-space shadows, noisy reflections on everything making water surface at a certain distance looking as if it’s raining…
…and a great deal of other issues covered in all these many topics during this 1st year of our new simulator’s life (baby) :wink:…patch that a bit, break this for a while, but stitch that over there so that this isn’t a big deal anymore, etc…Yeah…it’s fine.

But I have something to say !
Every single thing up there. All those topics. All of that together with all the votes should be merged in one mega-topic and given the title: “DIRECTX 12 ULTIMATE”.

It’s literally a dream API for the exact scenario and the exact demands that we face in the MSFS !
To finally have this masterpiece under a modern API the way it was supposed to be released.

Another reason why I’m all hyped about it are all those cool airliners we all know and love…that are to be released…but they won’t be released before the simulator receives the DX12 treatment.
Why ?
Because when the switch to DirectX 12 happens, it will literally break almost every single addon and livery, and every single one of them will require an update.

And if it’s got some C/++ or something like that (of which every complex airliner has A LOT of), it shall require an update…from scratch.
It’s also known as “full rewrite”.

When the DX12 happens some of the existing addons might take weeks before being delivered an update for.
However, despite bringing dramatic compatibility requirements in regards to addons - it shall deal with all of that up there​:point_up_2: and introduce improvements far greater than the word “dramatic” implies.:grinning:

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You should temper your expectations. DirectX 12 won’t be a magic fix for everything.

For example, the clouds and reflections look grainy due to the ray-marching technique which accumulates samples over several frames, for performance reasons. They said in a past Q&A that the fix for the grainy reflections will come with ray-tracing, but at a hefty performance cost of course.

The stutters and pop-in when panning the camera can be fixed with a new graphics setting in the next update, but it also means giving up some of the performance improvements that Sim Update 5 brought. It will effectively allow you to reduce or completely disable the off-screen scenery culling, which helped reduce CPU load and RAM usage so much.

The anti-aliasing is something completely separate. They can continue to refine the TAA algorithm, or add new AI-powered technologies like DLSS and XeSS. But the API is irrelevant in this case.

DirectX 12 will definitely allow for better visual effects, but your hardware needs to be up to par so you can enjoy them.

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Single biggest issue since SU5 for me, both in 2D and even more so in VR.
very unfortunate that all the votes were lost as there were over 70, now just over 40.
It would be appreciated if the devs could comment on this major bug and confirm its existence and that it will be fixed in the next update. Makes the sim virtually unplayable for me currently, as the graphics are so degraded compared to the prior version that the fun and immersion is completely gone.

I really hope this is addressed and restored in the upcoming update.

Please get the votes back to where they were and should be.

EDIT: I know that the issue is in the bug list and “under investigation”, however a few comforting words and acknowledgement by the devs that this is indeed a bug (just like with the lighting issue that was resolved in the hotfix) would be more than welcome. I feel left in the dark about if this issue is being fixed and when.

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Voted it up myself again. If you voted before please vote again on this topic…

I agree it would be great to have a developer chime in on this bug and confirm its existence and where it’s coming from…

Windows store apps games such as Roblox (which I tested today for my son) work perfectly fine in Fullscreen (AA doesn’t work in windowed mode however)… but that’s the problem, it seems MS has tweaked the OS in a way that makes it so Store Apps have priority over traditional Fullscreen games.

As I’ve mentioned before it’s been affecting a majority of my regular games. I stopped playing altogether on my PC due to this broken AA bug. It currently looks like I’m playing on an Xbox 360…

On the other hand I’m glad the bug is “Logged” now…

Let’s get this fixed Microsoft, please…

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I’m pretty sure it’s not a bug, and I’m 99.99% certain it’s nothing to do with Windows. I downloaded MSFS on Xbox, purposely to test and compare the AA, and it has the same exact same issue. They’ve simply just downgraded the AA so it can run better on Xbox, I don’t think there’s anything more to it than that

Hate to break the 0.01% to ya, but every game’s AA is affected due to this AA issue.

Here’s a picture of Rocket League’s terrible AA as well in Windows.

I’ve done a lot of testing and am actually compiling some feedback for Microsoft on this issue, since I’ve been able to rule out the issue as being a hardware problem. I’ll post the feedback here once it’s complete.

EDIT: You say it’s the exact same result on Xbox… know why? Because Microsoft purposely downgraded the PC graphics to allow for Xbox support. That’s why you don’t notice a difference. PC should still have superior quality vs Xbox.

Be sure to click the image and enjoy all that jaggedy goodness on what’s supposed to be max settings… lol

I think you need to read my post again. In your edit you just repeated what I already originally said. I’m agreeing that there’s an issue with AA in MSFS, and I’m agreeing that that it has been downgraded to allow support for Xbox. The point I’m making is that if it was Windows specific, as you’re suggesting, then the Xbox version wouldn’t have the same horrible looking AA, but it does, so it must mean that it’s an issue with the game rather than Windows

I also have the same issue as PilotRaider and it went from great to What the… on two systems. First my old and then a completely new system that was fine for about 6 months. And Xbox is made by microsoft so im guessing they share a lot of the same tech

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What I was getting at in my edit is that PC should still be capable of looking better than the Xbox edition of games. PC should be able to force higher AA than Xbox. Yet the thing is Xbox runs on Windows 10 Core, and this AA issue as I pointed out happens in many other games too. Therefore it can’t just be the game itself. It’s more than likely the OS itself causing the problem. It isn’t a hardware problem as I’ve already swapped every single piece of my computers out, even using new parts.

Same thing that happened to me, I just woke up one day, powered on my PC and then I was like “hey who turned on these garbage graphics?” lol.

Fair enough, I just find it really hard to believe that it’s a Window’s issue rather than them just downgrading the AA to be able to run on Xbox. Surely more people in the PC community would have picked up on it? For me, MSFS is the only game that has worse AA than before, and it seems like it would be a bit of a coincidence that a Windows-wide downgrade in AA would occur at the exact same time that you download Sim Update 5. I’m not saying you’re wrong, it just seems highly unlikely to me