Reading the replies from this thread, you can certainly tell who is new to flight simulation vs those who have been around for a while! As a simmer for over 15 years, and a real world pilot for over 10 years, I am blown away by the realism level that the FS2020 weather and graphics engines offer. Often when I am flying for work, I look out the window and think the world outside doesn’t look as good as it does in FS! We’ve come a very long when in terms of immersive virtual environments, and whilst a computer game will never have 100% accuracy with the dynamic 3D natural planet, it’s getting better and better as time and technology progresses. Take a look at this video from FS2004 to remind yourself how far we’ve come: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn52ii-qhds
In terms of the grainy-ness, I was happy to see Asobo pay attention to the forum voting system and actively peruse it. After version 1.10.8.0 in early November, any vertical cloud formations with significant volumes were rendered differently than they had been previously causing the distracting grain effect as referenced in this topic. It appears the rendering system has been swapped back to how it was prior to this fix- and whilst this may not meet every simmers approval, the visual quality is a subjective value and to me it certainly ticks the box.
Remember addons such as REX and ActiveSky were a necessary requirement to make old sims look half decent by completely replacing cloud textures and had an associated hit on performance. Hang tight and wait to see what comes out in the future, I’m sure the live weather we see as of Jan 2020 will morph into a new beast as development continues.
Cirrus clouds? Are you sure? The thin levels of ice crystals usually found above 20,000 feet would be the least volumetric and lowest performance effecting cloud layer out of all of them.
