I think theres two things going on here. First, there is something broken with the weather. I would say ‘again’ but some say it was never fixed to begin with. There are thunderstorms everywhere and we have lightning with mostly clear skies. The clouds that are there really arent very attractive – low diffuse and bright and shaped like elongated saucers or very fat cigars maybe.
The second thing is that people kept complaining about pixelated clouds and I think that resulted in Asobo making the clouds more bland and then many people praised the clouds. Maybe Asobo went further in the ‘bland’ direction.
What I find odd is that even with the weather icon in the weather planner showing ‘severe thunderstorms’, I never get any thunderheads with the lightning. Its all just flat saucer shaped and bright ‘clouds’.
It’s live weather I guess. All the presets in discovery flights and landing challenges look amazing. There it’s just the blocky cloud reflections in water that look bad (Iceland bush flight for example)
Live weather can still look great, yet some conditions seem to create ‘glitches’. This was a few days ago over Scotland, nothing wrong with this
The same as the map data I guess, not everything is equal.
Nothing has compared to ActiveSky Cloud Art IMO. It’s disappointing to see the poor quality clouds right now. More often than not, I feel like the clouds look more like volcanos. What I miss is below!
Ah yes I see … ok since I am on a “around the world” trip right now I am using exclusivly live weather.
Yeah the reflections - this is a limitation on how they are calculated currently since they can not be calculated with screen space reflections only
Once we get ray tracing this will belong to the past - so keep fingers crossed that “RTX on” will come soon 
The only realy issue I see with the clouds are the excessive pixelation around the edges while in motion. When you pause the sim, the pixelations stop.
Yes, on the still photos they look quite good, but you miss one point, an important point: they are not truly volumetric. It is fairly easy to create some photorealistic 2D sprites mimicing real clouds. You can not use this technique with real volumetric clouds, they are calculated and rendered completly different.
Giving us real volumetric clouds which build up and disperse (=the clouds are dynamic) and which we can fly through and around them (with a still usable framerate ) is a great feat and for that how complex the tech is, the clouds look superb.
At release cloud reflections were very subtle, it looked a lot better.
This is from early in my world tour (September last year)
This is the Finland bush flight a month ago
It actually looks like a corner that moves with you as you fly on, very weird. Two vertical walls intersecting
I can confirm that cloud reflections got more “blocky” with at least the last two updates. All to squeeze out a few more frames. It’s not the way the sim should take.
hmm yes that looks indeed strange and off - I assume that you are on the highest water reflection settings?
I have to check with some of my own screenshots, but a bad reflection as shown in your picture I would definitly remeber 
Let’s not forget how badly the sim used to run for most people. For quite a long time lots of people were complaining about poor frame rates. Now the sim runs extremely smooth and now you don’t hear anyone complaining about it. Unfortunately to gain a smoother experience, the graphics quality has to be tweaked. While I agree that the clouds don’t look as good, for me personally I would rather a much smoother experience than perfect looking clouds.
Turning down the graphics settings would have had the same effect. Asobo did it for us, now everyone can run on medium disguised as ultra.
You could get that experience by dialing down the settings yourself before. My GTX 1060 laptop has no business running a 2021 game on Ultra settings at 30+ fps, yet now it does using less than 10GB of ram as well. (And not looking as good as high settings before SU5)
Before you had the choice between high quality and performance. This is FS2020 in December on a handheld at up to 60 fps
Now you have a choice between performance and more performance.
<spits out coffee>
I’ve read there is a known bug in reflections that they are working on fixing. I think the reflections in mirrors on aircraft might be related? I saw some discussion about it in the BBS L-19 Birddog thread, and elsewhere I think.
I don’t think we’re getting the same results as if we had just turned graphics to medium. I tested this out and am getting a smoother sim than had I just turned graphics down.
Before the update I was averaging 30 FPS in Ultra and 40 FPS in Medium.
Now I’m averaging 50 FPS in Ultra and 60 FPS in Medium.
So for me it’s not the same as if I were ‘dialling down the settings’ before the update.
I mean the sim looks good, yes maybe certain things don’t look quite as good as before but they still look good.
Take a look at Flight Simulator 98 and look at how far we’ve progressed.
I’m very familiar with with the technology and understanding the differences between what the crew at HiFi has created and what we have in MSFS. It still doesn’t change my opinion though, that Asobo needs to work towards making their volumetric clouds have some life in them like those from the ASCA product. Now it’s up to them to create believable clouds and not pixelated blobs that resemble volcano ash. That or invite 3rd party devs to do it. Given the chance, I’m confident if HiFi had access to the weather APIs, we would’ve seen more realistic cloud types by now.
I wont totally fault Asobo. There are times the clouds look great and not out of place, but for me anyways, the majority of my flights involve clouds that do not immerse me. Picture below for reference. (Volcano on the left)
