Grainy Graphics

Low res textures and messed up LOD are a totally different thing than the topic of this thread. You’re not wrong with your observation. Just not related to the topic here.

@FlyZRG If your problem is just on the panels textures make sure “Texture Synthesis” is on Ultra.

Didn’t the devs mention, in the previous Q&A, that the grainy shadows would be fixed once they moved to the DirectX 12 engine? I have had grainy shadows since the beginning. Not sure if they got worse in the meantime, I upgraded my graphics card in the meantime, so I can’t compare.

You can fix the grainy shadows and textures yourself. At least revert them to the way they were at launch, where you’ll only occasionally get a small amount of grain along the edges of dark clouds under certain lighting conditions vs this grainy mess we’re seeing everywhere now. At launch, the small grainy edges in clouds was acceptable to me. Or at least a giant improvement over what’s there now.

The grain issue is a combination of film grain effect, and then excessive sharpening applied over top of it. Those settings are not exposed to us in the in-game menus, but can be disabled from the config file.

Open the file below in Notepad (back it up first just in case)
<yourWindowsProfileFolder>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\UserCfg.opt

Set both Film Grain and Sharpening values to 0, and then boot the game. Grain will be gone.

The end result is an overall image that’s a touch less sharp, but you can bump up render scale about 10-20 and it regains its sharpness. The performance tradeoff for increased render scale vs turning off those other 2 effects is about the same. Not really noticeable to me at least at 3440 x 1440. If you’re running at 4K with 100 scale rendering, that might cause a performance hit.

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This helped a lot, though it’s not quite perfect. I can still notice graininess on some cockpit textures and clouds, but it’s much less noticeable.

Yeah, it’s not perfect. I’m not seeing the grainy effect in my cockpit anymore, nor am I seeing that effect on the ground or buildings and such. Just a light touch on the edges of dark clouds. Different hardware, settings and resolutions could yield different results for different people.

In any case, I find it’s WAY better than before. Not perfect, but much closer to what we say prior to the last 2 patches.

I have the same problem. RTX 2070 Super.

FYI I installed through the Microsoft Store and the UserCfg.opt file was located under
%AppData%\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache

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I have the same card as you. Had the same issue. I turned off image sharpening in the Nvidia settings. Fixed the issue. I strongly suggest using this post as a starting point for 2070 super cards. My 2070 SUPER 4K settings and suggestions - episode 2

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Good to know. I have the Steam version so I could only speak for that. Thanks for adding that extra info in…

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Thanks for the tip, I will surely try this out! Btw, why would anyone apply film grain effect to the image?

Beats me. Probably the same people who think motion blur is a good idea. I hate it and whenever it’s an option, I will always disable it. Why it’s forced into the game through a non user accessible manner like this is beyond me.

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Just curious, what sort of FPS are you getting in the cockpit with LOD radious at 200?

I am getting very grainy/pixelated graphics regardless of whether I am on high end or ultra.

. I get quite grainy and pixelated when flying. Menu items/still images are great except when of the world. I have looked at many videos on youtube of people using my graphics card and various settings and they have far better results than I am getting.

The sky also looks terrible - lots of blocks and rings.

I have looked at a few forums etc but have been unable to improve performance. I don’t have these issues on other games as far as I can tell.

Watching videos with the same card shows me I should be getting much better performance.

Any suggestions on how to get a more normal performance would be very welcome.

System:
Intel(R) Core™ i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.59 GHz
16.0 GB
NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI

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To me, it looks like a very low bits per RGB channel thing. The grain looks like dithering to smooth out the color gradients. Normally (s)RGB is 8 bit per color (red, green, blue), giving 256 (0 to 255) possibilities and then mixed together is 256 * 256 * 256 = 16.8 million colors.

It looks like your display is only showing 2 to 4 bits per color channel.
That’s what I think I see. I do not know how to solve it for you.

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This is not a photo of the screen, it is a screenshot. This picture also looks grainy on my screen. This eliminates the display as the cause. So the GPU is the cause. Either a hardware problem or a driver problem.

I think there is something wrong in the graphics driver. I would reinstall the current graphics driver cleanly, reset it to factory settings and clear the nvidia shader cache.

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Not sure if it will help, but you can also set sharpen and film grain from 1 to 0 in your user cfg.

Hi everyone - thanks for the suggestions (some of which I tried). On a whim I again began changing settings one by one in the graphics menu and I think I figured it out. I turned ‘AMD Fidelity FX Sharpening’ to zero and suddenly I saw a massive improvement. I hadn’t come across this in older forum posts but this appears to have been the primary culprit. It is now looking much much nicer. I might be able to have it at a low setting and get a better result, so I’ll play around with it. But right now on zero it appears to have solved the problem.

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When reading back my own post, I see what you mean. What I really ment was that it looks like MSFS is outputting a 2 to 4 bit per channel image.

Good to see it solved!

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This is a handy tip, thanks for sharing :slight_smile: