There was 20GB or thereabouts of data added so it was a fair amount of whatever it was. Plus there’s all the extra data being streamed remotely. Its all part of one big system at the end of the day. The fact that people are getting poorer performance kind of proves my point that with each update more content is added and from a purely computational point of view it doesn’t come for free. Its bound to create more and more work for the sim to do.
The clouds are better looking now, noticeably improved, but I’m sure that extra quality comes at an FPS price, even if its small it all adds up. My point really is it’ll be the same going forward. They’ll keep making things nicer looking but it’ll always come at a performance trade off. They’re talking about making mountains look far more realistic, which will be great, but I can imagine that’ll come at a huge performance cost for those with even mid range PC’s who up until now have been able render mountains ok.