Was flying around and the night sky was creeping in, as the fully dark sky was transitioning in, i noticed a lot of “banding” going on during the 2 minute transition. This is pretty jarring to look at, and it doesnt quite seem intentional, given how smooth the rest of the atmospheric simulation is… I have only noticed this so far from the ground level or low altitude, didn’t notice it while it transition at cruise levels in the A320 for example.
EDIT: it is also very visible from cruise altitude, probably even more so than ground level due to the fact you can see the shadow banding skipping every few seconds as it rolls in and the plane nears the full darkness.
Here is a series of screenshots showing what i saw. Given the screenshots will end up compressed, this is probably a bit harder to show than just experiencing first hand in the sim.
You see the banding skip forward every second or so as this happens, making it very immersion breaking to be honest, i hope this could be addressed with some sort of smoothing during that transition!
The last album shows this very clearly and in my opinion this level of banding is not acceptible, especially not when the older MSFS 2020 didnt have this issue.
Most game engines render in 8-bit color which means that gradients are prone to this type of thing unless there is some sort of dithering and/or film grain to break up the transitions.
0-256 for each R, G, B color doesn’t leave a lot of room for smooth transitions between like color values.
Another example i saw today, it seems to really especially show on the ground textures, when viewing from cruise altitudes. Asobo, please look into a fix for this.
We have created an internal ticket to see if our team already has this logged, and if not they will attempt to reproduce the issue and create a new bug report. This item is now marked as feedback-logged. If there is an existing bug report or one is created, we will move this thread to bug-logged.
I remember this also being a bug in MSFS 2020, but they fixed it. I think this could be the same bug that crept back in 2024. Seb talks about it here https://youtu.be/1JahMnUl8Vo?t=2731. I’ve noticed its not just the transition to the full dark sky that has color banding, the general sky has a lot of it and it looks quite bad. Seb says, most of the time 10bit could be enough to not have banding visible, but in some cases it’s just not enough and that’s why they use 16 bit. Please look into if this setting was inadvertently changed back to 10 bit, as this would explain all what i’m seeing i think.
The more I’ve looked into all this, the more uncertain of my claims I’ve become. I have a 42" LG C4 and I’m sitting maybe a meter from the screen, while flying at 4K. Yeah, there is definite banding whether I have HDR enabled in the game or not, but I decided to set up the system so, that by all accounts I should see the effect and found myself flying in a high moisture environment with a lot of mist. Fiddled with the HDR and there is a night and day difference between it on or off.
And the banding… actually HDR brings 4X times the hues on main color values R/G/B. Which is to say, I can’t say for certain if I ever encountered a sky within MSFS that only had like straight blue hues and not a bit of any other - bringing me into conclusion.
If you start deviating from a straight blue values and start adding other colours, the 4X doesn’t apply here, it’s actually less. The more deviant colour hues you encounter suffer this the most and the effect is the most prominent on those.
Well, we could go into dither, but I’ve babbled enough and proved myself wrong twice in a short time already.
I see gradient bars in the sky as I move the cursor over the timeline
msfs 2020 had the same problem with gradient stripes, but when I set the ColorGrading 0 setting, the stripes disappeared and the picture was smooth and the FilmGrain 0 option also makes the clouds soft without grain.
PLEASE RETURN these settings to MSFS 2024
We’ve had a nice discussion about the banding issue on MSFS and I think your post about enabling these options in the game would be real gamechanger. If it really were possible in 2020, this could be used to our advantage - if so, then why not in 2024, like you said.
This needs proper visibility as even using HDR with tertiary colours, the banding remains an issue.
