the title says it all Pre 1.8 patch water looked great really awesome then I guess they dumbed it down and now its a little better but nowhere near as gorgeous as pre 1.8 patch…
Also general fps performance is worse now. especially with live traffic multiplayer on…
I had to laugh because one of the guys in Elite:Dangerous labeled a similar issue in that game “elephant butt leather”.
lol too funny
Not sure how they looked at that water and thought it was good to send out tbh.
Personally, I wish they could return it to the way it was in the Alpha.
Now we know where we got that extra 10FPS. 
I wonder how many of the water changes are just number tweaks in the config files.
the “leather FX” disappears if you set wind knts above approx 15, but now new issue, foam wave have repeat tiles, please vote
“Elephant Butt Leather…” 
Before it looked very realistic; now it does look fake. They did it to increase performance ?
I think the water does look better under some conditions. I thought the movement and textures gave a very realistic result. This shot is on a flight in the Robin in the Japanese Islands with high winds. But less wind on an earlier flight wasn’t as impressive.
In the screenshots the weather had thunderstorms with lightning (but oddly no turbulence). None of the nearby airports had ATIS so I wasn’t able to find out how high the winds were, but the 2nd screen shot shows me lined up for a landing, so you can guess they were high.
I agree that with some 15kts wind it looks alot better but its kind of annoying… Try 55 kts wind… it looks really cool but its just a chore to fly in…
There should be a way to decouple winds strength and wave height.
I too see some tiling with stronger winds, especially foam is too regular. The long wavelength swell they added is not very realistic and when seen from high above it looks alot like wrong scaling. They seem to have talent to make things worse 
Where in the patch notes did it make mention of changes to water texture?
In the patch notes… Plus the change is obvious if youve been flying aound water alot.
might depend on your settings also…
WORLD
Ocean rendering has been improved (waves scale, foam and reflections)
Water mask has been edited to display actual aerial image near the shore in some areas
Luminance has been tweaked for some photogrammetry cities (Napoli, Darwin, San Gorgonio, Las Vegas)
Fixed terraforming issue which was causing issues in KTEX airport
Water elevation has been updated to improve rivers (Missouri river and around Toronto for example) and lakes (center of Canada)
Fixed detail map rendering around runway/taxiway bordersI simply want them to return the water to what we had at release.
That is right. The water seemed very nice and the best befor patch 1.8. I don’t understand, why a lot of things are getting worse after each patch, like fps, to much lightning, a not more realistic weather and so on.
I can only say many things looked better befor the last 2 patches.
I’m hoping for a simple enough mod that allows the water to “look” the way it does at windspeeds of 10kts or greater, even when surface winds are actually at 0kts.
The “calm” waters really do look awful…
Asobo,
Please apply the water .fx you have for splash , particle, waterfalls. and so on. This only enhances an already beautiful sim. But when I fly over niagara, yosemite, and Victoria falls. or land on water I 'm sorely disappointed. Please guys., make this a priority in the patches and updates.