Pixelated and grainy clouds are back starting with 1.14.5.0

If you are using Nvidia, you can put in sharpening with the game filters.
You can try it “on the fly” so you can find the best option between pixel clouds and texture sharpness.

I don’t what they have changed from the alpha to now.
In the alpha the clouds were perfect.
I guess they really lowered the visuals for the Xbox

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I had a major case of ‘grainy cloud’ the other day. I was flying on my Xbox S and I was flying at an altitude that is higher than I normally do. The flight was Palm Beach to Merritt Island in Florida. Most of my Xbox flights have been at night so I never saw any grain of course. I also normally fly below the clouds but this time I was in the tops of them at 9,000 feet or so. My other system is a PC with a GTX 1070 and a non HDR monitor. My XBox S is attached to a non HDR TV but it appears to have more range than my PC monitor.
On my PC I notice that my trees don’t look as good as they do on the XBox but I also don’t have the shimmering issue that I see on my X Box.
When studying the grain as I flew, I noticed it seemed more noticeable because of the brightness and color differences in the way the clouds morph over time. On the Xbox (Series S which I think has lower quality clouds by default and that probably matters) I noticed an almost sparkly pattern that was so noticeable because of the wide variance in the brightnesses and colors of the pixels as they morphed over time. On the PC, although the morphing pattern was basically the same, the fact that the colors in the pattern were so much closer made the ‘sparkle’ almost non existent and therefore no grain to speak of.
I don’t think this is an X Box downgrading issue. I think it may actually be a ‘resolution vs HDR’ issue. Lower cloud settings or lower render scale may just be more problematic with HDR. I don’t have anything HDR so I can’t check that.

Yes they did, an absolute travesty. The visuals are the only reason for using this sim as opposed to the others out there. You reduce visual quality, might as well not bother with this sim. Same with how they lowered the visuals to get more performance. Totally unnecessary, if you wanted better performance, buy better hardware or turn down your settings. All they did was force everybody to have their settings lowered. All because gamers expect to have really high FPS and complained they were only getting like 40. Totally more than enough for a flight sim.

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Strongly urging anyone experiencing the issue to VOTE in this thread. If we get another 30 votes we will show up on the Top Bugs page in the development update and the devs will be forced to at least acknowledge this issue in the next Dev Q&A.

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:unamused: :weary: :weary:

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Upgraded my system recently. Went from a RTX 2080 Super to a 3080 ti and an i7-10700k to an i9-11900K 32 Gb Ram and absolutely no discernable difference to cloud quality. Still extremely poor aliasing of cloud edges and pixilation.

Which is not a surprise, just thought I would bring to everyone’s attention that the capability of your rig will not help clouds look better.

Lets keep the votes going folks, we are SO close to getting on the top bugs page!

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Would this be acceptable?

not bad in my opinion, which settings are you using?

image

Although, I am just testing with all those zeros set back to 1, and getting this

and again began to receive this kind of clouds of live weather
settings Ultra

Here is a good, non-biased approach to seeing the issue.

Clouds and snow on mountains, both made up of water crystals should match in tone and value. The mountains are pure white on my iMac 5K monitor and the clouds are “gray/yellow based”. IRL that would not happen.

Here is the video review of Dolby Vision vs HDR10 by Vincent Teoh on monitors that have been properly calibrated. Notice the gray cloud on top of the mountain:

I really feel the clouds have suffered after SU5. The grain was there, but the cloud colors and softness looked much better than it looks now.

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Now it looks like old dirty ice or melting snow in the spring on the side of a road.

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issue still persists, it’s apity. even with WU6/SU7.
i am on ultra. RX6900XT. 4k.

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Are the Nvidia control panel settings supposed to take effect while you’re playing the game? They don’t for me - I’ve tried adjusting sharpening and other things while flying and nothing happens, it only seems to take effect if I close and reload the game. It would certainly make it a lot easier to compare settings if I could adjust it in game!

One suggestion which doesn’t help clouds unfortunately (mine remain terrible) but finally solved my issue with cockpit displays being fuzzy, was setting antialiasing transparency to 8x within Nvidia control panel - makes a huge difference and to some other textures as well, for example runways look much more detailed. No combination of the sampling settings within MSFS had been able to solve this for me.

This is how it looks right now with live weather on Xbox Series X…extremely grainy clouds which look not really nice and unrealistic since SU7.

Anyone else experience this on Xbox? From my point of view this issue was not so bad in SU6 and clouds look better there.


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@Jummivana

Hello everyone!
I would like to share my observations on the topic of grainy clouds.

I noticed and did some experiments

in my opinion, the grains appear from too high a level of cloud density.

The examples show how the cloud layer changes visually when I change the density in the settings.

My conclusion is that the maximum density parameter Unit - 5 is very large and it should be reduced to Unit - 1
then the clouds become soft without grain

Let’s vote for the cloud density option to be reduced







the density value of the clouds is very high and therefore they appear grainy.
the idea is to make the clouds fluffy and light

you can see for yourself if you move the slider up and down for the weather presets

but it’s better when the developers reduce the range in the code for live weather and presets

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i hope they will fix it in the new build

someone tested if they fixed the clouds in the new beta version ?

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