The Feedback Snapshot used to say it’s coming with the DirectX 12 update, but now it just says TBD which means a fix might come sooner. We do not know for sure though.
My guess is that fixing the grainy reflections would require a better denoiser (which is handled by the TAA I believe) that might have to be rolled with a more major engine update. If they do something about the clouds appearing more grainy since a recent patch, it could help with the reflections too.
Do you have any add-ons in your Community folder? If yes, please remove and retest before posting.
no. Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it?
no. Brief description of the issue:
Pixelated clouds are a well-known issue meanwhile and has been reported by many players (including myself) so far. But pixelated sunlight on the windshield seems to be a new bug/issue to me.
That’s not pixelated sunlight. It’s a reflection coming from the reflection of your dashboard. So the light rays are polarised depending on the materials of the dashboard. If it’s made from a grainy leather texture, then the reflected sunlight would be grainy as well. Then it gets reflected back to your eyes from the smooth glass surface.
Try to go to your MSFS installation folder and look for the UserCfg.opt file. Open it using notepad and search for FilmGrain 1. Change it to 0 and save it.
You can’t make any graphics changes in the sim anymore after this. Otherwise it’ll reset the film grain options and you have to look for the files and change it back to 0 again.
I’ve tried turning off the ‘film grain’ in the UserCFG.opt file - that hasn’t helped.
What on Earth is causing this horrible effect that utterly destroys the clarity and readability of the gauges and causes distracting effects on the windshield and cowling?
The bottom of the fuel gauge doesn’t have this effect yet (sun shine?) and it’s crystal clear, but this grainy film just washes over everything and because it’s static and the cockpit moves, it creates this moire effect that is utterly distracting, ugly and make the gauges unreadable.
It seems to me that you are not using any anti-aliasing method. Unfortunately, TAA is rather mandatory because it helps denoise reflections, shadows and ambient occlusion. It’s not perfect, and the denoising has gotten a little worse with a more recent patch, but it should look a lot better than without it.
What’s more distracting is that “horizon line” going through the the screen about 1/4 length from top on your screenshot. I’ve reported that on launch day and they never fixed it. It seems to happen when flying through misty days .
Sounds good your explanation but unfortunately I have never seen any sun reflections like that in a car for example. So it does not look realistic to me at all…
Grainy reflections is a known issue and will be fixed with DirectX 12 (Summer 2021). It’s useless to fiddle with various settings and configuration files because this is a known issue and will be fixed.
Yes that’s exactly right. Direct12 support in the summer initially I think is a like for like feature set. I don’t think anything new will be introduced in the initial version like ray tracing as it will not be in the Xbox version which this is based on.
Of course we’ll have to wait and see but that’s my understanding. So TBD is exactly right, who knows when reflections will be fixed. Certainly there are a lot of issues with reflections so it will be a much appreciated update and I’m kind of hoping some of the existing bugs do get resolved beforehand like the ‘floating bridges’ effect you get over water.
Only fixed with ray tracing? Omg…so we will have no more grainy reflections, but 30 fps less.
Well…maybe, at least, directX12 will optimizes CPU cores and thread to be used by system (I hope).
I’m not sure if ray-tracing will be the only solution, but with Sebastian’s answer it sure sounded like it. When explaining the benefits of ray-tracing, he said “you will see less grain in the reflections”.
I’ve seen much better screen-space reflections in other games so I hope they will take some steps to improve those too. Today’s hardware is still not very good at ray-tracing, we will need at least one or two more generations of GPUs to handle ray-tracing without upscaling being necessary.