When disabling bloom, usually in order to save a few more fps if possible, the sun is rendering as a perfectly outlined disk (with small atmospheric variation effect yet a plain disk). Furthermore, when Render Scaling is above 100%, the sun disk is rendering with a black outline (like many other “lights” by the way).
However when bloom is enabled, it is rendering as a fading disk expanding outward and it is very convincing, and when SS is above 100% it is no longer rendering with a black outline.
I understand the Bloom shader is actually making something like a blur on a smaller res copy of the render buffer and uses this as the highlighting source (it is usually how it works and why it takes some resources - read back, shader, blend). However it is not necessary to render the full Bloom Shader pass.
I’d suggest when Bloom is disabled, MSFS renders the Sun disk with a fading out halo. It would just be a rendering shader, not a bloom shader, specifically for the sun, and this will greatly enhance the effect.
UPDATE: As a matter of fact I believe it would be better having 3 values: OFF, Low (Sun Only), High (Full)
[update 31MAR2021]
Disabling Bloom post-processing is not just a matter of saving fps:
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This effect is also blurring cockpit integral lighting (the light behind buttons so that you can read labels in the cockpit at night) and is making text on buttons less sharp and therefore less legible.
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This effect is also blurring the EFIS screens in conflating thin lines and in dilating larger ones
(as in: OpenCV: Eroding and Dilating ) -
I find text legibility degradation due to Bloom post-processing more prominent on lower resolution VR headsets (comparing G2 and Index)
