Yep, to me there is absolute zero doubt the clouds are a lot worse in 2024.
This just now for example. It looks terrible.
Did they honestly think that was an improvement..?
I know.
It’s just unbelievable.
I also really don’t know why more people aren’t annoyed by this.
I think a lot maybe are just totally blind to it and just close their mind and assume because 2024 is newer it HAS to be better. I can’t see another explanation, it’s such a blindingly obvious step backwards.
Me, i’m not annoyed by this simply because i don’t see those strange clouds on my screen
If you stay below the clouds then it looks fine. The moment you go above them, it looks like garbage.
This isn’t what the majority of clouds look like in FS2024 though. I ran it on fairly medium settings and I never saw any clouds that looked quite that bad.
I think in this thread there is a lot of confusion between “what I have seen in the sim” and “what the sim is capable of doing”. People appear to be thinking the former is the complete scope of the latter.
Reading through these posts I am glad I made a decision to get FS2020. Did some reading before making the decision and looked at the favorability stats. Am new to FS2020 and cannot compare the two but FS2020 in overall picture seemed to score better than FS2024. But leaving the door open, surely there must be many good improvements and progressing sometimes presents some hurdles.
I’m not annoyed because I don’t see clouds like this. Maybe it’s a specific weather condition. Also, do you have your clouds on ultra? Is this live weather? Maybe it’s only an issue with a certain cloud type, at a certain time of day since shadows & lighting would be different.
If it’s a specific situation that’s reproducible I can keep an eye out for it in my sim.
I feel like this doesn’t look bad.
Live Weather:
Few Clouds preset:
MSFS 2020 from June 2021:
This is interesting because I have been flying the MSFS2020 for 1-3 hours a day since its release, of course also the MSFS2024 and I regularly encounter such terrible clouds when flying the latter.
For example, I recently completed two flights, both on the same route, one with 2020 and the other with 2024. My specific goal was to see the cloud depiction.
With MSFS2024, I was greeted by such awful clouds immediately, whereas with MSFS2020 I was not. The MSFS2024’s weather representation was strikingly more accurate, however.
It is a mystery why the pilots have such different experiences. 
The same as 2024 does
2024 does this as well.
While testing, I discovered that the “AMD FidelityFX Sharpening” setting degraded the visual quality of the clouds.
At 0, the clouds are vaporous (normal)
but at 200, the cloud edges are strange and take on a bit of a blob shape as some pilots described.
So be careful with the sharpness settings… it might affect clouds quality.
May be some frame generators do the same effect…
Interesting. I might experiment with this and use reshade for sharpening instead.
Weather/cloud depiction in live weather got destroyed around SU7 back in 2020, when they tried to merge the depiction with METAR data instead of pure meteoblue data. Ever since then it introduced bugs and regressions which have never been fixed, then 2024 introduced its own set of bugs on top of the already existing ones which were carried over from 2020.
If you look in the Live Weather bug report section of the current beta you’ll see bugs there which ruin the depiction of live weather yet as was in 2020, they get little to no traction with the developers.
They seem to constantly kick this one into the long grass. When a question about it does make it into a live stream, they often say they’ve never seen it. It’s frustrating that these issues are constantly brushed off, or flat out ignored.
Case in point, perhaps. I’d also like to know why a legacy issue warrants another weather related thread getting shut down.
Yep, one which was meant to be being investigated, received no further update and the bug still exists. It’s a joke.
I noticed a significant graphical downgrade on Xbox after SU14. It was significant enough for me to permanently switch to PC. Which still looks good with little difference from 2024 in my opinion. I don’t think the introduction of the Xbox would have anything to do with the graphics on a PC. You are likely seeing differences between graphic drivers and the effects of numerous memory optimizations over the years.
According to Asobo’s documentation they are still recommending an older driver for the best performance. I think it’s at or around version 566.72 for Nvidia cards.
There’s a silly bias in this board that any perceived difference between 2024 and 2020 is considered a “regression”. For example, 2020’s comparatively washed out look is now “Real” and “Amazing”