I have all my settings on Ultra and I am honestly not seeing any degradation in QUALITY. As a matter of fact, things look SHARPER. Colours and clouds are different. But who is to say they are worse? Maybe not what we are USED TO. But they might be more realistic.
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I think it may depend wether you have an HDR monitor or not. On my SDR monitor I see a major degradation, especially in the clouds. Hereās an example (look at the middle part) of clouds looking like they are watercolor images. Iām on ULTRA, mind you! I see banding, jagged edges and weird green and purple tones under certain lighting conditions. Overdone!
Even in the opening screen (the one with the rhino) the clouds look like a painting. Sad!
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While these are the least of my issues, i have voted since i found the graphics to have changed completely, its hard to put my finger on it, but it seems some post-processing is applied and the image is way over exposed and sharpened.
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this looks very good to me, clouds are white on a sunny day.
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The comparison images was a good idea Seabhag66!
I also find the graphic display after SU5 strange. The brightness during the day is too high for my sensation, so that a white airplane fuselage is over-illuminated to such an extent that hardly any details are visible. On your first two comparison pictures you can see this very well.
In addition, the ground textures seem too bright and somehow washed out - not as vivid as before.
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Most screenshots posted above look very similar to me, but I did notice that daytime is brighter overall. I thought I was going crazy but some pictures posted above confirm that something has indeed changed.
I noticed because the Garmin screens feel dimmer than before, even at their max brightness settings in-plane.
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how? rolling cache has nothing to do with how it looks.
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Yeah theyāve totally screwed the lighting a post processing, in SDR. Much better image using the sim in HDR now, but as my monitor is only about 400 nits, still need to use the nvidia control panel to adjust the image so highlights arenāt totally blown out. Obviously thatās an unbelievable faff setting all that up every time I want to fly. Hopefully all of this is just temporary as asobos focus has been on xbox, once that release is considered a success, they might turn focus back to making PC look great again. I donāt need 100+ fps in a flight sim, Iād prefer ultra to look like ultra again instead!
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The current sim is clearly optimised for 4K HDR10 Television.
I do have a HDR400 monitor but the results are still not great, videos are still messed up and with my screen I need to forgo Gsync to get HDR anyway.
One would be forgiven for thinking the devs only tested this on their shiney expensive 32" 4K HDR displays and totally ignored the fact that almost all of the PC community are on SDR.
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āSince the SIM Update 5, released 28th of July, Microsoft Flight Simulator has enjoyed better performance in terms of frame rates and smoothness over previous releases. However, the visual fidelity - LOD, lighting, anti-aliasing have all been sacrificed to achieve this. It is far from the same PC game that thrilled me graphically every time I did a flight, no matter where I flew (urban, country, islands, mountains).ā
I think this statement is wrongā¦its the hotfix that caused this imoā¦su5 was actually pretty good.
But as usual the hotfix causes more problems than fixes.
PMDG have stated that a rendering channel was disabled that broke the dc6 
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This topic is very subjective and unsolvable by changing only the code of the rendering engine. The end-effect depends on many factors like monitor profiles, hardware settings, software settings, different wheather conditions, the light environment of the users room, and above all the users taste.
Thatās why there is no āone size fits allā solution and there should be an option to change some basic settings like contrast, luminosity and saturation in the menu. I used Freestyle filters to change the image on my monitor for different wheather conditions but they donāt work in VR.
While is can be subjective, ultimately the trend here is that people prefered how the sim looked to them with SU4, however that may have been. The simple solution is not to introduce more scope for change, but just to return to the previous format
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There is a youtube video to fix this. It was for x-plane, but I think we can use it for MSFS too.
It works, to an extent. The problem is that the lighting in MSFS is so dynamic, that if you adjust the nvidia colour for one particular scenario, it will look totally ridiculous when conditions/time of day etc are different.
I noticed this aswell when I first tried SU5 update, atleast the clouds look fluffier and more realistic color wise now.
Some people including myself prefer the new lighting : In the old one, on my monitor, the buildings in New York were almost totally black under scattered clouds. It would be good if we had some Brightness - Contrast - Saturation sliders like in Prepar3D so everyone can tune the colors however they like.
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There are other problems.
You are just working around the real issue. By fiddling with monitor settings so the game looks OK in SDR, you wreck the graphics in all your other games and in things like watching Netflix or YouTube.
Also even if you get it t look acceptable, any screenshots of videos you make will look awful when anyone else views them, even if they use a HDR TV (which the game is now optimised for).
Work arounds are just that, a way to work around the issue rather than fix it.
Of course people that are HDR capable do not even get these problems and will regularly pop in saying ālooks perfect to meā.
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I love the new lighting alot.
But I agree they can tone down the exposure a tiny bit on clouds and some direct sunlight on white spots like planes.
but color grading is quite amazing ngl, i hated the warm tone pre SU5
It is more than just exposure.
All the detail in the dark bits and light bits is missing.
That is what gives it that anime/fantasy game look where you expect some guy in chain mail with a greatsword or some Kogal anime girl with long legs and big eyes to work around the corner of the terminal any second.
Can you make a screenshot pointing at details of what you mean?
I recommend using Lightshot screenshot tool for that, you can draw arrows.
Cuz for me it looks quite nice honestly other than the exposed bits. (alltho the sunrise sunset looks apocalyptic sometimes which is weird, other than that itās allright~)