Washed out graphics post SU5

Screenshots and videos tend to be pointless people just post “I do not get that in my game” or “that looks fine to me” or argue that it is your PC settings or the time of day or something…

Not to matter if you look at this screenshot taken at 2.00 pm game time, you will see both the bright areas and the dark areas are washed out. The clouds on the right have that anime cartoon look like it is a Ghibli movie or something. Quite artistic actually but not realistic,

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Yeah I have a HDR monitor and it definitely does not look perfect in HDR either.

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Don’t you have those controls built into your monitor…sounds like you need to calibrate it.

It’s not just the colours and exposure, the fine shadow details disappeared too.

This image demonstrates it quite well, look at the shadow edges:

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Oh god i tried so many things even reshade, you guys are right :joy:
I wasn’t in a full 12:00 setting even once after SU5 so i didn’t notice it that much.
I tried checking it in HDR (HDR600 display doing well over 600 nits, overexposed 0 details in clouds)
I checked again in SDR, same overexposure.
See screenshot below, there is no detail in clouds, it’s just sunlight somehow xD

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It’s basically impossible to fix, although I’d be interested to know what the like 3 people in the world with a 1000 nit monitor are seeing!

You can use the nvidia tool to reduce the contrast a bit to bring the details back in the clouds, but you need to adjust every time the lighting changes, so not really any sort of solution.

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Changing the colour grading in the configuration file ruins the world map by making the daylight ground white.

I use a fully calibrated 1000 nit HDR 4K QLED screen as my main monitor and after trying SU5 yesterday it looks phenomenal!

The HDR was always good in this sim but it seems to be even brighter now, with no loss of details. Now when you are above the clouds with the sun shining directly onto them you get whites so bright they make you squint, just like in a real aircraft, but you can still see all the details in the clouds or the rivets on a white plane etc.

It’s annoying that they don’t allow any sort of HDR calibration in this sim though, even Cyberpunk allowed you to set the max HDR brightness and change the HDR contrast but MSFS does not. I would imagine this means that people with lower nit HDR monitors will experience white and black clipping with no way to fix it.

Also I’m not sure why any of this should affect SDR as HDR and SDR should be two very different, very distinct settings. Otherwise what’s the point in even having a HDR toggle at all?

I read on a social media page that someone found a fix to get the graphics looking the same as it did before the SU5 update and is as follows.

Load the sim then in the graphics menu set everything to medium and apply and save.

Then set everything to Ultra and apply and save again and that is meant to give you back the way it looked before.

The only thing is that this process will have to be done each time you start MFS.

BTW… I am getting anywhere between 50 and 100 frames depending on my location in the sim.

That kind of confirms what i suspected then…they have built SU5 around the xbox, as many will be using on a HDR1000 television.

It’s an xbox game now folks!

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That fix rectifies the buildings having poor detail, not the washed out effect on SDR screens.

One issue is limited to people with SDR displays, the other issue occurs for everyone.

Two different problems.

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My biggest issue with the graphics after SU5 is the blown out brightness that is most apparent at higher elevation. It looks like haze and is most noticeable near the horizon. I have an nVidia GPU and I found that if I reduce the Gamma level from 1.0 to 0.7 the haze is reduced to the point that the sim is almost back to what I had with SU4. Asobo has clearly messed with the image quality and I hope they fix this problem.

The difference to me with the exposition problem, before and after SU5, is that the game seems to be "tuned” for Xbox + HDR TV display. Not only many PC + monitor users don’t have HDR capable display devices, but the monitor and the TV might not be using the same gamma either. In addition, PC+monitors are calibrated for sRGB whereas HDR TV are calibrated for a wider color gamut.

Some good starting points:

“While the Rec. 2020 transfer function can be used for encoding, it is expected that most productions will use a reference monitor that has an appearance of using equivalent of gamma 2.4 transfer function”
Rec. 2020 - Wikipedia

“SDR for HD video uses a system chromaticity (chromaticity of color primaries and white point) specified in Rec. 709 (same as sRGB). […] HDR is commonly associated to a Wide Color Gamut (a system chromaticity wider than BT.709)”
HDR Chromacity

I haven’t done the maths, but your experience in lowering Gamma level to 0.7 seems to reflect the inverse of the change from 2.2 (sRGB) to 2.4 (HDTV).

[edit] given the latest update on SU5 hotfix2 I’ve changed to a conditional tense.

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I can’t speak to the math or science behind it, but I assure you that by merely reducing the gamma from 1.0 to 0.7, my Dell U2412M monitor looks great again. The oversaturated images were a real problem for me. I was flying over the Grand Canyon earlier tonight and the sim was stunning…just like it was with SU4. I set the nVidia control panel app up on my task bar so that I can easily get to it to turn down the gamma while running MSFS. It’s a fairly easy workaround until Asobo fixes the problem.

these pics show the changes really well. when i finally got sim to work, i was flying through heavy clouds and i wondered why my plane was glowing. it looked ridiculous.

Your comment is awesome! I’ll explain why… quote “to such an extent that hardly and details are visible”

Over-exposing the image and editing the lighting model (which was absolutely amazing pre SU5) hides what they don’t want us to see, it’s so much easier to drop object quality etc… as well with over-exposure because even although you as a simmer know something is not right, the detail is hard to find but overall makes a really big difference. Avid Flight simmers are a very complicated bunch and if something is not right they’ll have no issue picking it out immediately.

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I fear that is the point:

They won’t, this is a xbox game now and from the ui to the controls, to colours, to the culling. pc seems to be no priority anymore, funny I go so much hate for saying exactly this in the last six months…

Great comparison!
Add reduced reflections into that, and the sum of all these changes is what makes the sim look cartoonish. The overdone dawn and dusk colors add their part.
But I guess we will hear that they are “super excited” how well the XBox launch has been received and that there is no downgrade, only “optimization”.

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I also reduced the gamma value via the Nvidia control panel last night. I am now halfway satisfied with a value of 0.80, although the white paint of the Robin DR400 still over-illuminates unnaturally strongly. The gamma value alone will probably not restore the old SU4 look. Therefore I opened a Zendesk ticket

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I have messed around with nvidia filters and achieved something “better” but still nowhere near to SU4. The term “cartoony” sums it up for me. Shadows are WAY overdone, object pop-in is ridiculous and I am so angry. Honestly now interested to look closely at what the next X-Plane iteration brings. I’ve always steered well away because Austin drove me mad but now I will keep an open mind. Latest immersion breaker I found is that when I fly into a dark cloud the cockpit lights up as if the sun is shining full on - wtaf?

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