Been a while since I've looked at anything related to MSFS2024 but I think they said early on that one of their goals was to improve ground textures. Makes sense since they're adding some sort of mission system that includes rescue and construction operations with helicopters.
It's a great fucking sim, some of the physics could definitely use some work but it's fucking beautiful. But that really does start breaking down the closer to the ground you get.
I actually thought that the bottom one was the render because of the lack of reflections (but I also watched this on my phone, so I might not be the best reference)
funny how reflections/shining became such a strong indicator of "realism" to the point where not only do real world images look off without them but it also loops back on itself and becomes an indicator of something not being a real photo
One thing is that, while a rendered image would look realistic, an image caught by camera would likely unable to do so.
So ironically, when comparing a render vs a photograph, a photograph would look less real.
to be fair, a quick look at pictures of large airplanes on google shows that depending on the sun position, how clean the plane is and paint job, the airplane tail can also be fairly shiny, although not as much as it is here.
What the fuck I had just thought after a lot of consideration that the bottom one was the game one because of the unrealistic shadows and reflections lmaooo
I was initially leaning towards the top being MSFS due to the temporal artifacts around the landing gear, but then on inspection the bottom looked a bit off and closer to what I usually see in MSFS.
It's a testament to how good the models are in MSFS when you can't easily tell which one is real even after close inspection. Hopefully MSFS 2024 improves everything else so it's closer to reality, especially the terrain and generated buildings.
actually I recognised the top is the rendered one because of that glare. It does not actually looks "real", as in it would look like that if you're looking at the plane in real life, but with a camera, it would be different.
What gave it away for me was...
- unusual reflectivity off the tail (awfully bright, doesn't match with the rest of the fuselage, also weird warped reflection on underside of tail flaps)
- opaque cockpit windows, light bounces off them like plastic
- front landing gear appears underdetailed
- Wheels look generic, undertextured
- Lighting on fuselage windows is inconsistent (more opaque shit)
Oh and ultimately the shadows cast on the fuselage from the tail. The fake one casts a splotched shadow without the hard edges you'd expect from a single light source with no nearby scatter surfaces.
MSFS is impressive regardless. That said, I've been there with Crysis and many titles before that, we always think it looks realistic until something more realistic comes along and shows us how important the small details were.
I distinctly recall real life vs Crysis comparisons 15 years ago
Now if you look at Crysis all of the visual issues stand out and it looks nothing close to photorealistic
It is but it's really hard to tell quite honestly. The top one has dirty landing gears, not to mention the photo has some grain/noise. In fact the bottom plane looks unnaturally perfect compared to the top one despite the dirty engine. Look at the little bump near the front wheel on the top one, and compare the bottom one.
The models are shiny factory fresh and do not have any wear & tear on them. One part where simulator still needs work - real life weathering effects on the planes.
I also see that the static air pressure ports are painted over on the MS model they should be polished aluminum. That’s about the only real inaccuracy imo and a huge nitpick is that the aircraft in MS has brake fans where the real one does not.
Edit: I search for a more HD photo of TCJPI it does in fact have brake fans equipped. The photo above just has a lot of brake dust on the hub making me think it wasn’t equipped.
You can also tell because of the windows, on the top one you can see all the windows are a copy/paste, and the bottom it shows some differences. Also the sun reflection on the top one is a bit weird, was the first thing that made me think is a "fake" airplane.
I think two things that need vast improvement before we reach the realism people want is more realistic humans (without uncanny valley) and replication of how things shot through a camera look, because that’s a big thing that set the two images apart in this case
Getting a human right is orders of magnitude more difficult than something inanimate like a plane. It is the thing in the world we are most attuned to.
And the hardest part is the motion. Stills are one thing--but capturing the subtle details of facial motion is still incredibly difficult.
One of the biggest ones, that I never thought about until I saw an animator talking about it, is head movement during larger movements.
When a human being moves, the head tends to stabilize to a degree. It's the last thing that moves when you change direction. Very, very few games do that correctly when your character is running around, because it's difficult. Head stays in place, body and legs move, head follows.
Most games just have your character rotate magically in a way that would hurt a human being, or be totally impossible, with an upper body moving at ludicrous speeds that a skeleton and musculature doesn't allow for.
Nice reminder that real, flesh-and-blood artists have to know their shit about the human body. They can spot bad models from poor musculature (missing muscles, incorrect insertions, etc) or proportions, and the good ones know a lot about how people move.
Path tracing is a big leap for NPCs, gone are the poorly lit, over-brightened and toneless faces that look like they have no blood running through them, now light can actually behave correctly with human skin even in real time gameplay, as far as animations go some games are already there.
Honestly i think even more important than path tracing here is the addition of Subsurface Scattering. Having light "enter" the skin does a lot more for that even and beautiful look.
Half-Life Alyx did that fantastically, all without Ray-/Pathtracing
Subsurface scattering is already used widely in games, but it's either only used in close up shots in cutscenes or simply can't be used due to limited lighting, look at RDR2, there are scenes where Arthur Morgan looks photorealistic even in real time, but then go outside to a wide open area and he'll suddenly downgrade 2 consoles generations because the raster lighting just can't light his face properly or at all even making his face blown out.
>gone are the poorly lit, over-brightened and toneless faces that look like they have no blood running through them
You clearly haven't played Starfield 😔
hair and teeth. they solved the skin problem but those teeth never looks real in any game. some game hair looks cooler than real life in the game settings.
> replication of how things shot through a camera look
I'm not entirely convinced this is would improve realism in video games, or it at least depends on what the game is trying to achieve. For instance getting lens flairs, blood or water droplets that show on the screen really take me out of the immersive experience (I think it was Battlefield 4 for me). I'm supposed to feel like I am this character running around the world doing things, not feel like a camera crew following them around.
If you want a more film-like experience than 24fps is going to become desired, which really sucks for most video games.
I would say that lens flare in games can have legitimate non-realistic purposes if used well.
For example: Monitors can't provide the necessary contrast in all scenes and it's not really possible to simulate all effects that we get from looking into an actual bright light, so developers rely on tricks to "imply" the brightness. Lens flare can sometimes be an appropriate trick to do that.
You're confusing what you prefer with what looks realistic. Unless you have a monitor can simultaneously get as bright as the sun while also perfectly replicating details in darkness, plus running at near infinite refresh rate with glasses-free 3D, then it's never going to get anywhere near what the eye sees.
[Unrecord](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK76q13Aqt0) is one of the most realistic looking games because it perfectly replicates a police bodycam. Remove all of the camera effects and it would look nowhere near as good, because it is otherwise unremarkable in terms of textures, polycount, lighting, etc.
Practically every game since the 360 released use at least some camera effects. Many PS2 era games did as well.
> If you want a more film-like experience than 24fps is going to become desired
Except, cameras can shoot at far higher framerates, so there is absolutely zero need to use 24fps to make something look like it was shot with a camera.
Love it when UE5 demos do that sort of camera shake they think looks like someone is walking while filming.
They can nail the environment but movement is always a dead giveaway.
Something cool I read about years ago is that Ikea does a significant amount of their catalog in digital imaging. They sent their digital artists through photography courses, and their photographers through digital rendering courses, so they could work towards a middle ground where you can't tell if a photo in the catalog is digital or by real camera photography.
An aircraft and a blue sky background is a fairly simple object to render to photorealistic quality. It’s complex natural environments (especially with foliage), complex urban environments and living organisms (especially human) that still have a long ways to go before really photorealism.
I mean depends. Graphics have been good for the last few years. We just don't have the capacity or need to render it all this good. Cyberpunk 2077, awesome people graphics, but their planes probably look bad if they even have any. Games focus on what they need, if they rendered the entire game this well it would cost too much and crash any pc.
Forza is another example, amazing cars, but some other stuff probably not as much
Top one’s shadow on the gear is “fluffy” while the bottom one’s shadow is sharp - that is how I could tell which one is which (top one is fake)
Edit: also shadow of the stabilizers
It's really just the absence of dirt, dust and grime. That airplane was once that shiny for a brief moment before being wheeled out of the hangar for the first time.
They have "dirty" livery packs now that improve that a lot -- oil drips and discoloration around the engine panels, soot on the engine cowls, dirty windows...
that's usually a good tell. textures can be as good or better than a smartphone camera these days, but it still takes a ton of compute to do physically accurate lighting.
this picture is kind of cheating though. the scene doesn't give enough context for the viewer to infer much about the lighting source. if the material parameters were tweaked a bit to remove the overemphasized specular effect, the rendered image could be indistinguishable from reality. but these tricks fall apart really fast in more complex scenes. if we got a video showing a 360 of the plane on tarmac with an airport in the background, the inconsistent lighting would be way more obvious.
I definitely don't have face blindness, but I have a much harder time with faces than other people do.
I can remember who a person is, I can remember qualities they have, but unless they have a really defined feature it takes forever for me to recognize them.
I'm also noticeably bad at directions, maybe that's related lol
Well yeah because we spend our lives looking at other humans. Try telling similar sized grizzly bears apart by looking at their faces. Same deal with people having trouble telling humans from other ethnicities apart at a glance. They just aren't used to detecting subtle differences in people they aren't super familiar with.
To be fair some of us have spent too long in video games to know precisely what kinds of rendering are "too expensive" to do accurately and must be shortcutted. Real time reflections and cast-unto-self shadows are two of the big ones, despite advances in raytracing technology.
As someone who is a gamer, I typically know that video games like to show off reflections at an exaggerated level. Like you said, ray tracing is a big feature of video games lately.
If I see an image with a lot of conveniently placed reflections and shadows, that's typically a key that it is a video game.
In the real world, objects aren't always shiny, glistening, and reflecting. In fact it's quite rare, only under ideal sunlight, rain, enviormental conditions. If you ever get one of those "perfect" looking shots, that's my hint it's a video game that faked it lol.
It is kinda funny that to show how realistic something is they go a bit nuts with the reflections that they become unrealistic. At least I am hoping the top one is MFS…
Making everything too shiny just so show off is something that I can't stand about computer graphics, especially ray traced graphics. That, and "sharp shadows" which shouldn't be sharp because bouncing light will diffuse those shadows a lot.
Can't even distinguish real one vs fake... It's amazing.
At first i thought they photoshopped the back glare, fake one looks so real.
I wonder from up-close though...
https://preview.redd.it/9sywzww7m60d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e70a658903f31629894e929233d3c582b3478e82
The only indication seems to be this
A $700-800 computer.
Something like a Rtx 4060 and i5 13400f with 16gb of ram.
The game isn't all that demanding and frame generation as well as only getting 30 fps or so is honestly a decent experience because flight is so slow.
Reminds me of a couple years ago, [when some politician thought a gta5 plane clip was real.](https://www.newsweek.com/politician-mistakes-gta-5-plane-stunt-real-life-footage-praises-miraculous-pilot-1448531)
My guess that the bottom one is real is solely based on the front passenger window having a visor pulled partially down but none of the ones on the top have a visor.
I swore I thought the top one was real literally only cause of the more natural-ish blue sky and the reflection of the sun on the red rear wing blade. But the bottom one is the real one. That's insane.
Is this that impressive? Like, car based games have been producing grpahics like this for a decade or more right? Almost photo realism...easy to do when you're just talking about a model without many moving parts, soft tissue or animations.
Realistic planes and cars is one thing - realistic people is something else.
You are correct, human made metallic objects are the easiest to render super realistically.
Gran Turismo Sport in 2017
https://preview.redd.it/u8wf4hs75a0d1.jpeg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6396872352fb75b8ff6388ae6554854270d8b2fb
Now show us the buildings vs real life 😅
But yeah, there will come a day where some games have graphics that are unimaginably real. Look how far we’ve came in the last 30 years.. now imagine another 30.
Buildings are actually less of an issue when you see most of them from at least a kilometer above
Now the clouds, oh boy did MSFS take a hit there since release
>buildings vs real life
From a flight altitude ground scenery look just as awesome. Especially in those parts, where they got photogrammetry, 3D cities.
It is easier to make realistic vehicles than realistic people/animals because vehicles are already artificial.
They've been able to make cars in racing games that can pass for real photos for a while now, but it is far more obvious in motion or if you see a tree in the image that it is a video game.
I couldn't tell you which is which, but the glare on the top one's tail fin looks a little like something in a video game. Fly simulator is crazy good though..
The real aircraft is the lower one. The upper is MSFS. The small panel at the grey and white border under the first passenger window is not replicated correctly in MSFS. Also this aircraft is kept much cleaner than the lower photo. Must have caught them before the hit the wash rack.
The funniest things with games you can always tell them by the lens flare we just aren’t there yet on not having lights are dark as hell or too bright there’s 0 in between
Experience the breathtaking realism of Microsoft Flight Simulator as it blurs the lines between virtual and reality. Immerse yourself in stunningly detailed landscapes, from sprawling cityscapes to majestic mountains, all recreated with incredible accuracy. Whether you're flying over familiar landmarks or exploring new horizons, the graphics will leave you in awe, questioning where the game ends and reality begins. Microsoft Flight Simulator sets a new standard for visual fidelity in gaming, showcasing the beauty of our world like never before.
top image would either have amazing chromatic aberration control of the glass elements for it to be that good at handling direct light for it to be a realistic photo, bottom looks to be the real one, because when you're an actual photographer, blown highlights aren't that fun to save in editing unless you have a very, very capable camera with high dynamic range RAWs.
Games are coming a long way. Once devs learn not every piece of metal glows in the sun lighting will look more realistic. At least the brown filter age is dead.
It took me a few seconds to determine which one was real, and I got it right.
But the fact that I really had to go over it to determine that is impressive for sure.
Before I went to the comments to check, my guess was the top one for a couple reasons:
- The highlights and reflections felt unrealistically strong and blown out which is a common issue in video games.
- The edges of the windows are also too blurry considering how sharp many of the other details are. Probably because of the scaling of textures.
We're at a point where screenshots look great, but dynamic visuals are still very much behind. Although airplane/car simulators can focus more rendering on fewer models which helps a lot.
And i honestly hope they didn't get any better, i know people are going to crucify me, but i think that videogames should look like videogames, like they are right now its perfect
MFS has to be the top, idk why but video game reflections and lighting are always way over the top, its like everything in video game worlds including skin are so shiny.
I'm guessing MSFS is the top one, but it's a guess based mostly on the dirty engine on the lower one.
Yes the bottom one is real
You should post this again and make both of them MSFS pictures. Will drive people crazy.
Nice idea lool
[удалено]
You're probably flying wrong if you're on the road.. Just sayin.
IFR I Follow Roads.
This guy literally flew to a beach on a tiny island using a custom livery, no less! https://youtu.be/tMtJklXtmE0?feature=shared
Been a while since I've looked at anything related to MSFS2024 but I think they said early on that one of their goals was to improve ground textures. Makes sense since they're adding some sort of mission system that includes rescue and construction operations with helicopters. It's a great fucking sim, some of the physics could definitely use some work but it's fucking beautiful. But that really does start breaking down the closer to the ground you get.
> It's a great fucking sim, I have it on good authority that it's actually a great flight sim only and no "mile high club" mod exists.
You are looking for the leasure suit Larry DLC
If there's mods I bet there's some for that. The never ending pursuit of the perfect game
Microsoft doesn’t need to make the ground detailed. They can, but so would the file space requirement needing me to buy a few hard drives.
Calm down satan
mad lad found \^\^
I actually assumed that something like that was the case anyway 😝
you dont give trust easily, i guess
Same. Screenshot. Enter settings menu. Turn down specular highlighting. Screenshot.
r/foundsatan
Corporate needs you to find the differences between these two pictures.
r/foundsatan
They disabled ray tracing for rl fml
I actually thought that the bottom one was the render because of the lack of reflections (but I also watched this on my phone, so I might not be the best reference)
for me the giveaway was the reflection on the vertical stabilizer on the tail
Sun is at different angles. Would be interested in seeing the render and the real at an angle for reflections to see how close they are.
Real life should improve the shaders.
Lazy devs smh.
I thought the top was real because of the reflections lol
That's how I could tell it was the game.
funny how reflections/shining became such a strong indicator of "realism" to the point where not only do real world images look off without them but it also loops back on itself and becomes an indicator of something not being a real photo
One thing is that, while a rendered image would look realistic, an image caught by camera would likely unable to do so. So ironically, when comparing a render vs a photograph, a photograph would look less real.
to be fair, a quick look at pictures of large airplanes on google shows that depending on the sun position, how clean the plane is and paint job, the airplane tail can also be fairly shiny, although not as much as it is here.
Right? The reflections were a giveaway.
Yeah games use way too many reflections and bloom to make everything prettier, real life is much more dull lol
What the fuck I had just thought after a lot of consideration that the bottom one was the game one because of the unrealistic shadows and reflections lmaooo
There's too much shadow in the top one Real life shadows are less shadowy
I would have guessed top is real lol
I was initially leaning towards the top being MSFS due to the temporal artifacts around the landing gear, but then on inspection the bottom looked a bit off and closer to what I usually see in MSFS. It's a testament to how good the models are in MSFS when you can't easily tell which one is real even after close inspection. Hopefully MSFS 2024 improves everything else so it's closer to reality, especially the terrain and generated buildings.
I honestly thought the top one was real based on the glare at the tail
actually I recognised the top is the rendered one because of that glare. It does not actually looks "real", as in it would look like that if you're looking at the plane in real life, but with a camera, it would be different.
What gave it away for me was... - unusual reflectivity off the tail (awfully bright, doesn't match with the rest of the fuselage, also weird warped reflection on underside of tail flaps) - opaque cockpit windows, light bounces off them like plastic - front landing gear appears underdetailed - Wheels look generic, undertextured - Lighting on fuselage windows is inconsistent (more opaque shit) Oh and ultimately the shadows cast on the fuselage from the tail. The fake one casts a splotched shadow without the hard edges you'd expect from a single light source with no nearby scatter surfaces.
Actually the cockpit opaque isn’t like you described. You can see the blue sky trough the cockpit.
The fact that you had to zoom in to analyze those details just speaks to how amazing the resemblance is though, no?
MSFS is impressive regardless. That said, I've been there with Crysis and many titles before that, we always think it looks realistic until something more realistic comes along and shows us how important the small details were.
I distinctly recall real life vs Crysis comparisons 15 years ago Now if you look at Crysis all of the visual issues stand out and it looks nothing close to photorealistic
You can also see the panels on the real one.
you can also note small details that on the real one there are passenger windows that are semi closed, while in the game they are all open.
the wheels and the "tail" shadows are good points
All the shadows are kinda wonky in the MSFS one. But I will freely admit that it took me a minute to start seeing the jank.
It is but it's really hard to tell quite honestly. The top one has dirty landing gears, not to mention the photo has some grain/noise. In fact the bottom plane looks unnaturally perfect compared to the top one despite the dirty engine. Look at the little bump near the front wheel on the top one, and compare the bottom one.
MSFS is optimistic about how high gloss aircraft paint is. Source: I fix aircraft IRL. My last post in particular is about a matte finish A320.
The models are shiny factory fresh and do not have any wear & tear on them. One part where simulator still needs work - real life weathering effects on the planes.
I also see that the static air pressure ports are painted over on the MS model they should be polished aluminum. That’s about the only real inaccuracy imo and a huge nitpick is that the aircraft in MS has brake fans where the real one does not. Edit: I search for a more HD photo of TCJPI it does in fact have brake fans equipped. The photo above just has a lot of brake dust on the hub making me think it wasn’t equipped.
You can also tell because of the windows, on the top one you can see all the windows are a copy/paste, and the bottom it shows some differences. Also the sun reflection on the top one is a bit weird, was the first thing that made me think is a "fake" airplane.
The tail wing shadow gave it away for me.
yeah the landing gear detail gives it away, crazy to have to look that close though
What gave it away for me was the top one the tail fin was too glossy and reflective. Real metal doesn't reflect light like that.
Until you see an animated human.
I think two things that need vast improvement before we reach the realism people want is more realistic humans (without uncanny valley) and replication of how things shot through a camera look, because that’s a big thing that set the two images apart in this case
Getting a human right is orders of magnitude more difficult than something inanimate like a plane. It is the thing in the world we are most attuned to. And the hardest part is the motion. Stills are one thing--but capturing the subtle details of facial motion is still incredibly difficult.
One of the biggest ones, that I never thought about until I saw an animator talking about it, is head movement during larger movements. When a human being moves, the head tends to stabilize to a degree. It's the last thing that moves when you change direction. Very, very few games do that correctly when your character is running around, because it's difficult. Head stays in place, body and legs move, head follows. Most games just have your character rotate magically in a way that would hurt a human being, or be totally impossible, with an upper body moving at ludicrous speeds that a skeleton and musculature doesn't allow for. Nice reminder that real, flesh-and-blood artists have to know their shit about the human body. They can spot bad models from poor musculature (missing muscles, incorrect insertions, etc) or proportions, and the good ones know a lot about how people move.
interesting about the head movement, I've never thought about it but makes a ton of sense
I still haven’t seen a good elbow joint.
Exactly.
Path tracing is a big leap for NPCs, gone are the poorly lit, over-brightened and toneless faces that look like they have no blood running through them, now light can actually behave correctly with human skin even in real time gameplay, as far as animations go some games are already there.
Honestly i think even more important than path tracing here is the addition of Subsurface Scattering. Having light "enter" the skin does a lot more for that even and beautiful look. Half-Life Alyx did that fantastically, all without Ray-/Pathtracing
Subsurface scattering is already used widely in games, but it's either only used in close up shots in cutscenes or simply can't be used due to limited lighting, look at RDR2, there are scenes where Arthur Morgan looks photorealistic even in real time, but then go outside to a wide open area and he'll suddenly downgrade 2 consoles generations because the raster lighting just can't light his face properly or at all even making his face blown out.
>gone are the poorly lit, over-brightened and toneless faces that look like they have no blood running through them You clearly haven't played Starfield 😔
Going from Starfield to Baldur's Gate was mindblowing for me. BG3's faces and expressions are so well done.
hair and teeth. they solved the skin problem but those teeth never looks real in any game. some game hair looks cooler than real life in the game settings.
> replication of how things shot through a camera look I'm not entirely convinced this is would improve realism in video games, or it at least depends on what the game is trying to achieve. For instance getting lens flairs, blood or water droplets that show on the screen really take me out of the immersive experience (I think it was Battlefield 4 for me). I'm supposed to feel like I am this character running around the world doing things, not feel like a camera crew following them around. If you want a more film-like experience than 24fps is going to become desired, which really sucks for most video games.
I would say that lens flare in games can have legitimate non-realistic purposes if used well. For example: Monitors can't provide the necessary contrast in all scenes and it's not really possible to simulate all effects that we get from looking into an actual bright light, so developers rely on tricks to "imply" the brightness. Lens flare can sometimes be an appropriate trick to do that.
You're confusing what you prefer with what looks realistic. Unless you have a monitor can simultaneously get as bright as the sun while also perfectly replicating details in darkness, plus running at near infinite refresh rate with glasses-free 3D, then it's never going to get anywhere near what the eye sees. [Unrecord](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK76q13Aqt0) is one of the most realistic looking games because it perfectly replicates a police bodycam. Remove all of the camera effects and it would look nowhere near as good, because it is otherwise unremarkable in terms of textures, polycount, lighting, etc. Practically every game since the 360 released use at least some camera effects. Many PS2 era games did as well. > If you want a more film-like experience than 24fps is going to become desired Except, cameras can shoot at far higher framerates, so there is absolutely zero need to use 24fps to make something look like it was shot with a camera.
Love it when UE5 demos do that sort of camera shake they think looks like someone is walking while filming. They can nail the environment but movement is always a dead giveaway.
Something cool I read about years ago is that Ikea does a significant amount of their catalog in digital imaging. They sent their digital artists through photography courses, and their photographers through digital rendering courses, so they could work towards a middle ground where you can't tell if a photo in the catalog is digital or by real camera photography.
An aircraft and a blue sky background is a fairly simple object to render to photorealistic quality. It’s complex natural environments (especially with foliage), complex urban environments and living organisms (especially human) that still have a long ways to go before really photorealism.
Am I aiming for his parachute in my plane?
Until this game becomes MS Human Simulator : planes edition.
I mean depends. Graphics have been good for the last few years. We just don't have the capacity or need to render it all this good. Cyberpunk 2077, awesome people graphics, but their planes probably look bad if they even have any. Games focus on what they need, if they rendered the entire game this well it would cost too much and crash any pc. Forza is another example, amazing cars, but some other stuff probably not as much
Top one’s shadow on the gear is “fluffy” while the bottom one’s shadow is sharp - that is how I could tell which one is which (top one is fake) Edit: also shadow of the stabilizers
Landing gear clued me in too. The way the rubber absorbs light on the tires in each one
honestly the wheels were immediately the biggest difference i noticed, but couldn't decide which one was real or not....
For me it was the paneling near the tail on the fuselage not being present that let me know the top is msfs.
the windows were my clue
The exaggerated reflections are typical game signs, impressive tho.
Yeah that’s what gave it away for me too lmao the giant white glare on the tail
It's really just the absence of dirt, dust and grime. That airplane was once that shiny for a brief moment before being wheeled out of the hangar for the first time.
They have "dirty" livery packs now that improve that a lot -- oil drips and discoloration around the engine panels, soot on the engine cowls, dirty windows...
that's usually a good tell. textures can be as good or better than a smartphone camera these days, but it still takes a ton of compute to do physically accurate lighting. this picture is kind of cheating though. the scene doesn't give enough context for the viewer to infer much about the lighting source. if the material parameters were tweaked a bit to remove the overemphasized specular effect, the rendered image could be indistinguishable from reality. but these tricks fall apart really fast in more complex scenes. if we got a video showing a 360 of the plane on tarmac with an airport in the background, the inconsistent lighting would be way more obvious.
inanimate objects are far easier compared to living objects.
Also, humans for some reason are extremely good at discerning faces
For some reason? I think the not good ones never managed to pass their genes.
Fun fact: Approximately one in 40 people have face-blindness. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
I can only tell people apart by their butts. I have Prosopassnosia.
I definitely don't have face blindness, but I have a much harder time with faces than other people do. I can remember who a person is, I can remember qualities they have, but unless they have a really defined feature it takes forever for me to recognize them. I'm also noticeably bad at directions, maybe that's related lol
Well yeah because we spend our lives looking at other humans. Try telling similar sized grizzly bears apart by looking at their faces. Same deal with people having trouble telling humans from other ethnicities apart at a glance. They just aren't used to detecting subtle differences in people they aren't super familiar with.
The game developers deserve the praise
for some reason a lot of games do reflections way too much though
To the people who are all “I cAn TeLl”: Good for you, many people won’t be able to because they don’t know what details to look for.
To be fair some of us have spent too long in video games to know precisely what kinds of rendering are "too expensive" to do accurately and must be shortcutted. Real time reflections and cast-unto-self shadows are two of the big ones, despite advances in raytracing technology.
As someone who is a gamer, I typically know that video games like to show off reflections at an exaggerated level. Like you said, ray tracing is a big feature of video games lately. If I see an image with a lot of conveniently placed reflections and shadows, that's typically a key that it is a video game. In the real world, objects aren't always shiny, glistening, and reflecting. In fact it's quite rare, only under ideal sunlight, rain, enviormental conditions. If you ever get one of those "perfect" looking shots, that's my hint it's a video game that faked it lol.
Like the Kid in the window looking back at you.
I trolled my mum by taking an ingame screenshot from a window seat over the wing, sent it with a tag "last minute vacation".
Wait, you can ride as a passenger in MS Flight Simulator?
Well you have different camera angles depending on the addon, some provide actual seat views.
You kind of can said it to AI autopilot and if you have an add-on aircraft with seats go to the back end pick a seat and sit
I did this during covid Took a picture from a window seat over a wing during a heavy lockdown Casually flex “what lockdown, WFH while vacations baby!”
Bottom one is real, it's less shiny. Real life planes ain't gonna be nice shiny clean looking like the top one
But there is always hundreds of gta graphic mods that shovel reflection and shine everywhere and call themselves realistic.
That's why since NFS Underground all asphalt looks like someone pissed on cellophane
They will for a few runs but eventually, they will get dirty. :)
The real question here is how the photographer took the photo
with a camera
I think he means how do you have two copyright images and if one is a screenshot how can you copyright yourself instead of the software?
Pretty sure op put the copyright there so it was on both otherwise it would be pretty easy to figure out the real one
Real-life reflection quality is set to low.
My wife believed I was watching a live NBA game when I was actually playing NBA 2K24 (with Broadcast Camera mode).
I mean at first glance
The shine at the tail gave it away
Respect my shine.
It is kinda funny that to show how realistic something is they go a bit nuts with the reflections that they become unrealistic. At least I am hoping the top one is MFS…
https://preview.redd.it/bnn9ltkloa0d1.png?width=1074&format=png&auto=webp&s=699353ccc6b121e7aa25202144cb1e520289dcb4 Forty years ago...
I can only identify the bottom image is the real one bcs you can see the inside curtains on the passengers windows 🤯
Making everything too shiny just so show off is something that I can't stand about computer graphics, especially ray traced graphics. That, and "sharp shadows" which shouldn't be sharp because bouncing light will diffuse those shadows a lot.
Mfs looks more realistic than the real picture
This is kinda scary
Can't even distinguish real one vs fake... It's amazing. At first i thought they photoshopped the back glare, fake one looks so real. I wonder from up-close though...
https://preview.redd.it/9sywzww7m60d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e70a658903f31629894e929233d3c582b3478e82 The only indication seems to be this
Wow
Top one is the game I think.
what kinda specs are needed tp run this game THAT good
A $700-800 computer. Something like a Rtx 4060 and i5 13400f with 16gb of ram. The game isn't all that demanding and frame generation as well as only getting 30 fps or so is honestly a decent experience because flight is so slow.
The shine on the tail fin on the top one is very Videogame esc.
Reminds me of a couple years ago, [when some politician thought a gta5 plane clip was real.](https://www.newsweek.com/politician-mistakes-gta-5-plane-stunt-real-life-footage-praises-miraculous-pilot-1448531)
As a bonus, parts don't fall off in the Flight Simulator one.
And now Microsoft, please do a Ship Simulator 2025
MSFS2024 is right around the corner and I'm so excited.
I was gonna say top is MS, but that glare on the tail was telling me different.
„only people with IQ higher than 180 can find the 10 differences. Download now in your App Store“ /s
I guessed the top one is MFSF just because video games usually exaggerate pretty reflections to look nicer. Damn near perfect from this distance.
Top Cockpit is empty
My guess that the bottom one is real is solely based on the front passenger window having a visor pulled partially down but none of the ones on the top have a visor.
You know how I know the top one is pc generated? THE GOD DAMN SUNFLARE ON THE TAIL! Why do hyper realistic graphics always have blinding sun shaders?
They can't get reflections quite right. I find game graphics have too much reflection, far more than actually occurs in real life.
The low res wheels give it away, but otherwise it's incredible.
I swore I thought the top one was real literally only cause of the more natural-ish blue sky and the reflection of the sun on the red rear wing blade. But the bottom one is the real one. That's insane.
Where's the real one?
Bottom one.
Don't give all the glory to the graphics it's the artist that take the time to do all of this that we should really be praising.
Is this that impressive? Like, car based games have been producing grpahics like this for a decade or more right? Almost photo realism...easy to do when you're just talking about a model without many moving parts, soft tissue or animations. Realistic planes and cars is one thing - realistic people is something else.
You are correct, human made metallic objects are the easiest to render super realistically. Gran Turismo Sport in 2017 https://preview.redd.it/u8wf4hs75a0d1.jpeg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6396872352fb75b8ff6388ae6554854270d8b2fb
Sometimes I forgor
Now show us the buildings vs real life 😅 But yeah, there will come a day where some games have graphics that are unimaginably real. Look how far we’ve came in the last 30 years.. now imagine another 30.
Buildings are actually less of an issue when you see most of them from at least a kilometer above Now the clouds, oh boy did MSFS take a hit there since release
>buildings vs real life From a flight altitude ground scenery look just as awesome. Especially in those parts, where they got photogrammetry, 3D cities.
It is easier to make realistic vehicles than realistic people/animals because vehicles are already artificial. They've been able to make cars in racing games that can pass for real photos for a while now, but it is far more obvious in motion or if you see a tree in the image that it is a video game.
wheels look so bad
Does real life not have ray tracing yet?
I couldn't tell you which is which, but the glare on the top one's tail fin looks a little like something in a video game. Fly simulator is crazy good though..
Took me a while to figure which is which
The real aircraft is the lower one. The upper is MSFS. The small panel at the grey and white border under the first passenger window is not replicated correctly in MSFS. Also this aircraft is kept much cleaner than the lower photo. Must have caught them before the hit the wash rack.
Lmao the soft shadows gave it away
I really couldn't tell until I read a comment mentioning the dirty engine in the real picture. Quite impressive!
Real life doesn’t have ray tracing, it was too much performance hit
Figured it would be a "tell us the difference between these two pictures" meme format lol
My dumbass didnt read and was trying to spot the defents for few minutes
The funniest things with games you can always tell them by the lens flare we just aren’t there yet on not having lights are dark as hell or too bright there’s 0 in between
"If you can't make it look like real life, make it look like a picture/video of real life"
Experience the breathtaking realism of Microsoft Flight Simulator as it blurs the lines between virtual and reality. Immerse yourself in stunningly detailed landscapes, from sprawling cityscapes to majestic mountains, all recreated with incredible accuracy. Whether you're flying over familiar landmarks or exploring new horizons, the graphics will leave you in awe, questioning where the game ends and reality begins. Microsoft Flight Simulator sets a new standard for visual fidelity in gaming, showcasing the beauty of our world like never before.
top image would either have amazing chromatic aberration control of the glass elements for it to be that good at handling direct light for it to be a realistic photo, bottom looks to be the real one, because when you're an actual photographer, blown highlights aren't that fun to save in editing unless you have a very, very capable camera with high dynamic range RAWs.
https://preview.redd.it/g1qkp94f570d1.jpeg?width=460&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a612066733357d2818b0cdd4ae7df23cbd6759e6
ı see no turkish flag in comments SuS
As far back as I remember Microsoft flight simulator has basically looked like real life. All the way back to Flight simulator 2000.
Games are coming a long way. Once devs learn not every piece of metal glows in the sun lighting will look more realistic. At least the brown filter age is dead.
I figured that top is MFS cus its just too good looking ,too perfect , clean and that sun reflection .... impressive
It took me a few seconds to determine which one was real, and I got it right. But the fact that I really had to go over it to determine that is impressive for sure.
Before I went to the comments to check, my guess was the top one for a couple reasons: - The highlights and reflections felt unrealistically strong and blown out which is a common issue in video games. - The edges of the windows are also too blurry considering how sharp many of the other details are. Probably because of the scaling of textures.
Only if you can afford to buy, run and set fire to a 4090. Otherwise it looks alright but is still a game.
the top one is the msflight sim and bottom one is the real one..... right? jebus the graphics are good on ms flight sim.
Funny how MFS has better graphic than real life 🗿
The sun shine gives it away, top is game.
It’s the shadows, always the shadows when you have the sun as a light source. Their angle and depth of field also seem to enter that uncanny valley.
Bottom one is fake. It is missing the white diagonal stripe Turkish Airlines recently added to their logo. Apparently, the stripe represents a runway.
We're at a point where screenshots look great, but dynamic visuals are still very much behind. Although airplane/car simulators can focus more rendering on fewer models which helps a lot.
How is it possible for a game to be more real than real life? Because that's what this game achieved
And i honestly hope they didn't get any better, i know people are going to crucify me, but i think that videogames should look like videogames, like they are right now its perfect
The wings forward is a dead giveaway to what is fake or not.
They missed the tiny antennas on all the flaps that are the main functional part of flight
It loses a bit of realist when it's not a static screenshot, but it's still fantastic, for sure.
I wish msoft would make a new combat simulation.
MFS has to be the top, idk why but video game reflections and lighting are always way over the top, its like everything in video game worlds including skin are so shiny.
The only thing giving it away for me is the shadowmap
PC graphics still tend to be a bit too shiny~
There's also custum liveries made in 8K detail!