UPDATE – X-Plane 12.08 Beta update has been released to all who accept beta updates. Report bugs and issues to the developers as the development continues.
X-Plane 12 Beta now offers whole new dynamic lightning and volumetric clouds with beautiful upper clouds as well. In my eyes, the new sky is far more real-life-like than MSFS’s cartoon-like. To enable the best-looking sunset cloud colors, be sure to set in-sim Cloud Quality to Maximum. Next, I expect them to fix the overexposed cockpit lightning, especially during flying at higher altitudes. Another one to wait for is the ground texture facelift which is coming for sure for those who are not using satellite images aka orthos. On this page there are a few new screenshots of the new sky within XP12 Beta.
Before running X-Plane 12, check that you have both the Background Application Max Frame Rate and Max Frame Rate values at 30 or 60 FPS, Antialiasing – FXAA at ON, and Vertical Sync at ON for x-plane.exe under the Nvidia Control Panel. Also, note that all aircraft failures are enabled by default, so you need to disable them by unchecking the Set mean time between failures option under Failures settings, or you start losing an engine at some point. To fix the ugly cockpit shadow lines, edit settings.txt file under Resources folder. Below are the recommended graphics settings for the Graphics options screen under the X-Plane 12 Settings.
Texture Quality: High
Ambient Occlusion Quality: High
Rendering Resolution: OFF
Antialiasing: FXAA
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
Cloud Quality: Maximum
Shadow Quality: Aircraft Only
Rendering Distance: High
World Objects Density: High
Vegetation Density: High
Draw Parked Aircraft: OFF
Enable 3D Vegetation: ON
User Interface Size: 100%
Allow Windshield Effects: ON
