these pics DO look terrific no question about that! Especially the combination of morning fog and dawn lighting look great
Anyway I'd rather fly a sim with partly dumbed-down graphics like it is now and can actually FLY the sim smoothly than just look at the graphics, shout "WOW, it looks so beautiful" and then exit, because I can't actually use this as a game.
Lets just hope that they are able to get at least some of it back (maybe in the sequel) without a loss in fps.