Let me give you a quick overview of how developers handle those fancy cloud effects without melting your older graphics card. Its actually pretty clever how they make it work and i've seen some really neat tricks especially in games like no man's sky. They basically use these smart compression methods, kind of like how you might zip up files to save space but for 3d clouds if that makes sense.

The whole thing relies on some pretty cool math where they break down those big fluffy clouds into smaller, more manageable pieces. Instead of storing every little detail they use these noise patterns that create cloud-like shapes on the fly which saves tons of memory. Its actually pretty fascinating how they stack different flat cloud textures to make them look 3d, and they only draw the parts of clouds that you can actually see.

One thing i found interesting is how they use this thing called marching cubes (sounds fancy i know) to only create the visible parts of clouds, which really helps with performance. They also do this neat trick where they skip empty spaces when drawing the clouds, and layer different detail levels to make them look more realistic without killing your frame rate. Pretty smart if you ask me!

Its definitely one of those cases where developers had to get creative to make something work on older hardware but the results are actually really impressive once you understand whats going on behind the scenes.