The second picture is very similar to an x-plane 11 in terms of gamut. Everything I hate. Dear developers, you have done a great job with EA, please do not stop there. I have been wondering for a long time why PBR is not applied to ground textures. Is it just for compatibility reasons?
This is because you cannot seperate snow from the overall shaderrs, i guess. Its either one of both, nice looking overall terrain/ground shading or white snow.
Probably you dont have any shadertool installed in normal mode. But in the times of a PTA or Tomatoshade, or now probably with Envshade too, this is what you would end up with there too. And EA tries to do what they do, make the visuals not fully boring to look at. Sadly that has the effect that snow gets a bit a taint, yes.
Btw, PBR is applied to ground textures, if the dev who developed the airport made them PBR :-) If you buy a payware airport like Flytampa EHAM v2 for example, you get PBR ground textures.
P3D 5.3, I7700K, 2080 RTX, 16GB Ram, Asus Prime Z270K, Win 10
Active Addons: ActiveSky, Skyforce Env Textures, Envshade, GSX, UtLive
DCS uses the same EA technology, but there all is normal with the lighting. Not to mention MSFS, there is excellent lighting, and the snow is white. So, everything can be adjusted, if you want to. But even to make normal shadows in the default atmosphere for some reason has become an impossible task for developers, although other enthusiasts are fixing it.
You would before recommending third-party shaders and paid airports themselves first tested. You would learn a lot of interesting things.
