I don't think its much of a secret at this point that DayZ's development has been a bit of a letdown, to put things lightly. Even after years in Early Access the standalone version is more or less on par with the mod and nowhere near the lofty promises it made when it first launched.

There is a however a ray of sunshine in all of this as the DayZ team has recently showcased their work on a new Direct X 11 renderer that brings with it great performance improvements but most noticeably an upgraded weather system. Here's the video and if you don't feel like watching all of it I'd suggest skipping to around 5 minutes in order to see it all in action:

As you can see the new rain is a lot more atmospheric with its heavy, dense and oppressive downpour but most importantly it actually covers all environmental objects so you won't see a lone roof or some sign in the distance that's magically unaffected. The only real problem I have with the new system is that rain only seems to affect things in a 5 meter circle around you so it constantly feels like your character is walking in the eye of the storm rather than a proper rainstorm but I'm sure that'll be fixed as the testing phase goes on.

Speaking of atmosphere, the visibility-limiting rain works perfectly when it comes to zombies as you can only see dark blurry shapes slowly shambling towards you. The problem, as is standard with DayZ these days, is that once the zombies come near you their animations and path-finding start bugging out all over the place and any scare factor goes away. That's no fault of the renderer but its one of those things I would love to see fixed in the near future.

Right now the new renderer is still in a testing phase but its expected to arrive in the coming months and once it does you'll finally be able to use all of your hardware in DayZ.