Since the discussion here was about the benefits of 2.5, I thought an illustration would be valuable.
This is a shot from my WIP airport/scenery project(s), due for release this year.
Mesh: FS Genesis here, but works equally well with Global Vector.
Landclass: I'm using both stock P3DV.2.5 and FTX Global...neither is visible in this shot. My scenery will be color adjusted to integrate with either. FTX Global landclass is greener than stock in certain desert terrain, so it's necessary to use different PR for each application.
Texture: High definition photoreal, color adjusted and enhanced for accuracy. The PR and and autogen are fully seasonal.
Autogen: Hundreds of hours hand annotating with attention to accurate trees for location and altitude. Many, many single placements. The detail work is what really brings the scenery to life.
System: Tweaked autogen settings to produce very dense & accurate coverage, sliders all maxed. No terrain shadows used until LM refines the engine a bit more. They tend to pop and I'd rather have a more seamless display when flying close to terrain.
I've been working on the process for over a year, beta testing in P3D to find the sweet spot in performance and display. Currently, I'm locked 30 FPS, but when I go unlimited I see 55 to 60 across a few hundred square miles of terrain I've completed at this detail level. I'm going to the GTX 970 soon and FPS should not be an issue at all.
The whole experiment is aimed at developing scenery to take max advantage of P3D lighting and other aspects unique to the LM platform. The final scenery will be hyper saturated for high end systems, but with flexibility to de tune for average systems.
