I'm afraid that I have to stand with one foot firmly planted in both camps, as it were.
There are places where photoreal scenery
IS best
(above certain heights, true).
And there are places where well done scenery, such as Orbx creates, that make FSX/P3d a true joy. In fact, if it weren't for Orbx not only would I would "fly" far less often, but I'd probably be doing something else by now.
With me, it's not so much the aircraft that I fly,
but the places that I fly to.
The original scenery that came with FSX, while good for it's time, drove me crazy
(yeah, short trip). It was just too hard to suspend disbelief.
With the more powerful computers of today we can have very detailed scenery that mimics the actual location that you're flying over.
On the other hand, there are
LARGE areas of this country where the scenery is still abysmal.
Utah is one of those areas.The photoreal scenery "tiles" from Blue Sky Scenery covers very large areas. Usually several thousand square miles/kilometers in each section.
That gives me a simple way of contrasting the two sceneries,
Orbx and
photoreal.
These are the edge/corners of the two types of scenery. On one edge is
Orbx. On the other is
photoreal.
If you download just one Blue Sky Scenery tile you'll easily see what I mean.
The pictures are totally untouched, not photoshop.
In these comparisons, Orbx, is clearly the looser.At other times, in other places, photoreal just isn't as satisfying as this.
