Ultrascenery 2 Aerial - Resolution Comparison

UltraScenery2 has a new feature that sees landscape geometry with a 16x higher resolution than the first generation. This doesn't sound like a big deal at first, but the implication becomes apparent when you show larger areas of the landscape. These two pictures are a comparison between the new high resolution and the previous resolution. Notice how blocky the outline of the river becomes, as well as the areas that get covered by shaders per square. The low res version looks very unrealistic, whereas the high res version looks more believable.

Note that this took forever to render in either resolution due to the fact that from an aerial like this, not much culling optimization can be used. Culling is the process of hiding objects that are not seen in the render (think trees occluded behind other trees), so those culled object aren't sent to the render engine and their effect doesn't have to be calculated. Showing things from above, there's not much you can hide, hence the increase in render time.