PREVIEW - what about an UHD Mesh Scenery?

I couldn't sit idle in the last days, and started some very extreme experiments pushing the scenery generator even further outside of its comfort zone. I massively increased the mesh resolution (almost 3x of HD Mesh Scenery v3) and added in some nice 30m DEM data (everything else - on the data side - is identical to HD Mesh Scenery v3).

Well, the results have surprised even me ... the Alps or the Grand Canyon changed their look in a quite obvious (and positive) way, making them look even more realistic (and big - yes, the "feeling" of dimensions has improved very nicely!).

At the moment I am tinkering with the results, and am also waiting for some DEM data improvements (the good guy behind Viewfinderpanoramas.org hinted to me, that he wanted to increase the 30m Alps data very soon - and of course, I will wait for that). But then, I am definitely considering to share a few, smaller UHD regions with you (don't even bother to start asking for "regions" ... I will do the ones, I find the best to do at the moment). Like the - entire - Alps, the Canyon Land in the USA, and Maybe Colorado and the Yosemite region ...

BUT, there is one drawback. of course, this absolutely insane (consider it experimental) mesh resolution needs some beefy hardware to run (users who have FPS concerns with HD Mesh Sceney v3 should not even think about it). On my machine, it worked quite well (yes, definitely usable FPS) ... BUT it will definitely need a minimum of 16 GB RAM (24 or 32 might be much safer).

Here are a bunch of comparison screenshots (labeled UHD and HD ... so you can browse trough them and see the differences):

• https://picasaweb.google.com/101666907909842492197/PREVIEWUHDMeshSceneryV1?authuser=0&feat=directlink
  

And some quick examples:

PS: This is also showing you, what X-Plane could one day achieve with hardware tessellation (its on the roadmap of Laminar ... but without a due date) with less heavy DSFs.