I would like nobody would take this in the wrong way, because it's not meant to be a bashing of other developers in any way, I would like to be as objective as possible.
Here's two screenshots of a similar situation (viewpoint very close to a building with concrete wall+glass), from some of the best developers of large airports out there: FlyTampa's Athens and Flightbeam's KSFO.
They both look *very* good from a distance, but when you get close, there's no comparison with KLAX.
FlyTampa used a very FS9-compatible method, just diffuse mapping + alpha for transparencies, both things that FS9 can do just as well as FSX. The best idea here is the use of baked shadows and Ambient Occlusions to give depth without costing anything to the fps. We use that method at KLAX extensively too, the whole scenery use AO. However, there's no bump mapping, so the scenery is a bit flat and doesn't change much with time of day or viewpoint, but what really ruined the otherwise very nice detailed shadows, is the DXT compression, which created a lot of pixelization artifacts. In any case, it's a scenery that will probably look the same even in FS9, at least in this place.
Flghtbeam KSFO is a bit better. First, there is bump mapping, although being on the main texture, it follows its limited resolution, so it's not as sharp as KLAX, were we used it on the much high res detail texture. Amir was very smart here, because he chose a combination of colors and a way of painting that won't suffer as much when compressing in DXT so, there are not many visual artifacts as in the FlyTampa scenery, that has lots of high-frequency detail and sudden changes of nearby colors, and those don't compress very well.
In both cases, we are comparing to the developers we respect the most, but I'd say KLAX is really a big step forward in visual quality, with the side effect it won't convert very good in FS9.
