Photo or ortho sceneries are available or can be generated in different resolutions. The bigger the zoom level (ZL) is, the more file size, download time, decrease in frame rates in your simulator. So if you look at the pictures below, showing different ZL at 500 ft, you’ll see ZL 16 or 17 is sufficient. Otherwise you get in trouble with memory overflow, decreasing frame rates, loading time before and during flight and maybe hard disk capacity.
If you do your own orthos using Ortho4XP, I recommend to do it in ZL 17 and maybe around airports in ZL 19.
ZL17 tiles are available
- for Alps region at askystory.fr
- for Switzerland at x-plane.org
- for Italy at x-italy.it
- for Spain and Portugal at Spain UHD
- for USA at x-plane.org
- for USA at verticalsims
For tiles in ZL16/17 for Europe please refer to
A tile – which is 1 x 1 degree – needs in ZL16 2 GBytes, in ZL17 8 GB and in ZL18 32GB space on your harddisk, 7-zip-compressed to download it is 1,5GB for ZL16, and 6GB for ZL17.
View from 500ft AGL
 ZL16 |
 ZL17 |
 ZL18 |
 ZL19 |