Thank you for this analysis. It seems to corroborate my findings. I will be skipping 3rd party mesh for now. Should help decrease load times, particularly with the settings menu. It's nice having scenery and addon config in there now, however opening the menu with many scenery addons is like pulling teeth now. Not a wise choice by LM in my view. 

1 hour ago, Joe L said:

I have to say I received excellent service from Stefan.  Following this thread I decided to see what type of upgrade discount I might get on my DVD version purchased at least three years ago.  In less than 10 minutes I received a very nice reply with a 40 Euro discount.  Quite fair in my mind.

Joe

Same here. got also this dicount!
excellent support from Stephan!

1 hour ago, Joe L said:

I have to say I received excellent service from Stefan.  Following this thread I decided to see what type of upgrade discount I might get on my DVD version purchased at least three years ago.  In less than 10 minutes I received a very nice reply with a 40 Euro discount.  Quite fair in my mind.

Other than v5 installers, what other benefits do you get for that €40 discount?

I already have FS Global Ultimate - Next Generation FTX installed. Considering the 2020 version is the same size as the previous version and the product descriptions are similar, there's nothing to convince me to upgrade to a newer mesh if I switch to P3D v5.
A visual comparison similar to Mischung's post would be beneficial.

Surely if I just add the links to the scenery.cfg, the current mesh will work?

This is a fantastic post, thanks for doing this! Very interesting to see these comparisons. Clearly the mesh has been upgraded over previous iterations. Especially good to see that South America has received some love. All in all, this is not at all bad. I might just skip over my mesh addon when I first install v5, or limit it to certain regions that might still benefit from it.

23 minutes ago, F737NG said:

Other than v5 installers, what other benefits do you get for that €40 discount?

I already have FS Global Ultimate - Next Generation FTX installed. Considering the 2020 version is the same size as the previous version and the product descriptions are similar, there's nothing to convince me to upgrade to a newer mesh if I switch to P3D v5.
A visual comparison similar to Mischung's post would be beneficial.

Surely if I just add the links to the scenery.cfg, the current mesh will work?

Yes it will.  I did this with P3D v4 using the v3 installer.  I have to just figure out what I did and repeat. 

I also updated for 15 euros.

Just do not understand, do I need to register manually? Sim did not automatically pick up the files.

After seeing the comparison, how can that be valid (FS Global Ultimate NG 2020 product description) ...

About 80 GB of 3D-data is injected with more than 500 times more detail in your Flight Simulator when compared to the default world!

Mike

3 hours ago, mikealpha said:

After seeing the comparison, how can that be valid (FS Global Ultimate NG 2020 product description) ...

About 80 GB of 3D-data is injected with more than 500 times more detail in your Flight Simulator when compared to the default world!

It looks like this product description was just copied over from the former "FS GLOBAL ULTIMATE - NEXT GENERATION". Just checked that on simmarket.

So it definitely applies to P3D before V5 and I can imagine that it's true for certain regions in Africa or South America, because the default-mesh there was pretty bad.

But it does not apply to P3D V5 in my opinion. It should have better resolution of course (it's 80GB for the mesh only!), but cannot imagine a factor of 500 😉

I have the FsGlobal Ultimate NG mesh in v4.5 and just for comparison I took a flight on one of my streams on You Tube and flew around the Grand Canyon with default mesh and then with the FsGlobal mesh from 2017 and it was exactly the same as shown in the video..... I will be sticking with the default mesh in p3dv5 as much as I can, its even better than Orbx mesh 

The real test for me with any mesh isn't the 'highlights' parts of the World such as Mount Rainier, Grand Canyon or Ayers Rock, which tend to receive special treatment. It's the rolling hills in Vermont, Cheddar Gorge, 3 Rondavels in N.E. South Africa.

If instead of pancake flat terrain we get undulating relief or instead of blobs we get terrain definition that displays outcrops, that is what appeals to me and helps me make a decision on which mesh to use.
 

Anyone happen to do a comparison with FreeMesh?  Have it downloaded but have held off installing anything other than FSDT/FB airports since I don't have a compatible addon plane yet anyway.