I’ve not tried any of the new textures, and probably can’t with my version. I’m sure someone will correct me if that’s wrong – I wouldn’t mind trying them out.
From what I’ve seen in various screenshots they don’t look too good or properly scaled, even close up.
From a medium distance some look OK, but only from an acceptable angle. A good example is the one with the swirly grass that looks as if it’s been wind beaten.
The problem seem to be when it’s laid on a fairly flat or even surface and the viewpoint looks along the texture. It can then suffer from serious perspective distortion. This is because the in game 3D imagery is using the correct vanishing point to create three dimensional objects, but the photorealistic texture is still preserving the vanishing point of the original photographic image. That image is then visually in totally the wrong plane; the two are therefore in conflict and will always look wrong. That’s why 3D grass objects work better in close-up, simply because the vanishing point will always be in harmony with all of the other objects.
I also think that the 3D grass objects will look better when laid over a lower resolution texture because they won’t then be competing for visual attention. Laid over a hi-res image they might look a bit messy. It would be good to try out some of these new textures though, or at least see some screenshots showing them at their best.
