What is best freeware for more realistic scenery for geography and cities with least impact on frame rate?

Question

I have the latest top of the range 27" 5K Retina iMac - beautiful and powerful. Two questions:

1. Despite earlier advice from Laminar, X-Plane runs well and looks great with 5K Retina. But the menus are tiny. Can Laminar in future provide facility for larger menus seeing that 4K and 5K screens are becoming popular?

2. I have no problems downloading aircraft and airports. But I would like more realistic scenery for geography and for cities/towns. I get confused with meshes, photorealistic, ortho etc etc. So, what freeware would you recommend for more realistic scenery that impacts the least on frame rate?

Thanks Laminar, Love X-Plane!

Answer 1

I am not part of Laminar so I can't answer question 1, but I can help you with question 2

HD Mesh Scenery V3, 50 files thus takes up a lot of your hard drive space. Start by downloading one, check if your FPS is good, then you can keep on downloading files.

http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-10-hd-mesh-scenery-v3/

Fly with LUA. Once installed, install RTH

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=17468

Real Terra Haze (A MUST HAVE!)

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=22387

KLAX/KSFO

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=26246

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=29166

Scenery Gateway

https://gateway.x-plane.com/airports/page