This is actually one of the strengths in X-Plane; there's a scenery gateway where users can submit custom airports or tweak existing ones. They started that many years ago and at this point there are many thousands of user contributed airports with carefully modeled 3D scenery. With every patch release they bundle what's on the scenery gateway and things get better.
Most airports that people care about are modeled to a pretty high standard at this point. Even the tiny, remote ones. It's not just about making them look pretty but also about ensuring signage, taxi ways, etc. is where it's supposed to be. It's all licensed under the Creative Commons license too (CC BY 3.0); so MS could make use of this. It's one of the things I always liked about X-plane, the third party add on ecosystem is great.
And of course there are commercial scenery plugins as well. Orbx makes scenery for both X-plane and MS Flight Simulator. Which despite the awesome scenery that they have out of the box still requires stuff like that if you really want the best looking scenery. The default scenery is amazing of course; but it has its limitations.
I've not used that personally but it looks awesome. For X-plane, simheaven.com (very detailed open streetmap based scenery) combined with free satellite scenery generated using Ortho4XP gets things close enough. Not quite to the level of MS Flight Simulator but it's not that bad. And free.
With Orbx it actually looks comparable. That's actually a good way to compare the two simulators if you care about the visuals because the only difference would be the rendering engine; the content is essentially the same with orbx and much better than what comes out of the box with either simulation. There are some videos on youtube comparing the two side by side. They both look great. But also very different.
IMHO MS has an edge with things like clouds and weather. But it can also look a bit over saturated and slightly too pretty. X-plane is shooting more for realism. And part of that is that visibility usually just isn't really that great from a plane. And they have gradually upgraded a lot of things. E.g. the clouds and weather just got a major upgrade in a patch release and the physics based rendering in v12 is a big step forward and they are still doing major updates to things like HDR and cockpit rendering (which is a hard problem because of the way human eyes compensate for the huge dynamic range difference inside and outside).
Most airports that people care about are modeled to a pretty high standard at this point. Even the tiny, remote ones. It's not just about making them look pretty but also about ensuring signage, taxi ways, etc. is where it's supposed to be. It's all licensed under the Creative Commons license too (CC BY 3.0); so MS could make use of this. It's one of the things I always liked about X-plane, the third party add on ecosystem is great.
And of course there are commercial scenery plugins as well. Orbx makes scenery for both X-plane and MS Flight Simulator. Which despite the awesome scenery that they have out of the box still requires stuff like that if you really want the best looking scenery. The default scenery is amazing of course; but it has its limitations.
I've not used that personally but it looks awesome. For X-plane, simheaven.com (very detailed open streetmap based scenery) combined with free satellite scenery generated using Ortho4XP gets things close enough. Not quite to the level of MS Flight Simulator but it's not that bad. And free.
With Orbx it actually looks comparable. That's actually a good way to compare the two simulators if you care about the visuals because the only difference would be the rendering engine; the content is essentially the same with orbx and much better than what comes out of the box with either simulation. There are some videos on youtube comparing the two side by side. They both look great. But also very different.
IMHO MS has an edge with things like clouds and weather. But it can also look a bit over saturated and slightly too pretty. X-plane is shooting more for realism. And part of that is that visibility usually just isn't really that great from a plane. And they have gradually upgraded a lot of things. E.g. the clouds and weather just got a major upgrade in a patch release and the physics based rendering in v12 is a big step forward and they are still doing major updates to things like HDR and cockpit rendering (which is a hard problem because of the way human eyes compensate for the huge dynamic range difference inside and outside).