Between procedural textures and PBR textures which one is good for photorealism
You’ re mixing things up. PBR is not a texture or shader, it is a workflow.
Nowadays, most renderers support physically plausible rendering equations, resulting in materials, lights and so on that play well together. They respect physically plausible light transport, including energy conservation, refraction, SSS, Blackbodies and so on.
Textures in a 3D context are usually surface images. Procedurally or not. That said, it depends. Whatever fits your needs. Throw both at a PBR-capable shader/renderer and adjust to your liking.
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I tend to mix; textures for the actual lookup, and procedural for how the lookup is done. Textures can contain a lot of detail and variation that is just too time consuming to setup or calculate on the fly using tons and tons of generators to achieve the effect, whereas an image is just a simple pixel lookup. None are connected to “photorealism”; there are really bad “realistic PBR textures” out there too, using albedo values far outside realistic ranges, contain lighting information, or non albedo textures are clearly some derivative of the albedo if the typical use may not suggest it. Be critical on what you use, both texture wise as well as procedural.
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