High Res Texture Pack; Good or Bad?

[Pickysaurus]

Hi guys,

 

So I've been reading all over both the Nexus and these very forums that the Bethesda High Res Texture pack is a bad bad thing to install, however it's actually part of the STEP Guide. So is it really that bad?

 

Many people have recommended this mod instead, so is it better?

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/57353/?

 

Thanks for your opinions

[Kelmych]

The high rate texture pack is very useful. The mod you reference is an optimized version of the high res texture pack. You can that mod, or the one mentioned in the STEP guide , to get the optimized high res textures. If you use the one in the STEP guide you also need the high res texture pack from Bethesda since some of the textures don't need optimization.

 

So the high res textures are good, and the optimized versions are better.

[Greg]

If you follow the guide to install STEP Extended, all but 408^* files in the High Resolution Texture Pack are replaced by various mods.

 

^*Assuming I can count correctly.

[hishutup]

One can argue that optimized is actually worse as it uses a higher compression. Some believe that it makes a difference in the performance which I highly doubt. 

I can see when the time before ENBoost was released, it would help with avoiding the 3.1GB crash but for today that isnt an issue.

As for performance, texture res doesnt impact performance; actually it kind of does but it is so minimal that it is within the margin of error.

 

Honestly, if you have a less than a 2GB VRAM card then it can be useful but other than that I say optimizing is pointless for an end user.