So I poked around at all the textures in the SE version to see if they had changed. I PM'd Arthmoor about this, but I figure I'll post it here for others to see.
Bethesda decided to upscale a large amount of textures, doubling their size. Upscaling a texture from 512x512 to 1024x1024 or whatever is generally considered a bad plan because all it does is blur things or add noise and not actually improve image quality. Bethesda has used a sort of automated upscale-noise-filtering system to make the textures a bit more...noisy. It does make them ever so slightly less blurry, but it also
adds dithering, which isn't good. I suppose it is a toss up on which is better. Here's some comparisons:
rug,
bear pelt.
For reference, the original release (with HighRes DLC) had 898 architecture files for 825mb. SE has 898 architecture files for 1.91gb. So yeah...technically I should update all my vanilla texture edits to use these new "high res" textures...but like I said, I don't believe any of these larger textures are actually from high res art sources.
Overall, the textures take up about 4gb more space in the SE version. I assume Bethesda increased the texture size mostly because the PS4/XB1 have plenty of texture RAM available.
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