Since there is some confusion about what this does (and practically nobody reads a lengthy mod description the first time they're looking at a new mod), I thought it'd be helpful to explain how this thing works.

In the past, so far as I can tell from looking at other mods (without breaking into their PAK files, mind you), what's been done is:

1. Messing with the Material Instance files for 'mechs (basically, a set of parameters that are passed to a shader, which is basically the code that determines how to draw the final object). This allows for stuff like "no damage" mods, etc., but it doesn't improve performance.

2. Adding in cut-content materials that PGI, for whatever reasons, left out of MW5. Obviously, this can make performance slightly worse, as these things eat up a little more memory, but it's largely OK.

3. Adding new Skins and their associated graphics files. This can add to bloat and hurt performance a bit, but as it's largely confined to player 'mechs, it's fine.



What this mod does is different. I rewrote the 'mech shader, cutting out a bunch of instructions in it that I didn't feel contributed to the final look of 'mechs. For example, there are dozens of instructions dealing with the "paint damage" feature, and I've simplified them into a nice, streamlined system, where they just read a texture file one time and do some very simple math on the results.

I've also cut down the sizes of the 'mech graphics assets. 'Mechs were typically using 4096X4096 files for all of their graphics, and involved quite a large number of files per 'mech. Cutting this down helps quite a bit with VRAM throughput, etc., and it doesn't have an obvious impact on the quality of the final image.

A lot of the 'mech graphics also had totally-useless (and counterproductive) alpha channels enabled. Getting rid of them improved the quality of the final visuals and made the files better at the same time.

Things like trees were edited in a few places where I felt like I could safely improve performance. I've run into a few issues w/ trees' LOD settings that I'll probably address in Optimize later on that should further-improve the performance of trees in this game.

Finally, there are a lot of graphic files that were totally blank (i.e., pure black) but were still at huge sizes. These have been made minimal in size so that they're not wasting RAM / VRAM.

So, in short, this is a major edit of the game's files; it's not just a few tweaks. Which is why the mod's so large in file size. It and Optimize, together, touch about 75% of the art content in the game in one way or another, and paired, these two mods help performance considerably.