After spending a while with slight stutters and pretty significant fps drops, I figured I should take a look at the game's textures. Needless to say, I saw quite a few tweaks to be made.

Every tweaked texture included in this mod was handpicked for best performance and visuals. Also, keep in mind that this mod was made to maintain quality while gaining a bit of performance.


List of changes

- Diffuse maps are relatively untouched. Any included ones had their compression fixed and/or were compressed to DXT1a if their alpha was simple enough.

- A few normal maps were reduced in size (flora and oversized normals).

- Smoothness/shine/specular for a ton of textures was slightly reduced in size. This provides decent performance gains with next to no loss of quality (compared to reducing diffuse and normal maps, anyway).


Installation

- (For manual installs): Drop the extracted contents into your game folder.

- (For NMM installs): Install the mod.

- (HDD Users) If you're running the game on an HDD, running a defrag would be a good idea to help provide smoother gameplay.

- Edit your Fallout4Custom.ini and enter the following lines:

[Archive]
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
sResourceDataDirsFinal=


Recommended mods


Performance


FAR - Faraway Area Reform (LOD) - Highly recommended. Proper compression and potential performance improvements for LOD textures. Looks better, too.

Optimized Textures - Only use this if you don't mind minor to moderate loss of quality. Reduces some 2k diffuse maps to 1k. Provides better visuals than Wasteland 512 but the performance increase won't be as large.

Wasteland 512 Textures - Only use this if you're struggling with VRAM. Install it over this for even better performance. Loss of quality will be noticeable due to the downscaled diffuse maps.

Fog remover - Performance Enhancer - Only use this if you're struggling with performance indoors. Performance is gained by replacing some of the mist and fog meshes with blank ones.


Quality/Retextures


High Resolution Texture Pack - Valius - Texture pack replacing a good bunch of the vanilla game's texture eyesores.

Fallout Texture Overhaul Power Armors UHD 4K - High-quality textures for Power Armor.

Detailed Deathclaws - Best Deathclaw retex so far imo.

Delightful Ivy - HD Vine Retexture - Massive texture improvement for vines.

Commonwealth HQ Landscape Overhaul WIP - Pretty good landscape retexture mod.

Vivid Fallout - Landscapes - Another great landscape retexture.

Langleys Workshop - Definitely something to consider tracking.

Kellog's Armor High Quality retexture - The name speaks for itself.

Piper's Outfit Retexture - Same note as above.

Piper's Coat HR - Alternate option for a 4K texture closer to vanilla style.


Misc


Musical Lore - Wasteland Edition - Immersive lore-friendly music!


Bonus tips 

(Optional) - If you're annoyed by the game's texture pop-in like I am, you can try setting the following into your Fallout4.ini under the general section. Expect a minor performance hit and/or increase in loading times.

iTextureUpgradeDistance1=2400 -- (default is 1200)
iTextureUpgradeDistance0=1200 -- (default is 600)
iTextureDegradeDistance1=3000 -- (default is 1500)
iTextureDegradeDistance0=1600 -- (default is 800)

Example:

[General]
sLanguage=en
uGridsToLoad=5
uExterior Cell Buffer=36
bDisableAllGore=0
bForceUpdateDiffuseOnly=0
iTextureUpgradeDistance1=2400
iTextureUpgradeDistance0=1200
iTextureDegradeDistance1=3000
iTextureDegradeDistance0=1600

(Recommended) - Shadow distance tweaking is another thing can that drastically improve performance. If you're using high shadow distance (or greater), you can try the settings below in your Fallout4Prefs.ini.

fShadowDistance=6000.0000 -- (default is 14000 for high, 3000 for medium)
fDirShadowDistance=6000.0000 -- (default is 14000 for high, 3000 for medium)