Err... sort of. I'm not really interested in long debate on this. I just want to point out that what these 'Trim The Fat' mods are doing to increase performance is not so much related to the meshes. Instead, with the empty mesh files, you are not loading in the associated textures. Even for lower resolution vanilla textures, by not having to load them into the game world, you are increasing the performance far more than you would by reducing the poly count as much as you are. Reducing your textures from 4k to 2k will have bigger impact on performance overall compared to removing all the meshes you are with these mods. Which for vanilla is what you are essentially doing by stopping the loading of lots of 2k or 1k textures from being loaded.
Here is quick example to get an idea of how poly count on modern graphics cards is not an issue. Go in game, open console ~ and type TWF return. That is Toggle Wire Frame. Type it again to change and once more to turn off. Just shows how many triangles the game is handling at any one time. Spoiler: it's a lot.
TL;DR: Yup, system works less. Not much less, but less.
I understand all that and as you said without the polys the textures are not loaded. Less polys (and less textures) = better performance. The system does also have to work a tiny bit to “draw” the extra polys in the 3 dimensional space and “bend” those textures. So a square = 4 points and a single plane to render the texture on vs. a sphere with many points and many planes to render, each of those planes is assigned to a different portion of the texture. The sphere is more data to process.
This is not at all about big gains to performance. Ask any ultralight hiker or race car driver. A lot of little changes can make all the difference. Plus I get tired of grabbing a bunch of embalming tool when I spam E to pick up everything on a shelf.
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Err... sort of.
I'm not really interested in long debate on this.
I just want to point out that what these 'Trim The Fat' mods are doing to increase performance is not so much related to the meshes.
Instead, with the empty mesh files, you are not loading in the associated textures. Even for lower resolution vanilla textures, by not having to load them into the game world, you are increasing the performance far more than you would by reducing the poly count as much as you are.
Reducing your textures from 4k to 2k will have bigger impact on performance overall compared to removing all the meshes you are with these mods.
Which for vanilla is what you are essentially doing by stopping the loading of lots of 2k or 1k textures from being loaded.
Here is quick example to get an idea of how poly count on modern graphics cards is not an issue.
Go in game, open console ~ and type TWF return.
That is Toggle Wire Frame. Type it again to change and once more to turn off.
Just shows how many triangles the game is handling at any one time. Spoiler: it's a lot.
I understand all that and as you said without the polys the textures are not loaded. Less polys (and less textures) = better performance. The system does also have to work a tiny bit to “draw” the extra polys in the 3 dimensional space and “bend” those textures. So a square = 4 points and a single plane to render the texture on vs. a sphere with many points and many planes to render, each of those planes is assigned to a different portion of the texture. The sphere is more data to process.
This is not at all about big gains to performance. Ask any ultralight hiker or race car driver. A lot of little changes can make all the difference. Plus I get tired of grabbing a bunch of embalming tool when I spam E to pick up everything on a shelf.