Welcome to The Bug Genie

There is a mod for high resolution textures. This mod is 4.5 GB in size and leads to long load times, and can impact performance.

DDS texture files are smaller, load faster, the GPU can handle them natively, they make performance better, and they can have pre-generated mip-maps.

As a proof of concept I took the existing HD texture mod and converted it to DDS files with DXT5 compression. The pack went down from 4.5 GB to 2.67 GB. And even if they were the same size, a GPU will load DDS textures faster.