What’s the difference between these? I’m guessing pixels but is there any impact on performance?
Yes, it will.
It will just start eating up your VRAM with a diminishing return on visual quality.
I personally don’t find it worth it above 4k.
The more resolution, the bigger the file, leaves less space for the rest. Can become a bottleneck on lower capacity hardware
1 Like
To be honest I don’t notice any difference in performance.
For me the 8K looks great!
TAA makes things so blurry you wouldn’t notice the difference anyway. I’d much prefer to save space, load times and memory by using smaller textures.
In this case, Google will provide much better answers than you will get here.
Hm. If you have a computer with the Flight Sim already stuttering and having problems, and only one or two gigabytes of VRAM, the performance impact on resolution might be noticeable.
If you have a powerful machine, it makes no difference at all if a single airplane fuselage texture file in the community folder has the DDS file size of 1 megabytes or 25 megabytes or 100mb…
I sometimes use mods in Fallout 4 or Resident Evil with one new outfit, weapon or accessoir carried by the protagonist with a file size of 500 megabytes or even 1 gigabyte, and I notice not the slightest difference in framerates - so it depends on your machine.
But single texture files for planes have no performance impact at all. Just try the mod or livery - and you will see 
Sure, it works on RAM, but you’re wrong in thinking these files are that much larger. We’re talking the difference between 10 or 20 megs on 1k and < 80MB on 8k.