The reason why some textures could see vast improvements in quality is because with the initial release of the Orange Box, Valve added a resource data system to the Valve Texture Format, which could be used to set the 'default' quality of a texture to a lower mipmap level. This was done to address 'significant performance and instability issues' for some users. See the comparison image above.ДЄs of the JPatch, mat_picmip is locked between -1 and 4, corresponding to the settings which have always been available in the game's menu under the 'Texture detail' dropdown. This setting used numbers ranging from -10 to 4, -10 being the best quality and 4 being the worst.

Mat_picmip was the most well-known settings and had one of the biggest visual 'gains'. This mainly affects skinned weapons, and the Engineer's blueprints that appear when using the build tool. A side effect of Texture Streaming is that certain textures will appear 'blurry' or 'low quality' for the first few seconds of them being in view. It also helps load the game faster as it loads or 'streams' textures on the fly as they appear. Its purpose was to maintain support and performance of older systems. Texture Streaming was added in the Tough Break Update.

This makes skinned weapons appear sharp and clean the second they appear. Disabling Texture Streaming forces the game to load high quality textures of an object.

Setting no_texture_stream in the autoexec.cfg file or in Steam launch options disables Texture Streaming.

3 mp_usehwmmodels and mp_usehwmvcds (defunct).

Tf2 how to make an autoexec