Whats the difference from "high res backgrounds" on/off?

[DreamingOfRoundPlanetsAndNoBlocks]

Anyway, so I was dicking around with the options and first time trying out the background at 4K (default 2k). It looks absolutely fucking beautiful as I was on a planet looking up at the stars at night.
Im just wondering now if "high res backgrounds" being on do something? I enabled it just in case anyway.

And btw bloom should be ON by default and so should 4K background be it, the game looks much better and I don't see any difference in performance, the game still works great and I have 2gb of ram, q6600 and hd7850.

I hate telling to my non computer literate friends to change options so if these are on by default it would be good I think.

The rest is set to default in a way that looks good and its balanced peformance wise so dont need any changes unless you really want to.

What i've noticed that kills performance a lot is shadows, had to set it off.

 

[Criss]

If you turn off procedural backgrounds then a static high res image takes its place. Turning off high res backgrounds will just leave a black sky. This is at least the way I understand it.

 

[Crusade]

If you have the vram, the performance hit isn't much.
However, if you have 1gb vram, enable all the pretty settings and disable texture compression, your game will crash.

 

[aceface]

on low end cards (such as my old gt 210) i got 5 fps with bloom on and 100-120 without it.