I find it rich that the OP finds the temerity to whine about free DLC when they could've easily charged you for it. It did blow me away and the improvements the lighting, shadows and water rendering were immediately apparent. It wouldn't have bothered me if he just left feedback, but instead he had to make himself out to be a massive whiner.

Yeah the OP is quite funny, with his claims, but well thats the interweb and the almighty freedom of speech.

Really I don't expect someone like him that doesn't get idea behind the proper use of textures neither the math behind them to even understand the difference between DOF and Bokeh or SSAO and SSDO.

Its like:
"My textures are all pixelated, WTF!!!!"
"Cmon forget about the damn textures we got Directional Occlusion now, WEEEEEEEEH!"
"I don't care DUUUUDE, I can't even read that tiny newspaper snippet! F***** *censored*"

Just like that Dr. Dude right above. "In my opinion every single texture in FC2 looks sharper and better. They might not be so BIG and HI-RES, but for me they look more realistic and believable. I just see them and accept them. Blah...Blah...Blah..." *palmface*

SteamDawg, I don't argue with retards. So you won. Enjoy your facepalm and you so wise brain.

Well, pre-patch 1.9 - my VRAM usage was on about 300 MB.

Now, it's always floating around 975 MB..
..Where did that come from?

But that's not the big one. Here it comes..

So I did what the OP said, and copied the TexturesHighResolution.pak (whatever) to gamecrysis2. Loaded up cw2_lighthouse, and surely enough -
some of the textures were better.

But since the game usually used up around 975 MB of VRAM, I shouldn't even be able to run it with this patch.
Oh wait what, the VRAM usage with the pack was only around 1016 MB - which is quite normal.

Normal as in, do you really expect textures of a silly 1024x1024 resolution to use up GINOURMOUS amounts of VRAM?

Well yes, they would indeed, if only there wasn't this nice thing called Level Of Detail and MIPMAPS.
And for those that don't know what that would mean, then think about this concept.
Would you use the computing power required to render a 1024x1024 texture, if you can only see about 32 pixels in total of the object from a far distance?

Of course you wouldn't, that would be an extreme waste of power that could be used to render a more complex scene.
So instead, we temporarily render a mipmap of the texture, which is a downscaled version of the texture.

And voila, we gained more VRAM to spare, and more processing power.
All because we, for an example, render out a 128x128 texture instead of a 1024x1024 texture.

Because who would be able to see the difference from such a distance?

Yes, I did download and 'install' the DX11 pack, even though I can't run it. But I can't see where those 600 MB of VRAM are going.
Because surely, it can't be the uber-awesome DX11 features that require 768 MB of VRAM. Because they're grayed out and not active.

Something smells fishy to me!

And I'm also pretty sure that SSDO doesn't use up much VRAM.
As for the other new stuff, as far as I know - the only 'real' VRAM eaters, are textures.

Thus we come to the question once again, where do those 600 MB go?

[/tl;dr]

Not that I have anything against this, mind you.
I'm just pointing out that something smells fishy, and that an explanation would be nice.