When comparing Active Texture Management vs Environmental Visual Enhancements, the Slant community recommends Environmental Visual Enhancements for most people. In the question“What are the best Kerbal Space Program mods?” Environmental Visual Enhancements is ranked 2nd while Active Texture Management is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Environmental Visual Enhancements is:
Adds city lights for Kerbin and adds clouds and better atmospheres to planets.
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Pros
Pro Reduces texture memory use, including mod textures
All textures can be compressed & resized to save RAM. There are two modes of compression - basic and aggressive. Both compress to DXT and generate minimaps for all non-normal map textures, with aggressive mode having a max of 256x256 and basic mode having a max of 512x512 size for normal maps that it resizes to half the size.
Pro Can save vast amounts of space
In some cases up to 50% of space is saved.
Pro Aggressive mode eliminates the need for texture reduction packs for mods
Active Texture Management will optimize all textures to use less memory so there's no need to use separate texture reduction packs for each mod. It you choose to use texture reduction packs regardless, you might need to edit the config file at:
BoulderCo/textureCompressorConfigs/textureCompressor.tcfg
Pro Prettifies the game
Adds city lights for Kerbin and adds clouds and better atmospheres to planets.
Pro Allows choosing only the wanted enhancements and skipping others
All unwanted plugins can be deleted from:
GameData/EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements/Plugins
Cons
Con Extremely outdated and unsupported as of 2021
Most mods use .dds texture format which ATM doesn't work for, and the plugin hasn't been updated to recent versions of Unity.
Con ATM becomes ineffective as most mods texture file use .dds format
Con Slight increase in initial game load time
Con Adding more system memory might be a better option now that KSP support 64 bit
Con 8K textures don't work on Macs
Macs need to use low resolution textures.