It's amazing what textures with shader can do to make a game look better (referring to the Link pictures, which are amazing). I own Star Wars: Empire at War, its a RTS with a huge graphical load due to all the particles; since my laptop has only 1 Gig of RAM it can't run the game at max quality.
In the options menu there is "detail" and "shader" sliders that can be set high, medium, or low. I can only set one on high or else the game gets choppy, naturally I had always set the "detail" to high and left shader at low. One day by accident I switched the two settings, went for high shader and low detail... It was amazing, everything looked so much more realistic and, just better.
Conclusion: Upping the levels of shade on a character increases "realistic" appearance without putting much strain on the processor. My guess is doubling the shade doubles the quality of the image, while doubling the texture increase quality by ~50%, and increasing textures are much more demanding on the CPU
