im not sure whats mipmapping doing, i think its generating uglier textures, to use when it decides so
probably it uses distance to decide but in my case it judged poorly and it showed really ugly textures right next to my character instead of original resolution
i disabled it completely but maybe theres any use of it? why would it make nearby textures lower resolution? thats nonsense, but id understand it if it did the same only to textures that are very far away
Yes, mipmapping is explicitly texture LOD. Main purpose is to avoid aliasing, but also can have significant performance advantages. Mip mapping uses a pyramid of prefiltered images, with each mip level being half the dimensions of the previous mip, down to 1x1.
It does also mean that on ground or wall surfaces viewed from the side the texture resolution drops significantly. Which is what anisotropic filtering is for. Instead of disabling mip maps, try setting the aniso level on problematic textures to 16, or force anisotropic filtering on in the quality settings.