I prefer the originals in that instance. Although to be honest it's a really terrible texture in general. I used to map for Unreal and it's one of the worst textures in the game. 

Note: I DO have the original game somewhere, but the current install is from a torrent, so it's the compressed vanilla textures in the screenshot rather than the uncompressed ones that also come with the game IIRC. So they might look better - can't say. 

Also, I do see your point, Kinn, and I agree with you regarding certain textures, but some of the replacers are quite good - and the ones in the screens are one example IMO. 

i feel they are both shit.

is there a way to run unreal with nearest neighbour instead of linear/bilinear filtering? 

Yes there is. Press TAB to get the command line up and type in "preferences" and it will bring up an advanced menu where you can make all kinds of tweaks. Here you should be able to disable filtering on textures (amongst a shit load of other things). 

let me know if you find a way to use different texture filtering settings for the lightmaps vs other textures. 

equating "high res" with "good" without qualification or exception is a disease 

in that shot, the original textures arent exactly great to start off with and I would tend to agree the replacement is as 'good' if not better.

It's certainly very different to some of the quake hi res textures that get shown. 

pretty sure Unreal was not meant to be run without texture filtering, mainly because the 'detail texture' setting meant that you dont get the blurriness when up close. 

Look fine, or even good in that shot. I mean at least they have a bit of shading, and a bit of detail (scratches, chips in the rock). The replacements look like "noise filter; draw some black lines".