Just learned about the upcoming graphics/shader improvement in 7.0! Very exciting!
Textures alone are a big improvement - I'm hoping they're well optimized/compressed, b/c I'm sitting on almost 200gb of upscaled textures, and still suffering at seeing absolute pixel-hell eyesores in this game.
Sadly, seems to only be for player characters first, NPCs coming in 7.X (so, y'know, just before 8.0 ^-^;). There IS mention of world texture improvements, AND optimizations (since they're trying hard to keep the PS4 version up to snuff.) I guess that explains the textures, actually - running this on the PS4 would be a lot.
Better lighting - more in-world points, better shaders, etc. Increased shadow res (not a big difference for plugin users, ofc) a big win, actual metal textures, and even more world clutter! Exactly what's needed overall - not changing the style (like WoW did somewhat with its character model update), but bringing up the quality.
That'll also leave much more room for upscalers to mod the textures they don't get to, which will also be a huge boon. The whole game will jump in visual quality without losing its charm.
Very keen!