Indeed, nice effects.
The only purpose of the classfiles shipped with this mod is the visibility distance.
Visibility distance is directly connected to the frame rates achieved: The higher the visibility distance, the lower the frame rates.
For those playing with VSync enabled, the "sweet spot" obviously is where the frame rates are steady at the monitor's sync rate, which is 60FPS for the most.
But beware: Crowded missions, populated areas (cities), huge fleets (smoke!) etc. let your framerates drop so they can easily end up significantly below that "sweet spot" again.
The game's default values for visibility distance compared to the ones of this mod are:
Value... Distance (km) --> Stock Mod
MaxVisualDistance 5 35
MaxStaticVisualDistance 4 25
MaxLongVisualDistance 10 50
MaxPlateVisualDistance 16 30
Maybe it would make more sense to make these settings user-configurable, e.g. from conf.ini "[Mods]" section.
Best regards - Mike