No way. Torn doesn't hold up at all to the degree of graphical quality achieved at HL1's apex precisely because its authors made no attempt to budget texture sizes.
In fact, now that I think about it, I'd attribute most of the graphical improvements made in HL1 before the release of its successor to better textures and an increased knowledge of how the engine handled them. Towards the end, map models and the Tron glow definately played a part in improving graphics, along with advances in brushwork techniques (e.g. triangle terrain, usage of NULL and SKY, etc.), but 'discoveries' in texturing like finding out that the engine cuts polygons at 240 rather than 256 square units, that too many transparent textures kill the engine, that it deals best with texture dimensions that are powers of two and preferably as small as possible, that additive textures are best for windows, that textures can effectively replace minute brushwork, and (though maybe only my fellow texture artists will appreciate this) the evolution of texturing towards a mix of photorealism for raw materials and defined, almost cartoonish line for details were what ultimately took HL1 from They Hunger to DOD_Stuka.
