![]() ![]() If we presume the majority of these textures are loaded while walking around Whiterun, and if you're already at your video card's memory limit, not only would this prevent stuttering caused by taxed video memory, but it would also leave enough video memory to go from using no AA at all to 8xAA, or enabling SSAO, or using a mod like ENB. DXT5 and DXT1 look the same, DXT1 just doesn't store alpha. ![]() Re-compressing Chris's mod using DTX1 where needed gives us:Ī saving of 125M - and remember no image quality is lost. However for whatever reason, while Chris has saved his textures containing an alpha layer and normalmaps correctly as DXT5, there's a large number of textures without alpha also saved as DXT5 when they can be saved as DXT1 for a significant memory saving. īy default this weighs in at 226M zipped, 487M uncompressed. A high-profile and popular mod (and I don't mean to single you out Chris!) that's done this is Chris2102's Whiterun HQ Texture Pack. Now there are a lot of amazing texture mods on Nexus, but a fair few I've seen so far don't always use the correct texture formats. I've selectively chosen them to keep within my video card's memory limit - 1536MB (Nvidia GTX 580). How important is the correct format? By way of example I'm running a good 30 odd texture mods - some are large replacers (landscape, NPCs, clothing, armour, weapons for example) while others focus on particular areas (objects, architecture etc). And if you're an author, keep in mind that if your mod is too demanding people may elect not to use it - and if you made it to be shared and used, you're losing out from having your work bringing joy to the denizens of Skyrim (read: everyone!) Visual fidelity can be sacrificed in order to stay within the limits of video memory. Users are told to run at a lower resolution, or turn down their AA, to recover performance - but if the problem is a poorly packaged texture mod pushing you past your card's limit, then there may not be a need to do this at all. There may be users playing now with texture mods that don't realise the sudden FPS jumps and stuttering they're experiencing are due to taxed video memory on their cards.īut it's not just performance that takes a hit. When video memory reaches its limit, textures are streamed from main memory causing a huge performance loss. And given Skyrim is already more demanding memory wise than its predecessors, it's more important than ever to keep an eye on memory usage when using texture mods. Unfortunately texture mods, especially large ones, if saved using the wrong format can waste a lot of valuable video memory real estate. However I noticed, delving into the files, that some of them have textures saved in the wrong format, while others often forget mipmaps. There are so many texture mods of all makes and models that have been released so far, some of them fantastic and very professionally made. Disclaimer: I'm not actually a texture artist myself, though I have some limited experience manipulating textures (re: MMM), so those more knowledgeable than me please feel free to chime in! ![]()
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