JeanLuc761 wrote...
So far, the performance hit has been minimal, maybe a loss of 5fps at worst. I'll keep everyone updated as I add more and more characters. The game does take substantially longer to load (we're talking 4096x4096 textures here), but once it's loaded into RAM I don't notice any problems.
If I might make a suggestion:
4096x4096 is excessive when compared to the sacrifice you make in terms of overall performance, and I'm not talking about framerate. The larger your textures, the more hard drive and video meory thrashing will occur. With huge textures constantly swapping in and out of memory, and being read off the hard drive, you could potentially suffer from a lot of stuttering, long loading times, and generally poor performance.
I am a long-time Fallout 3 player with plenty of experience with texture mods. I have downloaded many 4096x4096 textures, and even some 8192x8192 ones, but have none of those anymore. Why? Because with huge textures, even my HD5850 would sit idle, waiting for the textures to load, resulting in low GPU usage and low framerate. The ones that were 4096x4096 or larger I either replaced or shrunk them myself, because Fallout 3 uses .dds files, which are very simple (for someone like me) to edit.
However, I have little experience with .tpf files and (correct me if I'm wrong) it is my understanding that once TexMod creates a .tpf file it can no longer be modified. This is why I am asking you to shrink the textures down to 1024x1024.
Here is my reasoning. It's a rather long post, so I'll quote the most relevant paragraphs:
Fallout 3 was designed for 8000 series cards an above on max settings. So with all the added chaos from the hours of hard work we all spent building stuff. I can't say it ever ran as smooth as it should. So over the last year I kept looking for performance.
You can't resize a picture up an keep the detail, but you can shrink it an it looks even more sharp in most cases with pictures, the same is true for our fallout textures, more so for the large an very large textures. We kind of went the wrong way. Take the 1stperson10mmpistol.dds texture map. It's 1024X1024, and only looks about an order of magnatude better than teh 512X512 map, which I like to call the poop map. Normally what would happen is we would rename that 1024X1024 texture so that it's just 10mmpistol.dds or whatever, then change the mesh to use it from now on, an upload it.
We went the wrong way of thinking though, I can't say anything because I did it too for like 8 months. What we should have done though, is take the 1024X1024 high res 1stperson texture, then open it with Paintnet, just because it's fast an easy to use, an what I have. Then resize that 1024X1024 texture down in steps, Size it down in best quality supersampling, which will save around 95% to 99% of the detail. Then save that shrinked map, in DXT-1 (highest compression) Which to the video card it's the same exact image. DXT-1 ignores the alpha channel (transparent), but most of the fallout 3 textures don't have alpha anyway, the only places you see alpha is like the radio, or the hairs on the back of the cows, (I'll never really even notice it) So you could in fact DXT-1 those too, an then they wouldn't look so nice, which is the whole point of falout, it's wasteland anyway. 1024X1024, keep the ratio, test it at half size an if it still looks okay you might could half it again if it's a small item or if the map is really huge.
But before you can shrink it, you still need the large texture, so it's not like a waste. Without the huge textures, I couldn't make the tiny ones, that look just as good, but run 10 times better.
"THE ONLY REASON THIS WORKS IS BECAUSE I SET MY PAINTNET PIXELS PER INCH TO 96, WHICH IS WHERE I TEXTURE AT ON .DDS"
So long as the other programs can set your actual res from the pixels per inch then it should work, 4096X4096 @ 96 pixels per inch looks just like 1024X1024 @ 96 pixels per inch, but that's what my monitor runs. Who knows what yall use. I found 96 somewhere I think, an set it there. I don't even really know what it should be, that's just what I use.
Resizeing the 1024X1024, would keep all the detail, as far as looking at the texture in nifscope as a 3D preview, in the game you probably wouldn't be able to tell either, but the raw file size would be half, if it were 600Kb, then the resize would bring it down to around 150Kb, then the DXT-1 would probably half that as well. So now it's a tiny file. Now scale that up to the kind of maps that we make rather than bethesda. 2048X2048 maps, 4096X4096, I found one which was 16Mb in size, just for a rifle, which only ever takes up a few hundred pixels. Anything over 1024X1024 is a waste. Hats with 2048X2048 on the screen. textures, or ammo boxes with 2048X2048, these small items you can shrink the texture even further. 256X256 128X128, keep a back up an check them in 3D, if you can't tell then you did good.
You can shrink a 4096X4096 map down to 1024X1024 an you'll flip out at how much it looks like the 4096X4096, but the kicker is that it's now 1/8 the size thanks to DXT-1, yeah not 1/4 like you would think. They're tiny.
I will mention, since I don't know what you know of Fallout 3, that the game's Gamebryo engine is one of the more notorious ones out there. It's badly optimized, does not properly utilize multi-core CPUs, and prone to crashes and decreasing performance as the game progresses, whereas the Unreal engine is much better and may not suffer as much from such larger textures. Still, I hope you will take my suggestion into consideration. Alternatively, just tell me how to modify a .tpf file and I'll be happy to do it myself.
Modifié par Alistair 3-921, 30 mai 2011 - 11:35 .
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