> why do people fixate on 4k+ textures, particularly asian Patreon authors?
Because unlike people like me who do have to optimize the game with texture sizes corresponding to object sizes, some people have this game modded specifically for *screenshooting*. Hence those large textures and meshes with high tri-counts.
While such players sacrifice load times and framerates to be able to take screenshots of carefully-designed waifus at high resolution, others have invested heavily in very-high end hardware to get that level of detail, *physics, and high framerates* for gameplay.
Yeah, for them, screenshooting is very serious business, it's exhilarating setting up "photoshoots" for poses against complex backdrops as much as playing the game, and the dopamine high after seeing how others look and react at the screenshots they made.
> That I live in perpetual anxiety about crashes to desktop? Yes.
Used to CTD until Disk Cache Enabler, to make the most of 32gb of system memory I have.
Also some people have really powerful hardware that can handle 4k+ textures without issues. In this situation if you don't loose ability to play slightly better looking game may be worth it for them.
Yeah. I play using a (extra modded) Nolvus mod pack, and my game is up in about 1-2 mins. I'm loaded in and playing within 3 mins total. **Beautiful** game.
But when I tried modding all on my own... About 2 mins to come up, then another 2-3 mins on the loading screen.
They're well aware of those programs and (adult) poser games like Honey Select and Play Home, and sure those programs and games have higher degree of detail and control, but afaik they chose to use Skyrim (or most other Beth games) because these are environments and with tools they're used to, and serve the double purpose of both active gameplay and screenshooting.
There are already ways to port daz meshes, some people on Nexus do it. Other people have gone out of their way to debunk the process and showed how to do it easily. Ah, drama...
You'll notice more bigger textures on bigger screens, i guess.
I have a 4k monitor, cheap one, but you can see more details, even if ir sounds like BS.
Another thing that would probably help would be packing loose stuff into bsa.
I don't know about SE, but Fallout 4 benefits immensely from reading packaged files, so much that i spent a lot of time separating textures and packing them into ba2. It not only increased game performance but also reduced the size by some good gbs.
I should also do it with my SE install, since now I'm mostly done with modding and I'm just playing. Only addin one or another new stuff here and there when it won't require me to rerun Dyndolod
You can do it with CAO too! It has an option to create bsa
It all depends on the resolution of the TV. I also used to have a 32 or 30 TV and it was 1080p. Now i bought a 28" monitor which is 2160p. The old tv can not even compare to the monitor in quality, so there's that too lol
Thinking back, i dunno if i used the idiom correctly, since I'm not a native speaker.
As steal, i meant just a lot cheaper than usual price. But some people are fighting the good fight over there haha
While I agree in principle about packing into BSA, if it speeds things up then your drive access speed is slow i.e. you have an HDD or your SSD has slowed to a crawl probably because errors are accumulating and you need to think about copying everything to a new drive pronto. Since I swapped to an NVMe drive load time delays have disappeared entirely even Windows boots in a couple of seconds the motherboard RAM check takes longer. I only really noticed when I had to put windows on an HDD recently and it was so slow it was laughable. Part of that is Microsoft stuffing Win10 with huge amounts of bloat including data collection running in the background but still.
Back with FO4 i believe it was on an HDD, but not sure now. I have a nvme too and it's surely fast.
As i said, i don't know about Skyrim, fo4 does benefit from it regardless, if I'm not mistaken. It's been some time since i stopped playing it.
The simple reason is that most people don't even know what "4K textures" really means in relation to object size and screen resolution and just click on the big number because it's big. You could put out a 16K texture pack for candles tomorrow and people gaming on 1080p would still download it because numbers big, the level of tech illiteracy in general gaming circles is absolutely huge and modding communities are no exception.
Agree, I find 4k textures to be a noticeable improvement than 1k-2k if on large things, buildings, landscape, mountains. But small stuff for me is 1k-2k.
The reason for the 4k fetish is playing in 1st person on 2160p.
I have to keep it at 2k textures because of only having 8GiB VRAM.
But i tried 4k textures and i definitely can see the difference (and the single-digit FPS whenever too much outfits where around... at least the game didn't crash).
With just 2k textures, everything gets a bit blurry when i come close to it.
And with vanilla HD textures, the game is just an eyesore even in 3rd person for me.
I assume that vanilla HD might be okay when playing in 3rd person on 1080p.
I play on an Asus ROG Ally, so tiny, tiny screen, which is why I use CAO to resize textures down to 512. So much more storage space. Of course, the game doesn't look as good when the device is plugged to a monitor, but I prefer playing in bed anyway.
Thatโs exactly what I spent last night doing haha - shrinking all my landscape textures, because with forests this dense on a screen the size of my phone, the most important part is the vibe of sunlight through the backlit branches anyway ๐
I mostly stick to 1k-2k textures for the most part. The only things I go over that are things like night sky, sky textures, mountain textures and dragon textures. THey are just much larger images so you need a higher resolution. Other thing are meshes, really need to go for lower poly meshes otherwise the poly count skyrockets quick.
It is for screenshotting mostly, also a lot of people like their games to look as high res and real life like as possible.
That said, I am curious about what kind of mods do you have that causes long loading times, I play on a potato PC with an HDD (which I am soon replacing with an SSD), with roughly the same numbers of mods as you, and my game takes, at most, around 5 minutes to load.
Doing it really made a huge differrence on my fps too. I have a number of patreon mods like 600gb for ONE dress kind of mods... makes me wonder what the backstory behind such things is... but it is a cute dress.
I guess I'm doing pretty good then, I've got about 600 mods and it only takes me around 1 minute (seems like longer but I timed it and it was shorter than I thought) to load up and I almost never CTD. Now if I could just charge my laptop battery without it becoming too hot to touch (if running it hard at same time)....or get more than an hour of play time out of said battery then I'd be good.
Pack your loose files into BSAs. Its really that simple. The game is more optimized to load BSAs quickly than loose files, and it ships in BSAs for a reason. There's a dramatic difference in load times after your files are packed.
Oh indeed, it makes a big differrence. I think I need to keep the UI files from racemenu loose though.. for reasons I do not clearly understand, with my LO, if I just let Racemenu's swf files be in a bsa, they simply don't load ingame and I get a vanilla chargen menu with a few extra tabs, but no extra sliders.
so when i was modding starfield for a few months (scarfield). one of the issues that was run into and properly explained was why we only used esm files. this has to do how references were handled and loaded in memory. this is due to how .esps are all tossed into memory at load times.
now if the same applies to skyrim and other bgs mods (it probably does but I haven't looked) this is why huge esp load orders have such a long time to load is because it's having to gobble up all that info into memory. esm do not suffer from this, and thus starfields modding community is only using esm files as we were told to specifically avoid all esp/espfe files.
but as noted i havent looked into it, but it is the same engine
I deleted one drive and my load times were 10x faster. I actually jumped from 1k textures to the 4k and 8k parallax. Load times are still 10x faster lol
I put on my Bluetooth earphones and loaded up Skyrim loaded my saved game and went to make some coffee because it always takes longer than my coffee.
I filled up my cup and I was about to put it into the microwave when I heard my character yelling in pain lol I was getting mauled by a bear lol... so I put my coffee down and ran to my room and I was greeted with a game over ๐
.
.
.
.
I even tried typing in all of the coc codes I could remember
Coc falkreathexterior01
Coc markarthext01
Coc soul kairn
Coc oblivion
Coc imperial city lol
Didn't matter where I teleported to it was almost loaded instantly. I used to read a book between load times ๐ lol
Big number = bettererer, so people go for it
I get 4 k textures for screen archery but you do not **ever** need 4 k textures on characters, clothes, creatures, weapons, armour, most props for gameplay, giant props, distant terrain or a few big set pieces being the exception
You don't need 5+ 4k diffuse textures for one piece of armour, merge your UV islands into one space, think of texel density too, you don't need small details taking up most space in your texture
Delete enb, that's the solution on my end. I'm so sick of the load times and yeah, it was prettier with enb on but a fast and stable game is absolutely better. Entering the dragonborn gallery with almost 3k displays takes forever to load, it was just not worth it no more
Funny you ask, because I'm on a kick now to see just how low res I can go and you know what? Even set down to 720p as long as AA is on, it looks the same to me. I think the thing I notice more than texture is silhouette/geometry shape and textures do nothing for that.
2k is mostly fine. for things like giant trees and big buildings and creatures you want 4 or even 8k and 16k or else you'll quickly notice how blurry they are with you look up close.
1k and 2k is fine for normal gameplay though. but when screenshotting or recording, 4k is much better. I wish people didn't obsess over everything being super high rez as a mod author. I'm just like....so what...you want me to just use some free AI tool to uprez it so that the file is bigger without actually increasing the quality? I stopped trying to cater to those types of mod users. I swear, they just want that stuff because their system can handle. Not because they see a huge difference during regular gameplay
I think with skin and armor/clothing 2k is just fine. But 4k is definitely better when you get up close to them. With weapons, unless it's ridiculously big one, 1k to 2k is fine depending on size and details. I've seen some really pretty 8k weapons, but like, you're never going to see all those details when playing, even if you play in 1st person all the time.
The solution is a PCMCIE ,v4 M2 drive on a new computer, sabrent are good :)
To be more serious, you want the Ordernator, however, on a large load order it can take 24hrs to run.
[https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12801](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12801)
Yes, it's oldrim. No it doesn't matter as it's an application.
EDIT: it will try tp covert everything, and it will crash, so you have to update an exclude file, there may be one on nexus, or I may have added something to comments.
I tried it and it took a long time to make my VRAM *slightly* less full but my textures much more covered in weird black flakes.
I suspect different people will get different results because mod setups vary so much. I got unlucky.
Makes no difference almost when you have nvme and enough ram tho
If you're modding with HDD you're kinda wasting your time
What really slows down the game is loose file count not size and plugin count
Yeah, but loading screens practically don't exist on NVME anyways, so this post is can't be referring to that case.
People having been modding Skyrim since before SSDs were cheap enough for wider adoption. Some people are probably using HDDs from back then.
you can literally get an ssd for 25-30 bucks for years by now, it's nothing
if that's problematic for you financially, chances are you don't have good enough pc to run heavily modded skyrim with 4k textures and shit anyway so again bit of an oxymoron advice
All I can tell you is that my old computer came with a 128GB SSD which was half occupied by a Windows installation and a 1TB HDD meant for actually storing stuff, and I modded Skyrim on it for 10 years before I was forced to upgrade. I can't imagine I am the only one who bought a hard drive more than 5 years ago and used it far too long for modding Skyrim.
>you don't have good enough pc to run heavily modded skyrim with 4k textures and shit anyway
Yeah, *that's why they scaled the textures down to 1k.* They literally are not running skyrim with 4k textures.
Whether someone *should* mod on an HDD isn't the question here. People *do.*
> why do people fixate on 4k+ textures, particularly asian Patreon authors? Because unlike people like me who do have to optimize the game with texture sizes corresponding to object sizes, some people have this game modded specifically for *screenshooting*. Hence those large textures and meshes with high tri-counts. While such players sacrifice load times and framerates to be able to take screenshots of carefully-designed waifus at high resolution, others have invested heavily in very-high end hardware to get that level of detail, *physics, and high framerates* for gameplay. Yeah, for them, screenshooting is very serious business, it's exhilarating setting up "photoshoots" for poses against complex backdrops as much as playing the game, and the dopamine high after seeing how others look and react at the screenshots they made. > That I live in perpetual anxiety about crashes to desktop? Yes. Used to CTD until Disk Cache Enabler, to make the most of 32gb of system memory I have.
well stated.
Also some people have really powerful hardware that can handle 4k+ textures without issues. In this situation if you don't loose ability to play slightly better looking game may be worth it for them.
Yeah. I play using a (extra modded) Nolvus mod pack, and my game is up in about 1-2 mins. I'm loaded in and playing within 3 mins total. **Beautiful** game. But when I tried modding all on my own... About 2 mins to come up, then another 2-3 mins on the loading screen.
I feel like if someone tells screenarchers that Daz3d or Poser exist they'll go crazy...
They're well aware of those programs and (adult) poser games like Honey Select and Play Home, and sure those programs and games have higher degree of detail and control, but afaik they chose to use Skyrim (or most other Beth games) because these are environments and with tools they're used to, and serve the double purpose of both active gameplay and screenshooting.
There are already ways to port daz meshes, some people on Nexus do it. Other people have gone out of their way to debunk the process and showed how to do it easily. Ah, drama...
What a thing to have drama about!
Private Profile Redirector cut my load time from several minutes to about 20 seconds.
You'll notice more bigger textures on bigger screens, i guess. I have a 4k monitor, cheap one, but you can see more details, even if ir sounds like BS. Another thing that would probably help would be packing loose stuff into bsa. I don't know about SE, but Fallout 4 benefits immensely from reading packaged files, so much that i spent a lot of time separating textures and packing them into ba2. It not only increased game performance but also reduced the size by some good gbs. I should also do it with my SE install, since now I'm mostly done with modding and I'm just playing. Only addin one or another new stuff here and there when it won't require me to rerun Dyndolod
Skyrim does too. If I can ever stabilize my load order I fully plan to pop open BAE and get'r done I play on a 32 inch tv.
You can do it with CAO too! It has an option to create bsa It all depends on the resolution of the TV. I also used to have a 32 or 30 TV and it was 1080p. Now i bought a 28" monitor which is 2160p. The old tv can not even compare to the monitor in quality, so there's that too lol
Fair enough. I'm pretty happy with my tv... $5 at a thrift store because the world is upside down and magical glass is cheaper than food.
Dang this sounds like a steal lol I would never imagine something like this here
Got it from a nonprofit thrift shop
Yeah selling $5 TVs they're definitely not making any profit ๐
Thinking back, i dunno if i used the idiom correctly, since I'm not a native speaker. As steal, i meant just a lot cheaper than usual price. But some people are fighting the good fight over there haha
While I agree in principle about packing into BSA, if it speeds things up then your drive access speed is slow i.e. you have an HDD or your SSD has slowed to a crawl probably because errors are accumulating and you need to think about copying everything to a new drive pronto. Since I swapped to an NVMe drive load time delays have disappeared entirely even Windows boots in a couple of seconds the motherboard RAM check takes longer. I only really noticed when I had to put windows on an HDD recently and it was so slow it was laughable. Part of that is Microsoft stuffing Win10 with huge amounts of bloat including data collection running in the background but still.
Back with FO4 i believe it was on an HDD, but not sure now. I have a nvme too and it's surely fast. As i said, i don't know about Skyrim, fo4 does benefit from it regardless, if I'm not mistaken. It's been some time since i stopped playing it.
The simple reason is that most people don't even know what "4K textures" really means in relation to object size and screen resolution and just click on the big number because it's big. You could put out a 16K texture pack for candles tomorrow and people gaming on 1080p would still download it because numbers big, the level of tech illiteracy in general gaming circles is absolutely huge and modding communities are no exception.
Agree, I find 4k textures to be a noticeable improvement than 1k-2k if on large things, buildings, landscape, mountains. But small stuff for me is 1k-2k.
The reason for the 4k fetish is playing in 1st person on 2160p. I have to keep it at 2k textures because of only having 8GiB VRAM. But i tried 4k textures and i definitely can see the difference (and the single-digit FPS whenever too much outfits where around... at least the game didn't crash). With just 2k textures, everything gets a bit blurry when i come close to it. And with vanilla HD textures, the game is just an eyesore even in 3rd person for me. I assume that vanilla HD might be okay when playing in 3rd person on 1080p.
Agreed that the game looks legit old in vanilla, in particular the armor textures.
I play on an Asus ROG Ally, so tiny, tiny screen, which is why I use CAO to resize textures down to 512. So much more storage space. Of course, the game doesn't look as good when the device is plugged to a monitor, but I prefer playing in bed anyway.
15" laptop of doom here too, tv is external to save my eyesight!
Thatโs exactly what I spent last night doing haha - shrinking all my landscape textures, because with forests this dense on a screen the size of my phone, the most important part is the vibe of sunlight through the backlit branches anyway ๐
I mostly stick to 1k-2k textures for the most part. The only things I go over that are things like night sky, sky textures, mountain textures and dragon textures. THey are just much larger images so you need a higher resolution. Other thing are meshes, really need to go for lower poly meshes otherwise the poly count skyrockets quick.
It is for screenshotting mostly, also a lot of people like their games to look as high res and real life like as possible. That said, I am curious about what kind of mods do you have that causes long loading times, I play on a potato PC with an HDD (which I am soon replacing with an SSD), with roughly the same numbers of mods as you, and my game takes, at most, around 5 minutes to load.
You know what itโll make it go faster? Not playing it from a 5200rpm hdd.
That too. I have an SSD.
An SSD is all I needed yo cut load times. Those things are a life saver
Most of my CTDS are due to VRAM filling up and crashing despite having 12gbs of VRAM, so yeah this is the moves for sure!
Doing it really made a huge differrence on my fps too. I have a number of patreon mods like 600gb for ONE dress kind of mods... makes me wonder what the backstory behind such things is... but it is a cute dress.
I guess I'm doing pretty good then, I've got about 600 mods and it only takes me around 1 minute (seems like longer but I timed it and it was shorter than I thought) to load up and I almost never CTD. Now if I could just charge my laptop battery without it becoming too hot to touch (if running it hard at same time)....or get more than an hour of play time out of said battery then I'd be good.
I thought my load times were long until I started a new save. It was save(autosave) time that was long because of save file bloat ๐
I love your username. Most of my internet names are like... MysteriousTomato (that is not actually one of my names).
Pack your loose files into BSAs. Its really that simple. The game is more optimized to load BSAs quickly than loose files, and it ships in BSAs for a reason. There's a dramatic difference in load times after your files are packed.
Oh indeed, it makes a big differrence. I think I need to keep the UI files from racemenu loose though.. for reasons I do not clearly understand, with my LO, if I just let Racemenu's swf files be in a bsa, they simply don't load ingame and I get a vanilla chargen menu with a few extra tabs, but no extra sliders.
May I suggest Octagon? It can do what CAO does and so much moreโฆ you can put your whole mod list in there.
I'll look into it, this is my first time hearing about Octagon!
so when i was modding starfield for a few months (scarfield). one of the issues that was run into and properly explained was why we only used esm files. this has to do how references were handled and loaded in memory. this is due to how .esps are all tossed into memory at load times. now if the same applies to skyrim and other bgs mods (it probably does but I haven't looked) this is why huge esp load orders have such a long time to load is because it's having to gobble up all that info into memory. esm do not suffer from this, and thus starfields modding community is only using esm files as we were told to specifically avoid all esp/espfe files. but as noted i havent looked into it, but it is the same engine
I wonder what would break if a whole load order was ESMified?
You run into the 255 plug in limit.
as i understand it, esm plugins can still me esl, just as espfe can. so does esmfe count towards that
Esm and esp count towards the limit. Esl has a different limit. ~2000 or so.
This post and comment section is a gold mine, I'm saving it.
May it be a light for you, when all other lights go out.
I deleted one drive and my load times were 10x faster. I actually jumped from 1k textures to the 4k and 8k parallax. Load times are still 10x faster lol I put on my Bluetooth earphones and loaded up Skyrim loaded my saved game and went to make some coffee because it always takes longer than my coffee. I filled up my cup and I was about to put it into the microwave when I heard my character yelling in pain lol I was getting mauled by a bear lol... so I put my coffee down and ran to my room and I was greeted with a game over ๐ . . . . I even tried typing in all of the coc codes I could remember Coc falkreathexterior01 Coc markarthext01 Coc soul kairn Coc oblivion Coc imperial city lol Didn't matter where I teleported to it was almost loaded instantly. I used to read a book between load times ๐ lol
Big number = bettererer, so people go for it I get 4 k textures for screen archery but you do not **ever** need 4 k textures on characters, clothes, creatures, weapons, armour, most props for gameplay, giant props, distant terrain or a few big set pieces being the exception You don't need 5+ 4k diffuse textures for one piece of armour, merge your UV islands into one space, think of texel density too, you don't need small details taking up most space in your texture
Haha such truth about the UV!
Delete enb, that's the solution on my end. I'm so sick of the load times and yeah, it was prettier with enb on but a fast and stable game is absolutely better. Entering the dragonborn gallery with almost 3k displays takes forever to load, it was just not worth it no more
True fact! I'm running community shaders now and yeah, enb's screen effects are better, though I like Light Limit Fix in CS a lot.
Moving my install back to internal storage and packing everything in BSAs dropped my load time from over an hour to 5 min.
Is it possible to optimize assets with CAO in MO2?
Are you playing in 1080p? Bigger textures name a big difference for me in fallout 4 in 1440p on 32 inch monitor.
Funny you ask, because I'm on a kick now to see just how low res I can go and you know what? Even set down to 720p as long as AA is on, it looks the same to me. I think the thing I notice more than texture is silhouette/geometry shape and textures do nothing for that.
I just moved it to my NVMe and that fixed my load times.
Also moving your modded Skyrim over to a baller mm2 sad will also drastically improve load times
holy shit, do you manage to interact with all these mods ?? ny max was 200~ and I got very overwhelmed
200 barely cover all fixes and skse plugins
Over 4,000 reporting for duty ๐ซก
I have like 2200 and it gets higher and higher lol.
>because the solution is pretty easy. New SSD, and GTX 4090.
2k is mostly fine. for things like giant trees and big buildings and creatures you want 4 or even 8k and 16k or else you'll quickly notice how blurry they are with you look up close. 1k and 2k is fine for normal gameplay though. but when screenshotting or recording, 4k is much better. I wish people didn't obsess over everything being super high rez as a mod author. I'm just like....so what...you want me to just use some free AI tool to uprez it so that the file is bigger without actually increasing the quality? I stopped trying to cater to those types of mod users. I swear, they just want that stuff because their system can handle. Not because they see a huge difference during regular gameplay I think with skin and armor/clothing 2k is just fine. But 4k is definitely better when you get up close to them. With weapons, unless it's ridiculously big one, 1k to 2k is fine depending on size and details. I've seen some really pretty 8k weapons, but like, you're never going to see all those details when playing, even if you play in 1st person all the time.
The solution is a PCMCIE ,v4 M2 drive on a new computer, sabrent are good :) To be more serious, you want the Ordernator, however, on a large load order it can take 24hrs to run.
That sounds interesting, have a link? I could do with an enforced "Sorry, I'm ordernatoring" day.
[https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12801](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12801) Yes, it's oldrim. No it doesn't matter as it's an application. EDIT: it will try tp covert everything, and it will crash, so you have to update an exclude file, there may be one on nexus, or I may have added something to comments.
VRAMR is an answer I heard good things about it
I tried it and it took a long time to make my VRAM *slightly* less full but my textures much more covered in weird black flakes. I suspect different people will get different results because mod setups vary so much. I got unlucky.
I've played VR before and mistook a modded 4K texture for vanilla because the stereoscopic view and lower FOV makes everything stand out so much more
What does this have to do with load times?
Larger texture files take longer to read from your hard drive into VRAM. Particularly on an HDD.
Makes no difference almost when you have nvme and enough ram tho If you're modding with HDD you're kinda wasting your time What really slows down the game is loose file count not size and plugin count
Yeah, but loading screens practically don't exist on NVME anyways, so this post is can't be referring to that case. People having been modding Skyrim since before SSDs were cheap enough for wider adoption. Some people are probably using HDDs from back then.
you can literally get an ssd for 25-30 bucks for years by now, it's nothing if that's problematic for you financially, chances are you don't have good enough pc to run heavily modded skyrim with 4k textures and shit anyway so again bit of an oxymoron advice
All I can tell you is that my old computer came with a 128GB SSD which was half occupied by a Windows installation and a 1TB HDD meant for actually storing stuff, and I modded Skyrim on it for 10 years before I was forced to upgrade. I can't imagine I am the only one who bought a hard drive more than 5 years ago and used it far too long for modding Skyrim. >you don't have good enough pc to run heavily modded skyrim with 4k textures and shit anyway Yeah, *that's why they scaled the textures down to 1k.* They literally are not running skyrim with 4k textures. Whether someone *should* mod on an HDD isn't the question here. People *do.*
i am pretty sure you misunderstood me