Great little explanation, hopefully it'll clear things up a bit for the average user. While yes, it's not the most in-depth detailed rundown of textures in games, it serves a more practical purpose and is easily applicable knowledge. Good on you, Flacon, and here's hoping you keep updating your Complete Retexture Project, as it's a mainstay in my game and I'm sure many others'. :)
It depends on two factors: object size and how often you are close to the object. In case of walls, buildings, mountains and terrain in general these should have 4K textures because they are big, low res textures will be stretched to match the size of the 3D model which will result in loss of detail. Same thing with 3D models that you often see up close, say characters, clothes. Weapons perhaps since they're the closest thing to the camera most of the time in first person. However in case of weapons, they're smaller in size, they're not taking a huge portion of the screen. That means although they're very close, they're small enough that the 2K textures are actually good enough for 1440p. As for small items, like junk, food, ammo, chems, etc, you really should avoid 4K textures, 2K even. 1K is good enough. Because they're very small in comparison to other things. And they're scattered all over the world, so that would have a big impact on performance and VRAM usage. It's simply not smart to have 4K (or 2K) textures in this case. So you see, you have to consider these two factors when deciding.
I know this mod post is years old, and that allot of people don't see it anymore, but I have one more thing to add about higher res textures. Each step up you take in textures size, not only give you higher res look in game, but as FlaconOil said, it gobbles more VRAM, But it also takes longer to load those higher res textures. Let take a hypothetical measurement of time. Lets say that a 1k texture takes 0.25 seconds to load into VRAM, that is 1/4 of a second. I am sure its allot faster, but bare with me here. Then a 2k texture is going to 1 whole second to load, as its 4 times the size of the 1k. So that means a 4k texture will then take 4 seconds to load. Again, these are guess-estimates and not real world. But the fact of the matter is, the more 4k textures that you use, each of them is taking 4 times longer to load into the game than a 2k texture does.
The other measurement of all of this is a little known spec of video cards. Its the Memory Bandwidth of the card, the higher the memory bandwidth, the faster it can load any given texture of any given size. The memory bandwidth is also tied to the size of the memory bus. So here is where things get more complex, all of your high end video cards use a 256 bit or larger memory bus, this is the fastest you can get. I believe the highest memory bus was nearly 780 bit, and a very high end Nvidia card, but don't quote me on it. So what does this mean, well, the next step down is the 192bit memory bus, this the one used on most upper midrange cards, the GTX 1060 has 192 bit wide memory bus, which results in 192.19 GB/s memory bandwidth. While a GTX 1070 has 256-bit memory bus, which results in 256 GB/s. Of course these number will depend on how fast your cards memory chips are running. Lower tier cards get smaller buses. The GTX 1050 gets a 128 bit bus, and hence get about 128Gbs of bandwidth. The lower the bus speed, and the more high res textures you are pushing through it, the slower the game is going to respond, in framerate and loading times of those textures in items in the games world. So, as a rule, if you are using a higher end card, by all means use 2k and some 4k textures. As a rule, I personally go for high-res 4k textures on things like vegetation, like plants, grass, bushes, and trees. You get close to these in game, and it really breaks my "immersion", you knew that was coming, when the textures break down and look blurry because you are hiding in the bushes. Things like rocks, cars ,and other things that you can take cover behind also may be candidates. Clothing is another one, as in games like Fallout and Skyrim you are seeing your hands and clothes in first person all the time. there is nothing worse then your clothes or armors looking all blurry. But for most in world objects, 2k is more then enough. Those using mid-range and lower range video cards, should max out with some 2k textures, and stick to 1k. Just some of my thoughts on the matter.
Cela faisait bien longtemps que je n'étais pas venu par ici ^^
Merci beaucoup pour ces explications très claires, c'est parfaitement bien expliqué et très résumé en plus, un petit guide à conseiller pour beaucoup de joueurs.
Ma nouvelle installation est prête, il me tarde de réinstaller tous mes modes dont mes préférés graphiquement parlant et dont les tiens font parti du top 3 !! Bravo pour ton investissement et à très bientôt ! ;-)
Yes, the ideal texture resolution depends on the resolution of the monitor/TV, how large the screen is (you can use smaller textures of a cell phone for instance), and how large the texture object is ingame (nails, coins, rope, hypodermics, bullets, wallets, etc only occupy a small portion of the screen). Also, it is more important to have larger diffuse textures than other texture types; sometimes mods are released with normal maps at half the resolution of the diffuse (in NeilMc's Texture Pack for Fallout 3/Vegas, the bump maps were one quarter the size of the diffuse textures; in 32 bit pre-DirectX11 engines crashes from memory overruns happen if you use larger size textures than in the vanilla game).
Sometimes I downsize certain textures from a mod if all of the included textures are the same resolution (eg 2K boots, helmets, gloves in Skyrim get dropped to 1k). There are programs to automate the downsizing, but I get better results doing it on Photoshop and applying filtering like edge sharpening and highpass sharpening to bring out the details in the downsized textures (you can Automate the process in Photoshop, but best results are achieved by processing each individually to find the best settings. Newer Photoshop versions have better resizing algorithms.
Sigh... You can not just go and compare screen resolution to texture resolution, coming up with some pseudo mathematical formulas to tell people what textures to use for specific resolutions. God damn it, you're doing one of the things I hate absolutely the most, which is having little to zero scientific knowledge on the subject, at the same time educating people.
One could make a 16x16 pixels texture and make it look super sharp on 4k screen. It's all about UV mapping and tilling. That's why technically speaking, textures are not made out of pixels, but texels. Sharpness, and the amount of details of the texture have nothing to do with screen resolution. There's no science behind it, you either install as high resolution texture as you can, to get the most of you powerful system, or install lower res if you have low amount of VRAM and slow bandwith from CPU\RAM\GPU\Data Drive - AKA, slow PC in general.
madre mia.... It's a Nexus page here, not a scientist one . Yes there's texels, yes there's differences between textures and screen, yes you can add sooo much mathematical formulas.... I could write 400page book if you want allll the details but it's not at all the purpose here. (that's why i added pictures). And if you could just compare what can be please, cause here i talk about a unique mesh 4K wall texture and another Nuka machine 1K, which cannot be tiled. Texel density insn't eligible here.
This is posted on a Nexus page (not scientifical one), for people who do not understand these things and need a comprehensive answer. I wroted it because a Nexus user, who installed my mod, asked me to write this and i did.
And yes, i know there will be an hundred of guys like you who will found this "mod" page and run to post and post again about "heyy dammit, you do not know everything abouuuuut"
PS : If you're able to texture a Nuka cola vending machine with a 16pixels tiled texture, explain me how-to please.
The explanation is unneccesary actually, it's all about what your machine can handle, and how much pixel space you assign from the UV to the mesh, if you have a large mesh you want some high res texies on it to preserve the same detail as a small mesh with a small texture.
I'm sure you both understand that and a lot of people using your mods don't, but the easiest way to let people know what resolution pack to choose from is to put some system requirements on your files, like for 4K textures you want a 4K monitor and vidcard with atleast 8GB RAM, and a i7 CPU (or Ryzen), in the end it's all about VRAM and GPU/CPU that dictates how much you can handle at one given time.
If you realize that this engine is ancient and has a very bad (high drawcall) shadow shaders and the fact that it is a open world game, you can be sure that 4K textures for big objects and smaller textures for smaller objects already wil tax the most powerful system, so in effect, 4K is ludicrous, you can only use it for large objects from which the UV's are layed out badly, PC's simply aren't fast enough to play a game like Fallout with all 4K textures.
Also, the texture quality of the base game is like poop, if you use the same resolution, but better source materials for your textures, the game will look 100x better then with Beth's textures, even when they utilize the same res textures. I'm guessing they made the textures in a hurry, a lot of stuff looks like beginners textures and models, as it has always done with any gamebryo Beth game, they're just not that good, so retxing in the original resolution wil in many cases be enough..
I do like your textures by the way, they're the most decent ones on the entire FO4 nexus.
Sure @printerkop , i already added a "description" of low, middle and high end computer on my mod page to help people understand what they need from my mod.
You're totally right about badly maded 3d meshse are. UV's space are very very non accurate, most of the time it's less than 50% use of the space.... I already thinked about making new UV unwrapping, but it's realllly time consuming in addition to all the work needed for a mod like this (and for one person). The other problem about this is that if i unwrap UV again, so i need to add new Nif files into my mod and so new meshes will not be compatible with vanilla and other mods. And that's what i don't want.
Anyway and also, thank you for your support and words
I know, doing the UV anew is not so much work since programs like 3D-Coat, but it's reimporting those obj files back into the nif files that's a crazy amount of work sadly, otherwise i would have probably done that already, but it's simply too much work to do for fun..
The UV mapping and tilling is the same .dds textures. Commonly, normal_maps (thig that doing magic with bumps) is the same resolution as the diffusion_map or one ^2 less. Yes, you can make 16px d_map with 4k px n_map, this texture will be sharp for bumping, bat totally blurry s#*! on diffusion details. What a point?
FlaconOil try to explain: You have no needs to user extra large textures, if you are playing on low resolution, cos effect of this texture you will see only macro-zooming on objects. 4k texture is useful for texturing large objects, like terrain or big buildings. For small object or clutters it's useless. And if you playing on 1024x768, it's no differences 1k 2k or 4k textures (talking about image quality not a performance).
MaxG3D FlaconOil created what is basically the biggest, most comprehensive, and in my opinion best texture pack on the nexus. I think he knows a thing or two about textures.
Just wanted to say thanks for the explanation. It was helpful in explaining the differences and the reasons why we needed the differences. Ignore the wags. You did good
I think using 2k textures instead of 4k maybe will not increase your fps with that GPU but it will certainly help with loading times and stuttering if you have any. But as this guide said, if you have a 1080ti you are probably playing at a 4k screen so you need bigger textures if you want to have clear view.
Interesting, I do get stutters occasionally when loading new cells. I wouldn't call it common but it does occur, I play on a 3440x1440 monitor and if I can eliminate or reduce the stutters I would gladly use lower res textures. The 2k textures look good already
So I tested it and gained about 5fps on average but I did notice my stutter reduce slightly. It's almost as if the stutters happen faster ? I can only see a difference up close so I think I'll stick with the performance version
If you want to reduce stuttering, use the BA2 version, BA2 is an optimized format that will decrease your loadtimes and stuttering as well as save you some SSD/HDD space as a bonus. You can read why BA2 is better than loose files over here and also here (Point 4.Addendum: BSA Compression), the second link is for BSAs but the same remains true for BA2 files, with BA2 files having the added bonus of the first link.
The only thing you have to keep in mind is that files in a BA2 archive get overwritten by loose files (only the ones conflicting, all the others are loaded just fine ofc). So if you have lots of overlapping mods it is advisable to delete the overlapping files you don't want, or put all your conflicting texture mods into BA2s and determine their load order through your ESPs, since the loadorder of ESPs determines the conflict winner of two or more BA2 archives (basically like ESPs).
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If you read, your eyes will burn ! ahah
Edit : I edit the Main page to be more comprehensive about why i wrote it this way
Good on you, Flacon, and here's hoping you keep updating your Complete Retexture Project, as it's a mainstay in my game and I'm sure many others'. :)
Same thing with 3D models that you often see up close, say characters, clothes. Weapons perhaps since they're the closest thing to the camera most of the time in first person. However in case of weapons, they're smaller in size, they're not taking a huge portion of the screen. That means although they're very close, they're small enough that the 2K textures are actually good enough for 1440p. As for small items, like junk, food, ammo, chems, etc, you really should avoid 4K textures, 2K even. 1K is good enough. Because they're very small in comparison to other things. And they're scattered all over the world, so that would have a big impact on performance and VRAM usage. It's simply not smart to have 4K (or 2K) textures in this case. So you see, you have to consider these two factors when deciding.
The other measurement of all of this is a little known spec of video cards. Its the Memory Bandwidth of the card, the higher the memory bandwidth, the faster it can load any given texture of any given size. The memory bandwidth is also tied to the size of the memory bus. So here is where things get more complex, all of your high end video cards use a 256 bit or larger memory bus, this is the fastest you can get. I believe the highest memory bus was nearly 780 bit, and a very high end Nvidia card, but don't quote me on it. So what does this mean, well, the next step down is the 192bit memory bus, this the one used on most upper midrange cards, the GTX 1060 has 192 bit wide memory bus, which results in 192.19 GB/s memory bandwidth. While a GTX 1070 has 256-bit memory bus, which results in 256 GB/s. Of course these number will depend on how fast your cards memory chips are running. Lower tier cards get smaller buses. The GTX 1050 gets a 128 bit bus, and hence get about 128Gbs of bandwidth. The lower the bus speed, and the more high res textures you are pushing through it, the slower the game is going to respond, in framerate and loading times of those textures in items in the games world. So, as a rule, if you are using a higher end card, by all means use 2k and some 4k textures. As a rule, I personally go for high-res 4k textures on things like vegetation, like plants, grass, bushes, and trees. You get close to these in game, and it really breaks my "immersion", you knew that was coming, when the textures break down and look blurry because you are hiding in the bushes. Things like rocks, cars ,and other things that you can take cover behind also may be candidates. Clothing is another one, as in games like Fallout and Skyrim you are seeing your hands and clothes in first person all the time. there is nothing worse then your clothes or armors looking all blurry. But for most in world objects, 2k is more then enough.
Those using mid-range and lower range video cards, should max out with some 2k textures, and stick to 1k. Just some of my thoughts on the matter.
At the end of a paragraph press the Left Shift key then hit Enter twice.
Thanks, and you're welcome!
Merci beaucoup pour ces explications très claires, c'est parfaitement bien expliqué et très résumé en plus, un petit guide à conseiller pour beaucoup de joueurs.
Ma nouvelle installation est prête, il me tarde de réinstaller tous mes modes dont mes préférés graphiquement parlant et dont les tiens font parti du top 3 !! Bravo pour ton investissement et à très bientôt ! ;-)
Sometimes I downsize certain textures from a mod if all of the included textures are the same resolution (eg 2K boots, helmets, gloves in Skyrim get dropped to 1k). There are programs to automate the downsizing, but I get better results doing it on Photoshop and applying filtering like edge sharpening and highpass sharpening to bring out the details in the downsized textures (you can Automate the process in Photoshop, but best results are achieved by processing each individually to find the best settings. Newer Photoshop versions have better resizing algorithms.
FlaconOil's HD ReTexture Project is still hidden after 3 days of uploading - guess you forgot to publish the mod afterwards?
One could make a 16x16 pixels texture and make it look super sharp on 4k screen. It's all about UV mapping and tilling. That's why technically speaking, textures are not made out of pixels, but texels. Sharpness, and the amount of details of the texture have nothing to do with screen resolution. There's no science behind it, you either install as high resolution texture as you can, to get the most of you powerful system, or install lower res if you have low amount of VRAM and slow bandwith from CPU\RAM\GPU\Data Drive - AKA, slow PC in general.
And if you could just compare what can be please, cause here i talk about a unique mesh 4K wall texture and another Nuka machine 1K, which cannot be tiled. Texel density insn't eligible here.
This is posted on a Nexus page (not scientifical one), for people who do not understand these things and need a comprehensive answer.
I wroted it because a Nexus user, who installed my mod, asked me to write this and i did.
And yes, i know there will be an hundred of guys like you who will found this "mod" page and run to post and post again about "heyy dammit, you do not know everything abouuuuut"
PS : If you're able to texture a Nuka cola vending machine with a 16pixels tiled texture, explain me how-to please.
I'm sure you both understand that and a lot of people using your mods don't, but the easiest way to let people know what resolution pack to choose from is to put some system requirements on your files, like for 4K textures you want a 4K monitor and vidcard with atleast 8GB RAM, and a i7 CPU (or Ryzen), in the end it's all about VRAM and GPU/CPU that dictates how much you can handle at one given time.
If you realize that this engine is ancient and has a very bad (high drawcall) shadow shaders and the fact that it is a open world game, you can be sure that 4K textures for big objects and smaller textures for smaller objects already wil tax the most powerful system, so in effect, 4K is ludicrous, you can only use it for large objects from which the UV's are layed out badly, PC's simply aren't fast enough to play a game like Fallout with all 4K textures.
Also, the texture quality of the base game is like poop, if you use the same resolution, but better source materials for your textures, the game will look 100x better then with Beth's textures, even when they utilize the same res textures.
I'm guessing they made the textures in a hurry, a lot of stuff looks like beginners textures and models, as it has always done with any gamebryo Beth game, they're just not that good, so retxing in the original resolution wil in many cases be enough..
I do like your textures by the way, they're the most decent ones on the entire FO4 nexus.
You're totally right about badly maded 3d meshse are. UV's space are very very non accurate, most of the time it's less than 50% use of the space....
I already thinked about making new UV unwrapping, but it's realllly time consuming in addition to all the work needed for a mod like this (and for one person).
The other problem about this is that if i unwrap UV again, so i need to add new Nif files into my mod and so new meshes will not be compatible with vanilla and other mods. And that's what i don't want.
Anyway and also, thank you for your support and words
Yes, you can make 16px d_map with 4k px n_map, this texture will be sharp for bumping, bat totally blurry s#*! on diffusion details. What a point?
FlaconOil try to explain: You have no needs to user extra large textures, if you are playing on low resolution, cos effect of this texture you will see only macro-zooming on objects.
4k texture is useful for texturing large objects, like terrain or big buildings. For small object or clutters it's useless. And if you playing on 1024x768, it's no differences 1k 2k or 4k textures (talking about image quality not a performance).
It was helpful in explaining the differences and the reasons why we needed the differences.
Ignore the wags.
You did good
The only thing you have to keep in mind is that files in a BA2 archive get overwritten by loose files (only the ones conflicting, all the others are loaded just fine ofc). So if you have lots of overlapping mods it is advisable to delete the overlapping files you don't want, or put all your conflicting texture mods into BA2s and determine their load order through your ESPs, since the loadorder of ESPs determines the conflict winner of two or more BA2 archives (basically like ESPs).