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Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Qarl's Normal Maps Reduced: Unofficial Option Pack for Qarl's Texture Pack 2

by dev_akm, Qarl, and MrWiseman

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# DESCRIPTION
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QNMR 2.0 has been released, but it's too large to upload here. Use QNMR 2.0 unless you're sure you want this one instead.

This is a texture replacement mod that acts as an unofficial option pack for Qarl's Texture Pack 2 (QTP2). It is designed to improve performance of QTP2 on some video cards by replacing all of the high-res normal maps from QTP2 with dramatically smaller normal maps. The normal maps are reduced to one quarter of their original size, which can significantly help reduce stuttering on 256Mb video cards with almost no loss of quality that you can see in-game.

Where there were previously 300Mb worth of normal maps in QTP2, they are reduced here to only 75Mb uncompressed. In my limited testing, this resulted in a significant reduction in stuttering and incresed performance (around +3-5 FPS, maybe more in heavily bogged areas) with almost no noticeable loss of in-game quality in the images.

This mod was created using Qarl's original normal maps and MrWiseman's excellent texture reduction script. MrWiseman's python script chews through texture subdirectories and invokes Nvidia's command-line DDS tools to strip off the top layer of each DDS file it finds, leaving the first mipmap as the new top layer.

Home Page for Qarl Normal Maps Reduced (includes additional info, a list of complimentary mods, screenshots and download mirror links).

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# INSTALLATION
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This mod requires Qarl's Texture Pack 2.

This mod is package as an OMOD-ready archive, which means you can either install it manually or quickly create an OMOD directly from the included Qarl_Normals_Reduced directory. See the OMOD_or_Manual_Install.txt file for details.

As with Qarl's Texture Pack 2, you must read the included README and follow the instructions exactly or you'll almost certainly have problems. If you're not willing to use the BSA-alteration method of invalidation, then you probably shouldn't use this add-on.

You can use this mod by itself, but to get the full benefit of improved performance along with Better Tiling, you should also install Better Tiling Landscape Textures for Qarl and my BTSR Normal Maps Reduced. The full install sequence should be:

1) Qarl's Texture Pack 2
2) Skingrad Roof Textures
3) Better Tiling Textures
4) Qarl's Normal Maps Reduced
5) BTSR Normal Maps Reduced

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