I'VE WRITTEN SEVERAL NOTES AND GUIDES IN THE POSTS SECTION ON HOW TO DEAL WITH TEXTURES SO PLEASE HUNT BELOW. ROFL. SORRY.
Been asked this a lot lately so I'll answer here. For those wanting to play oh decent quality, with good looking OBJECTS...here's a hint. Your worldspace takes up HEAPS of graphic memory. Landscapes, mountains, grass, trees...OBJECTS don't. If you don't MIND your world not looking totally realistic then downsize your terrain and landscapes.
2014 JAN update note: HD TREES WILL KILL YOUR MACHINE. Use his TEXTURES (I think he's got 1024x up now...) and just do NOT use the meshes. Same thing with the Flora Overhaul mod. Use JUST the textures, NOT the meshes. Our older computer just can NOT draw the extra items and really...do you want to see 25 different types of trees and 30 different types of plants growing??? Oh. Xcuse me....30 additional types of plants n trees... rofl...
On the old anchient laptop I have my terrain/landscape/WATER (remember...it's MOVING... the GPU has to RENDER it's movement...) I have those all downsized to 512 and 256 where possible but still looking great. I can play on Ultra/Ultra graphics settings with uGrids set to 3, view distances on average set to about 4 or 5 and I can get up to 40fps on an INTEGRATED laptop video card with only 64k ram shared on a 1 GB ram laptop.
My WORLD doesn't look the most awesome but the OBJECTS do. Armor, foods, buildings, chairs, bottles, etc etc... workbenches....
ANOTHER thing to remember is MESHES ADD things to the game. TREESHD is an EXCELLENT mod as is Vurts flora overhaul but are soooo resource heavy with the mesh additions....SMIM is another awesome mod but you can NOT use it on low end pc's very well, even with textures reduced.THere are just too many MESH additions. Personally I only use the 3d rope meshes for villages/farmhouses from SMIM and the animated barrels.
If I can ever get permissions from him I'll upload just the separate meshes for those somewhere but.. alas... you're stuck with a huge download people.
EDIT: Was asked another question which was "can/how I use BSA with ESP textures. First I think the program is BSAOpt to extract the BSA files to a TEMP location. Work from there. If you have a low end machine the question comes up if you want to use the ESP in its entirety as a test or just the textures. You have to choose on your own as much as I enjoyed the FLORA overhaul and the TREESHD mod, too many new mesh/textures additions were integrated so I opted to just use the textures from those mods.Until VURT decides to put up his own 512k or 256k version of his flora...i will say that they do NOT downsize well in any way shape or form...at least the layered textures don't. The standard graphics textures downsize...decently.
This is the most insightful post, especially for inexperienced user like me, who wants to add some more realistic look to Skyrim without totally killing the PC. Already resized some huge 4k male textures and they still look equally good for an unarmed eye, yet are smaller by 75%. Also got rid of some meshes.
I’m not sure if you will read this but I’m wondering what happens if I forgot to tick “Force Reburn?” I did and nothing seems broken yet but I also want to do a second run for stability purposes. Can I run it like I’m running it my first time with “Force Reburn” ticked or should I just move on to my second run because I missed my opportunity to “Force Reburn” all together?
is there any way to exclude normal maps (n and msn). SMCO seems to exclude them, but i can't figure out how to stop opti tex from running them. i sometimes see line striations on msn maps i've always read it's not good to compress normals. so why is there no setting to stop it??
how do i compres the textures just to 1k, i got a lot of modded armors, and they always 2k minimum, some 4k, but i want it to 1k just like the rest dlc, i can run the game without mods at 60fps, but its cdt wen a lot of npcs apears
Your the man! When I loaded that optimizer up it was gibberish until you came along thanks! I made a 4k manhole into 2k! I think...I did 1st pass that's it. I found after I installed the entire 4k 2015 wip parallax mod, skyrim didn't like me. Took a week or so, but then I got CTD so frequently. Before that I saw purple things(missing textures) but damn it looked good...I don't want to get the enbboost cuz I'd need to start a new save file. This optimizer is a better option, even for people who have good rigs like mine who don't want to restart their saves due to memory ctd issues.
So, can someone explain to me what the difference is between the two scripts Thorne67 has for download, and when to use them? The Ordenador modified INI and the Texture Optimizer Modified INI. The walkthrough just doesn't make it clear to me. Thanks!
Holy crap. I was seeing horrible purple textures everywhere after a few minutes of play, and someone recommended Ordenador as a fix. Did three runs like you instructed - with an updated ini from http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/55803/? - and my Textures folder went from 6.3GB to 1.4GB!!
Like Vaedian, I pointed the Ordenador tool at only my Textures folder and an hour later, my game still looked amazing! Now I don't see a single purple glitch anywhere *touch wood*
Not sure if it makes a difference, but on the third run I only Reduced Size to 512 once, not twice, before I started up my game to see the effect. There were only a few things I felt I wanted better quality of, like the Detailed Rugs, and the Rustic series by Gamwich, so I just downloaded those textures again no problem. Thank you so much for the guide!
99 comments
Been asked this a lot lately so I'll answer here. For those wanting to play oh decent quality, with good looking OBJECTS...here's a hint. Your worldspace takes up HEAPS of graphic memory. Landscapes, mountains, grass, trees...OBJECTS don't. If you don't MIND your world not looking totally realistic then downsize your terrain and landscapes.
2014 JAN update note: HD TREES WILL KILL YOUR MACHINE. Use his TEXTURES (I think he's got 1024x up now...) and just do NOT use the meshes. Same thing with the Flora Overhaul mod. Use JUST the textures, NOT the meshes. Our older computer just can NOT draw the extra items and really...do you want to see 25 different types of trees and 30 different types of plants growing??? Oh. Xcuse me....30 additional types of plants n trees... rofl...
On the old anchient laptop I have my terrain/landscape/WATER (remember...it's MOVING... the GPU has to RENDER it's movement...) I have those all downsized to 512 and 256 where possible but still looking great. I can play on Ultra/Ultra graphics settings with uGrids set to 3, view distances on average set to about 4 or 5 and I can get up to 40fps on an INTEGRATED laptop video card with only 64k ram shared on a 1 GB ram laptop.
My WORLD doesn't look the most awesome but the OBJECTS do. Armor, foods, buildings, chairs, bottles, etc etc... workbenches....
ANOTHER thing to remember is MESHES ADD things to the game. TREESHD is an EXCELLENT mod as is Vurts flora overhaul but are soooo resource heavy with the mesh additions....SMIM is another awesome mod but you can NOT use it on low end pc's very well, even with textures reduced.THere are just too many MESH additions. Personally I only use the 3d rope meshes for villages/farmhouses from SMIM and the animated barrels.
If I can ever get permissions from him I'll upload just the separate meshes for those somewhere but.. alas... you're stuck with a huge download people.
EDIT: Was asked another question which was "can/how I use BSA with ESP textures. First I think the program is BSAOpt to extract the BSA files to a TEMP location. Work from there. If you have a low end machine the question comes up if you want to use the ESP in its entirety as a test or just the textures. You have to choose on your own as much as I enjoyed the FLORA overhaul and the TREESHD mod, too many new mesh/textures additions were integrated so I opted to just use the textures from those mods.Until VURT decides to put up his own 512k or 256k version of his flora...i will say that they do NOT downsize well in any way shape or form...at least the layered textures don't. The standard graphics textures downsize...decently.
i've always read it's not good to compress normals. so why is there no setting to stop it??
Preserve_Folder = textures\interface\
Preserve_Folder = interface\
Preserve_Folder = scripts\
Preserve_Folder = textures\meshes\
Preserve_Folder = meshes\
Preserve_Folder = CalienteTools\
Preserve_File = *.css
Preserve_File = *.htm
Preserve_File = *.pak
Preserve_File = *.dat
Preserve_File = *.log
Preserve_File = *.exe
Preserve_File = *.ini
Preserve_File = *.nif
Preserve_File = *.fuz
Preserve_File = *.wav
Preserve_File = *.xwm
Preserve_File = *.tri
Preserve_File = *.lip
Preserve_File = *.psd
Preserve_File = *.zip
Preserve_File = *.rar
Preserve_File = *.pex
Preserve_File = *.psc
Preserve_File = *.bsl
Preserve_File = *.xml
Preserve_File = *.seq
Preserve_File = *.7z
Preserve_File = *.esm
Preserve_File = *.esp
Preserve_File = *.rtf
Preserve_File = *.jpg
Preserve_File = *.pdf
Preserve_File = *.txt
Preserve_File = *.lua
Preserve_File = *.hkx
Preserve_File = *.pas
Preserve_File = *.swf
Preserve_File = *.bat
Preserve_File = *.dll
Preserve_File = *.jar
Preserve_File = *.backup
Preserve_File = *.jso
Preserve_File = *.swatch
Preserve_File = *.bsa
Preserve_File = *.bsd
Preserve_File = *.cfg
Preserve_File = *.mohidden
Preserve_File = *.xrc
Preserve_File = *.vs
Preserve_File = *.fs
Preserve_File = *.lnk
Preserve_File = *.html
Just use the main .ini, because I think the second one is an older download or something.
Like Vaedian, I pointed the Ordenador tool at only my Textures folder and an hour later, my game still looked amazing! Now I don't see a single purple glitch anywhere *touch wood*
Not sure if it makes a difference, but on the third run I only Reduced Size to 512 once, not twice, before I started up my game to see the effect. There were only a few things I felt I wanted better quality of, like the Detailed Rugs, and the Rustic series by Gamwich, so I just downloaded those textures again no problem. Thank you so much for the guide!