Optimized Textures
!!!CURRENTLY KNOW ISSUES AND QUICK FIXES!!!
Optimized Landscape and Foliage Textures v2.0:
B: Trees look partially to blurry, fix is on the way.
F: You can fix it yourself by just deleting the “Trees” folder inside your “Data -> Textures -> Landscape” folder.
B: Grass density is broken.
F: You can fix it yourself by just deleting the “Grass” folder inside your “Data -> Textures -> Landscape” folder.
ShortVersion
This Mod reduces the size of many textures to a “reasonable” size, without sacrificing too much visual quality.
This Mod was mainly created for people with less than 4096MB of physically available VRAM, so if you have 4096MB+ VRAM you really don’t need this Mod. One more thing to mention since it came up a few times, this is NOT a Re-texture Mod!
If you don’t see a difference in the visual quality of the game and gain a few more FPS plus textures that load faster, i did my job well. If you want more information on how i did it, read the Longer description below.
LongVersion
As already stated in the short description this Mod reduces the size of may textures to a more performance friendly size.
Before i begin with the How’s and Why’s i want to make sure that you understand that the guys over at Bethesda who were responsible for the textures actually really did a great job on them. No doubt the game itself has its flaws at this time but most of the frame drops that we experience are not directly related to the textures, they only add on top of it. And i honestly hope that this mod will soon become completely redundant!
So let’s cut to the point. In todays games most of us strive for the ultimate immersive experience and high resolution textures are one big pillar of getting immersed. But what is that immersion worth when you constantly experience micro-shutters, frame-drops and huge loading-times? Well nothing if you ask me. Even though that textures with a size of 2048px aren’t uncommon nowadays and usually provide the best results in terms of visual quality vs. performance hit, they don’t need to be ultra high-res when they are just on objects that people only see in the corner of the eye. Do we really need grass-textures that are 2048px big? Do we really need tree-textures who are 4096px big? Do we really need dirt-textures who are mostly buried under rocks and grass patches that are 2048px big? Unless you’re one of those peoples who constantly stares at textures up close instead of actual playing the game i can assure you, No we don’t!
That is where this Mod comes in, even though i know nothing about the engine behind Fallout and how it handles most things. But i know how textures are made, how compression works and how engines handle textures in general. So i thought to myself lets put that knowledge to use and find those buggers who can safely lose a bit of weight without sacrificing too much visual quality.
So after digging through the archives i’ve noticed two things. Most of the textures look kinda blurred and the amount of color information the hold hardly justify the memory footprint they have. No offense Betty 😉
So it was obvious that reducing the size by half would not make that much of a difference in terms of visual quality but it would make a massive difference in terms of the actual size in MB. For instance a regular 2k texture with no alpha channel is round about 2.5MB big, a 4k texture with no alpha channel would be already 10MB big. If we add to both textures an alpha channel you can easily double the size of them. So now multiply that by 100+ times and you’ll see that we’re talking about GB’s here. However if we reduce them by half we get get values like 680kb for a 1k textures with no alpha and 2.5MB for a 2k texture with an alpha channel (example from the tress ingame since they are at 4096px).
Enough of the numbers! So what did i do to counter the blurry textures?
Well it’s actually pretty simple, when down-sizing a texture it already becomes a bit sharper during the process so for most of the more noisy textures i did nothing else and for those who are not that noisy i used mostly a technique called high-pass sharpening which delivers better result than a regular sharpening filter and provides more flexibility for me since i can choose through masking where it should apply the sharpening. Takes up more time but provides better results.
But all glory aside this process took quite a bit of time and therefor i had to partially “automate” it which can result in some textures looking to sharp or have glowing edges. If you recognize a texture that you think looks to sharp feel free to hit me up and i’ll fix it asap.
But you may ask yourself now, there are other Mods who do the same what is the difference to your Mod?
Well, not that much and you are free to try them all out and see what works the best for you.
At this time i know of:
Fallout 4 – Texture Optimization Project by torcher, Optimized Vanilla Textures – FO4 Edition by Myst and Wasteland 512 Textures by Darth Animal.
The first one does pretty much the same that my Mod does although we use a slightly different approach. You have to compare his mod to my mod. Main difference is he got more textures done at this time than i have but i’m a bit more picky about the quality aspect. 😛
The second one does not reduce the majority of the diffuse textures but rather the normalmaps and specularmaps. And i have to admit after looking through a lot of normal and specular-maps this is another viable approach since they did not hold that much micro-surface details anyway, so reducing them shouldn’t hurt visual quality. I haven’t tested it but if you want even more performance you can put his mod right after my mod and overwrite the few files that may conflict.
The third one reduces the size of the textures even more which will have a noticeable impact on visual quality but also should gain you a fair bit of performance gain. So if you value performance over visual looks this is the mod for you.
Ok let’s bring this to an end. Go download the Mod and see if it brings you anything!
!!!Prerequisite!!!
If you install this Mod manual then you need to make some changes to your Fallout.ini located under:
“”Documents/My Games/Fallout 4″” before it will work.
a.) Navigate to the folder mentioned above.
b.) Open up the file “”Fallout´.ini”” in your favorit text editor.
c.) Look for the [Archive] category usually located at the top.
d.) Look for an entry called “sResourceDataDirsFinal=”.
e.) Add the following after the =
STRINGS\, INTERFACE\, TEXTURES\, SOUND\, MESHES\, MUSIC\, LODSETTINGS\, SCRIPTS\, VIDEO\
f.) Save the file and close it.
— This should set you up for most common mods.
Installing the Mod
a.) Navigate to your Fallout 4 install location. Usually found under:
“”C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\Common\Fallout 4\””
b.) Open up the Data folder.
c.) Copy the “”Textures”” folder from the Archive into it.
d.) You are done.
What is planned for the next releases?
– Armor and Clothes.
– Characters and Creatures.
– Interiors (if needed).
– Props (if needed).
– Some personal re-textures (on the horizon).
Questions, Bugs or Wishes?
Please use the Post section of the mod for Questions and Wishes.
Please use the Bug section to report ANYTHING unusual since i wasn’t able to test all textures by my own.
I will try to answer or fix anything as fast as possible.
Legal Notes!
Due to the fact that those textures are only slightly altered original game textures made by Bethesda, you are only allowed to use them for Fallout 4 related mods!
All rights on the provided files belong to Bethesda and should be threaded accordingly.
Further Notes!
Versioning:
New releases will increase the Main number, 1.0 – 2.0 – 3.0 etc. and contain new textures.
Bugfixes will increase the second number, 1.1 – 2.2 – 3.3 etc. and contain alterations of already existing textures.
That’s it enjoy and stay safe out there!
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