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Question about Mesh sizes and impact on game performance


vizex1

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Depends mostly on your computer and the scene you're putting the mesh in. Maybe I'm exactly the right (or completely wrong) person here as my mods are always high poly. :devil:

 

On lower end computers (computers that can't run FO4 without mods higher than medium), the impact will be server in some regions when you place like 10 or so of those meshes. On higher end computers, the game is mostly CPU bound and the GPU can use its unused resources to render those high poly meshes. Shadows have a high performance impact on high poly meshes. The more polys, the more expensive the shadow computation.

High poly meshes have the advantage of having better specular reflections though. How noticeable this is, depends on the mesh and on the lighting.

 

High poly meshes should be packaged into BA2, otherwise the game will stutter heavily when loading them. If it's a static object, you are probably ok if you also do some lower poly LODs so the max detailed one is only loaded when you really see the details.

 

For clothes/armor there is also more load because all those vertices are skinned.

 

To sum it up: There is a performance impact. But how noticeable it is depends a lot on the computer's specs and the place where you put it. A 1070 or an R9 GPU don't have a lot of problems with that as the game is mostly CPU bound anyway. If you're GPU bound, the impact could be noticeable.

 

You may just want to try it out and spawn 10, 100 or 1000 objects of it and observe the load and framerate. Keep in mind that higher object counts can also lead to being draw call limited in some denser areas.

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Thanks, icestormng! That information helps me enormously!

 

My mod will mostly be using vanilla assets. Weapons to be exact.

The reason I ask is the vanilla weapons have two versions, a 1st person version and a lower poly model.

The scenario I'm wondering about is multiple 1st person vanilla weapon models equipped onto the player at once(up to 5 or 6, with bone data and everything). Also the file size will be higher because the nif will include all of that weapons modifications in one nif. So around 5 or possibly 6 of those on the screen at all times.

 

Do you think that will have any noticeable effect on performance? Or is it negligible for the vanilla models.

I might just make a version with lower poly models as an optional file.

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If we're talking about those vanilla models, you are safe. They're ultra low poly. They use a (bit) higher poly mesh for 1st person view and a lower poly mesh for NPCs and 3rd person view. You have to combine A LOT of weapons to hit a poly count that's acutally detrimental to performance.

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  • 1 year later...

just want to add to icestormng's information that fo4 has already some high draw call/DX11 related bottlenecks. area around mass fusion center is such a place (emipirically tested). an area with many high poly meshes like clutter, buildings, npc, weapons etc.. you will encounter fps drops in this area due do the poly count bottleneck even on high end rigs, while cpu and gpu are switching between idle and full power, even around 50 to 60%.

if you add mods which increase poly count in these areas like high poly weapons, npc, additional clutter like cars and so on or settings like higher ugridstoload you increase the chance of draw call overload and stalls resulting in fps drops or even ctd in these areas. fo4 engine (and all older gamebryo related engines) contributes to this problem with very bad or inefficient object culling routines.

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There was a heap of comment a couple of years ago about mods with overly complex high poly models causing in game rendering problems.

 

I think it was 100K polygon backpacks or such when equipped on multiple rendered actors.

 

At the time I was working on performance metrics so enquired in the mesh & texture community about polygons > draw calls > pipeline > performance curves (as frame rate can affect script execution), but no one had any hard data. Just too many is bad mmmkay.

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There was a heap of comment a couple of years ago about mods with overly complex high poly models causing in game rendering problems.

 

I think it was 100K polygon backpacks or such when equipped on multiple rendered actors.

 

At the time I was working on performance metrics so enquired in the mesh & texture community about polygons > draw calls > pipeline > performance curves (as frame rate can affect script execution), but no one had any hard data. Just too many is bad mmmkay.

 

Yeah, there are a lot 0f "limitations" in the engine of FO4, but nobody knows EXACTLY what those are ...

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you can read amount of draw calls with enb (maybe also with reshade) in real time and you can compare it with the dx11 draw call limit. some testers did that already and found the bottleneck in fo4 in the dense city areas. it is not exactly known what causes the high number of draw calls but it is known that this leads to the communication stalls between gpu and cpu even on high end pc because of the dx11 draw call limitation. so anything which helps to reduce the amount of draw calls in these dense areas will also help to reduce sudden fps drops in fo4 (not independently caused by some mods or enb :wink: ).

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