A couple of questions.

[Pikabloo]

I've come to the conclusion that the obvious reason why Fallout 3 runs so poorly on my computer is because of FOOK 2 in tie with tons of other mods (Not really, just that I get a few crashes here and there and a few moments where the game has a lag spike). So now I'm thinking about uninstalling it to achieve the performance I want. The problem is, should I just uninstall FOOK 2 and leave my data folder as it is, or should I completely reinstall Fallout 3? I don't feel like dealing with any possible problems with my save games or data folder if I just remove FOOK 2 alone, and I don't have any problems with reinstalling the handful of mods I use.

 

Moving on, I am planning on buying more RAM for my computer, which is currently at a low 2 Gigs. I'm planning on using tons of mods for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas when it releases (As in so many mods that it makes the lag I get from FOOK 2 pale in comparison), and I don't know how much RAM I should go for, whether it be too little or too much? Primarily around the choices of 4 Gigs and 6 Gigs. This is the only thing I have to worry about my Computer's Hardware as far as I know, and want to know if I'm already being overkill for the games by using 6 Gigs.

 

Any helpful criticism would be appreciated, also I'm not sure if this is the right section or not. I'm just assuming that since I'm asking questions related around the game that it might as well fit here.

[fap6000]

Bah DDR 3 is only worth it if you have the next gen MOBO an CPU to go with it, all that hyperspeedin stuff. Not that we even need that much power to play games. Heck, soon as they started putting GPU's on grapics cards it took most of the load off the CPU an MOBO. Same thing goes for RAM, once it was put on the video card (V-ram, not confuxiated with Virtual ram, it's video ram) Once they did that the desperate need for more RAM wasn't so desperate anymore, pfft or even needed.

 

Enter Vista, which normally runs on about 1Gb of ram at idle, boof boof, system ram overall size trippled in order to compensate, something like that, 64 bit plays into it too, the desperate need to get tons of stuff done twice as fast, an such as we progess down this path of the new computer age. Someone with only 2Gb of RAM using a Vista O/S is going to have minor performance problems when running applications. For example Fallout 3 seems to hover around 700k to 1.2Gb of RAM use, The system cache would pick up the slack on this persons system (virtual ram) so it's not like it would be a major problem, besides most Vista systems ship out with at least 3Gb of RAM anyway. XP 32 hovers around 400k at idle. Heck that's what I use... Personally that next gen stuff is silly. In 6 months it will be half price, an old news. I seem to stick with current technology rather than next gen stuff, just cause you get a better price when you end up frying something.

 

The basic framework for playing games built into the hardware over the last 10-20 years, is pretty much PCI-E, DXT texture compression, Mip-maps, Video ram, GPU.

 

PCI-E is built into the MOBO, basicly a backwards PCI slot, probalby has more pins too, but the key thing is the bus speed, when PCI-E came around it turned out like 4 times faster than PCI. Shoot, a lot of gamers turn down the PCI-E bus maybe 5% or 10% just to get some stability, yah it's that fast, you can drop 5% or 10% an not even notice, I just use the auto detect nowdays.

 

DXT compression, named DXT-1, DXT-2, DXT-3, ect, but it's just DXT-1, DXT-3, DXT-5 as far as we are concerned. DXT is a compression language designed in the 1980's I think, it's a compression language just for grapics cards. Take a texture of the 10mm pistol, let's say it's 3Mb worth of data. If there isn't alpha (transparency, see thru parts) in the texture then you can encode the texture in DXT-1 (max compression) Which ignores alpha (hence the max compresson) Now on the left you have the uncompressed 3Mb version, and on the right you have the 600k version that's compressed. Keep in mind they both look the very same, it's just how the data is accessed by the grapics card. The dorky way to put this would be that the uncompressed version takes up 3,000K while the DXT version takes up 600K, so which do you think is going to work better performance wise in the game world?

 

Mip-Maps are picture of a texture at certian distances, sort of pre-loaded, so that once in-game they system doesn't have to waste resources trying to figure out what that 10mm pistol looks like when you are 75 feet away, or 1 foot away, which changes on the fly as you move thru the game world. Games now days won't work without the Mip-maps encoded into the textures, it's pretty much a deal breaker. It's a simple process, when the texture is saved, the texture editor usually creates an encodes the mip-maps inside the texture itself. Most of the vanilla content is set up to use tiny darker versions of the texture noted by the _m at the end of the name. If you ask me it's better to just have them encoded inside the actual texture, it's only a extra 5% in the data size. But the way bethesda did it, there's now a mipmap texture for each texture, creating more files an more pain in the back side when you work with it.

 

Video Ram is pretty easy, just buy a video card with 1Gb of memory or more. 256K memory won't even run a fallout game, 512Mb is questionable if it will run it well. Even if the 512Mb card runs fallout 3 well, still there's going to be tons of data swaping in and out between the video memory and Virutal Memory & RAM, as needed depending on what's going on in the game. I reckon this promotes coruption in a game that's already prone to coruption. hence, get a video card with 1Gb of memory.

 

SLI come into play when physics are used, in a non-SLI system the physics an rendering is done on the card, then SLI one card takes care of physics, the other renders, unless you set it up to split render. I can give a Nvida example... If I couldn't get my hands on a 9000 series that had 1Gb of memory, then I might could find a 8000 series that did have the 1Gb memory, then use two of those cards in SLI which pretty much makes it the same performance as a 9000 series. But Two, three, or four 9000 series won't get performance like a 200 series. So to speak SLI is really only good if you were wanting to use a cheap old tech card, but stack more than one so that it would go up a series in performance. The 200 series I reckon they SLI just so that physics are on one card an renders on the other. However if you ask me, it's just a way for the company to sell more cards, it's not like you'll notice a big performance gain.

 

Burp... Now that we got all that out of the way. We can talk about FOOK2. When FOOK2 was built they forgot to put in the mipmaps. Whoops, yah so it totally lagged at first. They issued a fix, but just from the fact they forgot this step, any FOOK2 texture is suspect for being a performance killer. What makes things worse is that most modders are idiots, and we pretty much all think the only way to make a in-game item look better is to increase the size of the texture map. I.E. 1024X1024 2048X2048 4096X4096, Even worse than that, some fool idiots think that uncompressed textures look better which this pretty much takes the game back to working on 1982 standards, yah performance 30 years ago was a joke. Not having a mip-map is bad, but having totally large texture maps which are uncompressed is about 10 times worse, if you have both problems it's just tarded lag.

 

FOOK2 is no different than any other modder. Since launch we sort of got onto this path of thinking "make texture maps bigger" an it makes things look better. This came from the vanilla textures mostly, pretty much they were all 512, then 1024 versions for first person views. The first modders got things going by using the 1024 maps in 3rd person too, which made things look HD. The problem is that people kept using that practice. So now days we have one weapon which is the size of the players hand, which is using a 2048X2048 texture. All other things equal this is now 4 times the amount of data that the vanilla game uses for a hand sized item. If it's uncompressed as well it could be up to 16 times the size. FOOK2 pretty much uses huge texture maps for everything. Power armor is like 2048 or 4096, but then a tiny ammo box is also 2048 which 1024 is way too huge for a ammo box. Heck super mutants only use a 2048 texture an they're much bigger than a pistol. This is why FOOK2 has crappy performance even though they fixed the Mip-map issue.

 

It's not just FOOK2, pretty much every mod does this. I've only found a few that didn't. So as of about 6 months ago, any fallout 3 build I make, near the last steps in the testing phases, I go thru the whole texture folder. Shrinking things, but it also makes sure the mip-maps an DXT are in place. This was sort of figured out in the Chaos performance article http://fallout3nexus.com/articles/article.php?id=208 But look thru all the articles it all good stuff, and I bet you didn't know it existed.

 

I'm not as hard on the shrinking nowdays. Pretty much I use 1024 across the board for any weapon, if it was a fuzzy texture I might use a 512 size (but that's counting beans) Pretty much the main thing is to make sure that mip-maps are encoded as well as non-alpha weapons being encoded in DXT-1. There isn't a big enough weapon to make me want to use anything larger than 1024 (it would have to be the size of a truck) A lot of the weapons are made up of many parts, which if you wanted to take the time (counting beans) you could use 256X256 an 512X512 maps on those small parts, which end up looking 1024 when put together.

 

NPC's I shrink a bit too. Feral Ghouls I use a 512 map, because they look like crap anyway, and they run very fast. I also use 512 on the dogs an Boatflies for the same reason, they look like crap an run really fast. Pretty much all the other NPC textures I use the MMM default size. I did shrink the supermutant armor though. If I was to shrink any others it would probably be the Mirelurks.

 

Besides those two issues, pretty much anything over 600k for a defuse (base texture) is questionable to need shrinking, certainly anything over 1Mb size for a defuse map is going to get shrinkedafied. Then your Normal maps you have to pay attention to as well. Anything over 1.2 in a normal map is too large, unless it's a building, heh heh. I usually do all the defuse maps, then switch to normal maps. Thus avoiding having to switch back an forth from DXT settings. Normal maps you pretty much can't go wrong using DXT-5 (estimated alpha) There's only a very small few which need DXT-3 (non-estimated) Most of the normal maps we use are only estimated normal maps, not actual ones (which would take weeks to create), So they get DXT-5 most of the time.

 

You would be surprized at what some idiots upload for use in fallout. That being said you notice the performance drop from these items. Under chaos condtions an combat it's more noticeable, but it also promotes coruption & crashes from system tax. I guess part of the reason I shrink the textures is to avoid some of that, also getting better performance. But I also do it just so there can be better chaos in the game, be it by using higher MMM spawn rates or complex battles.

 

 

[fap6000]

Here's a prime example. I was having a good ole time in Zeta. Wuz bout to go into cryo an puts some heads on posts. It's like a war zone in there if you use a 4-8 MMM spawn rate like meh. So I grab the talon armor sitting in the little room, just off core engineering or whatever. Open the pipboy, find the armor, click it so it puts it on the PC. And I'm sitting there waiting... Yah This fool made his armor textures so large an poor performing that I actually have to wait for the system to load it up which took over 5 seconds.

 

Pfft I knew what it was before I looked. Exit the game, went to Data/textures/ and started looking for these talon components. I find 2.7Mb file sizes for the textures. Check the size an it's 1440X1440 which isn't even a legit size for texture maps. I mean hello... The worst part is that this texture in particular has very little detail. I mean yeah it has some stains an some fabric, but do I really need to see thread when I look at it? Most times you end up finding either 2048 or 4096, or just that it's uncompressed. I think I found a rifle one time that was 16Mb. That's 16,000K compared to the vanilla weapons 600k. Heck 600k in 1024 size. LMAO... rookies

 

Okay so back to the problem. I just got over 5 seconds of grapical lag when I equiped this fancy talon armor. Can you imagine what is going to happen when I'm fighting 20 talon company mercs, thanks to MMM. Heck just having NPC's wearing this armor in the wasteland near the place I'm at is going to cause grapical lag. So I fix it an go back to having fun. I'd say at first I just scan over the whole textures folder, anything big that sticks out. By that I mean a file size that is larger than what the vanilla file size would be for the same in-game size item. Scan because it would take too long to go thru the whole thing, I've done it before though. Anyhow I prefer to just scan over it touching on issues I know will come up as well. Then later on when I'm playing if I notice grapical lag then I'll go check the textures.

 

I'm not even going to check if this texture is encoded with DXT an mip-maps. I'll open it up with Paint dot net (paint.net) Which I already have it set to save with mip-maps encoded and using DXT-1, Then I also have it set up to resize (Ctrl R) in 96 pixels per inch & best quality super sampling. This 96 pixels per inch is the true resolution, my native res for my screen, which is why I use that. It also keeps the aspect ratio if you pick it, then you can just copy an paste 1024 to save time, then yer left hand can punch out 512 real easy too if needed. First I'll do all the defuse maps, then go back an do the normals, the only thing I'll change when I do the normals is to use DXT-5.

 

Okay did one, That 2,700K just turned into 680K, but more importantly I know that it's got the DXT an the mipmaps, and now anytime I equip it it will instantly equip, no lag. Also anytime I'm around an area that has NPC's wearing that, or even has them wearing it in the background culled where I can't even see it, there won't be any grapical lag, while also keeping something like 99% of the original detail. I can't even tell the difference. I'm sure you could, but you would have to be standing right next to a NPC wearing it, an looking at them thru the sniper rifle scope. Okay well, no reason to get mad, just get to work, because most textures you get from mods are like this.