LE Optimised Textures - Memory Saver

[536861646f57]

If anyone here knows how mipmaps work, then you'll understand that they take up more space. I want to do Skyrim with 2K textures, but the mipmaps kill my video card. I've got 2GB of video memory, however the 2K textures have mipmaps which vastly increases memory usage, and my video card has to dump some textures into the RAM....which is slow and absolutely murders my frame rate like a Dark Brotherhood assassin.

Edited December 22, 2015 by 536861646f57

[Novem99]

And what exactly is your "request" now?

[BigBizkit]

I do not know how mipmaps work and I am genuinly interested in an explanation.

[536861646f57]

I do not know how mipmaps work and I am genuinly interested in an explanation.

A mipmap is a sequentially smaller version of a texture, used to save processing power at the cost of vRAM. If you use GIMP or photoshop, you can open a dds texture and choose to also open the mipmaps, which are hidden layed by default, but each one is smaller by half dimensions. With 2048 textures, mipmaps can use an obscene amount of vRAM. Choosing to not have mipmaps in the textures forces the game to use only the one layer, the original 2048 texture, because the mipmaps do not exist. With a 2048 texture, mipmaps can take up anywhere up to an additional 50MB of memory. Multiply that by how many textures are used and how many times, and you could be seeing usage over 2GB. If you take away mipmaps, it could shave half off or more of your vRAM usage. My processor and GPU are both powerful enough to handle the 2048, but they just don't have enough memory to handle all of them at once with all of the mipmaps. So my mod request is to create a version of Skyrim 2K, as well as official textures optimised without mipmaps for people with less than 2GB of vRAM.