LOD Problems

[Dubik123]

Hello.

 

I have a bug in Nev Vegas that I cannot seem to fix no matter how I try. It started happening on an old save file. The LOD as well as objects like grass, bushes and road signs load in only after coming close to them. For instance, I could be walking along a road. Ten feet away from me, the road is all blurry (LOD) and grass pops in right in front of my eyes.

 

A few days ago, I did a complete clean reinstall of the game. None of my old save files or mods are present. I only made a test character and ran around a bit - the bug is still very present. However, New Vegas is not the only game that suffers from this issue. In fact, Fallout 3 and 4 do so too, but to lesser extent.

 

Any help or insight would be appreciated.

 

My system specs are:

 

Nvidia GTX970 4GB

Intel i5 4570 3.20Ghz

16GB RAM

(If any more components need to be stated, please let me know)

 

Thanks in advance.

[dubiousintent]

What, if any tweaks have you made to any of the three game INI files? If you kept backups of the original versions of them, you can use a "difference" program like WinDiff or WinMerge to compare the current version with the original and see what changed easily.

 

This sounds like you have adjusted some settings to reduce what you can see in the distance to reduce the effects of Z-Fighting (which I happen to know you are experiencing). The "pop-in" of things as you get closer is the trade-off to reducing the distance at which things appear.

 

-Dubious-

Edited March 1, 2017 by dubiousintent

[Dubik123]

The pop-in is the exact same problem I was talking about from the start. It relates to both the LOD and smaller objects, though sometimes, even bigger buildings like the concrete walls of Primm also generate in front of me.

 

I have not tampered with the .INI files yet. The game is 100% vanilla, nothing is changed yet.

 

I will try to install NVSE and the 4GB Enabler tonight and let you know if that changed anything.

[Dubik123]

So, the 4GB Enabler did not help at all. Any other suggestions?

 

In a private conversation, you mentioned ENB Boost. Would you mind providing me a link to download it, as well as installation instructions? They are very unclear on the ENB page.

[dubiousintent]

The 4GB Enabler is only the first part of the solution. Getting more than 2GB of memory for the game is important.

 

See "Checklist item #3" and "Vanilla Game CTDs on startup" Cause-1 in the "Fallout NV Mod Conflict Troubleshooting" guide. The behavior you describe is not consistent with default vanilla INI file settings. "Verify local files" will replace the "Fallout_Default.INI", but the two in "C:\Users" will not get rebuilt the first time you run the game from the original "FalloutNVLauncher.exe" unless they do not exist.

 

The STEP Project "ENBoost" page has the download link and setup instructions. Refer back to the "ENB is not working" Solution-2 for clarification on installation terms.

 

-Dubious-

[Dubik123]

I have actually deleted the "FalloutNV" folder in Documents. The game, upon installation, created a new one. Thus, I doubt anything in the INI files changed.

 

As I said before, this bug is also prominent in Fallout 3. LOD loading in too close on certain objects, grass popping in, etc. Are you sure this behaviour is not normal? I am too frustrated to tell. If it is, I might as well just live with it. If not... I will install ENBoost and try again... Though this problem seems unfixable.

 

Edit: The ENB did absolutely nothing apart from getting me as angry and stressed out as I possible can be with the installation.

Edited March 2, 2017 by Dubik123

[dubiousintent]

If vanilla settings are giving you "pop-in" at an apparent ten feet away, then that is the limit of your "foreground". Beyond that is the "mid-ground" and somewhere beyond that is the "background". Beyond the foreground, textures tend to be lower in polygon count and detail. The "Mipmap" is "Pre-calculated, optimized collections of images that accompany a main texture, intended to increase rendering speed and reduce aliasing artifacts. Textures should contain mipmaps (the same texture copied several times but with lower resolution down to almost a single pixel). If the mipmap is not present in the texture file then it will be generated on the fly (adding some stress to the CPU/GPU). If the texture is 1x2 and a shader requests color from the middle of that texture then it should get the interpolated value (in that case average of both the adjacent pixels). Mipmaps are included (or not) as part of the texture file when it is created." - Quoted from the TESTG site Glossary. "Ground cover" textures tend to be pretty minimal, as in it wouldn't surprise me to find they skimped on some mipmaps. What you describe with the grass sounds like there isn't anything between near and far distance. But even if there is, at some point the game has to switch between the LOD of the image.

 

In terms of alternatives, you can look for texture replacements of the sort that are bothering you the most. "LOD" tends to be used to refer to "terrain" in the distance; "VWD" tends to refer to "objects" in the distance. When "objects" are added to the game by mods, they do NOT automatically get added to the VWD if they do not include "_far.nif" files for that purpose. See the TESTG "VWD/LOD Category" page for the tools and how you can try to incorporate them on your own. But they will take some time and effort, and every mod you add takes it's own toll upon system resources.

 

As for 4GB enabling and ENBoost "not doing anything" for your problem, then I am out of ideas given the various INI tweaks pointed out earlier. Once you have given the game as much memory as possible for it to use, you are stuck with "hardware limitations". The only thing we haven't discussed is tweaking the nVidia Control Panel settings, but all you should need to do there is under the "Manage 3D Settings" choose the "Program Setting" tab and select "Fallout - New Vegas". Anything else should be attempted cautiously. I recently added a "Cause-4" under "Issue: Lag or "micro stutters" even with "New Vegas Stutter Remover" installed" in the "Fallout NV Mod Conflict Troubleshooting" guide with a link to "nVidia Inspector" which many people believe provides improved settings. You might want to check it out.

 

In researching this I have found a number of others complaining about the same "pop-in" problem with other games of all sorts, not only with the GTX 970 but also the 1070. Some posted videos, and frankly I had a hard time spotting what they were talking about unless they marked up the images to show just where to look.

 

Sometimes you have to just cut your losses in time and effort expended, lower your expectations, and get on with playing the game. Current systems are not capable of making every game (especially older ones) look like an HD movie. I don't say that lightly, but when you are out of possible solutions, what can you do?

 

-Dubious-

[Dubik123]

"Ten feet away" is again, an overstatement. I could not describe the problem very well.

 

If you still know where to look for them, would you mind sending me the videos of other people's "pop-in" issues? I would like to see them and perhaps compare them to my problem.

 

With the last paragraph, I take it you just say that I should just play the game with the issue. I might do it if we indeed ran out of possible solutions.

If I do so, as I pointed out, the installation of ENB was a bit messy. I believe I got it all right in the end, but still, would you recommend reinstalling the game again to avoid future problems?

 

Again, this also happens in Fallout 3, to a lesser extent, but it still does. Might be the Gamebryo engine not being comfortable with my PC. What kind of bugs me out with this is, that the problem has been persistent on two graphics cards and three differently modded playtroughs. It might just be a common thing with the game and I noticed it randomly. God only knows.

[dubiousintent]

As for video's showing what others are calling "pop-in", a simple Google search on "gtx970 pop-in" produces 604,000 results. The first two returns ( at Overclock and TomsHardware) link several videos each. The one that was "marked-up" was "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmjFATu2_vo". These are other sorts of games such as GTA and Far Cry, so the problem is not confined to Bethesda or the Gamebryo engine.

 

With the last paragraph I'm saying that I have already provided all the answers I can find (here and in the previous thread). Giving the game as much memory over 2GB as possible, including additional rendering memory with ENBoost, adjusting INI and video card settings (such as they are and their effectiveness is very specific to your card), using texture replacements which include the necessary "gradual" distance changes for the worst sorts of instances, and using FNVLODGen and TES4LL to rebuild the LOD landscape to include the mods you have added, has exhausted the extent of my knowledge of how to deal with what you appear to be describing. If you can produce a video which is materially different from any of the other examples found, then it may suggest some other cause or remind someone else of something I don't recognize or recall.

 

If you are getting the ENB "status" message on the loading screens, then you have the ENBoost installed correctly. Unfortunately that display doesn't look any different with just ENBoost than with the full ENB installed AFAIK.

 

If you have the same problem with a vanilla game without mods and with vanilla settings, then re-installing is not going the improve things. Only if you can point to a specific mod or INI tweak and say "HERE! It doesn't change until THIS" are you going to be able to find a single source of the problem. This doesn't seem to be such a "single source" issue given it occurs across more than one game. Otherwise, reinstalling is just a way to clear the boards and start over.

 

It always boils down to how much time and effort (and money) you care to spend upon attempting to "fix" something that may (or may not) be within your control.

 

-Dubious-

[Dubik123]

The video you sent me is nothing like my problem. The person's LOD loads in rather gradually. Mine is blurry, then I walk closer to it, get a small frame drop and the LOD is loaded in.

 

I am not getting any "status" message with ENBoost. Figures that I installed it wrong. I have no idea how to fix this. I followed the steps in a video (The installation instructions on the Nexus Wiki were still very unclear to a technophobe like me) very closely, yet... Nothing.

 

I have installed a texture pack (OJO Bueno in particular) just to try out whether it gets better. It actually doesn't. In fact, the frame drop when the LOD loads in is now higher, once I got from 60 FPS to 15... I am hoping that "New Vegas Stutter Remover" can perhaps fix this issue. Will play with that tomorrow.

 

That's about all I can do. The bug fortunately doesn't seem to harm any games besides the Fallouts, though I have seen a glimpse of it in Skyrim. That game, however, is unplayable even after dozens of reinstalls.

 

However, when I playtested New Vegas for a little while, I noticed a very strange glitch, not at all related to the main problem. After switching from first person, while moving, to third person and stopping to stand still, my character's hands have shrinked... At first they only got smaller, the second time the fingers actually "fell into" the palm of the hand. When I moved, the hands have gotten bigger again, but standing still again made them shrink. The only solution to this was performing a heavy attack with a melee weapon.

 

Besides that, I would also point out a bug that has been happening to me ever since I bought the game. The Mojave Music Radio station does not play songs properly. It plays about 10 seconds of a song, then switches to another one which also plays for 10 seconds, then to another one and so on. All other stations work fine. When MMR is heard through a radio aside from the Pip-Boy and I switch to it, the song currently playing is played normally, but the next one is glitched.

 

Just mentioning these in case you know any advice. If I decide to play the game again despite the problems, I would like to be clear about this.