Skyrim Polycount

[FlyIgnite]

Does increasing the polycount hurt skyrims performance? i am download SMIM and i want to know if performance will be hit or not.

[VikingPrince]

Increased polygon count will always have an effect on performance. The more polygons the game has to render the more work it has to do.

 

Whether you'll actually see the hit is another story. It's entirely dependent upon your machine's specs.

[VanKrill]

Because bethsda wanted their product available to a wide audience, they actually required their mod artists to keep polycounts low in their work, so the vanilla game is quite low, by today's hardware standards, in average, vanilla cell defined polycounts.

 

But, players will load up high Res everything mods, which includes both textures of large size, 4K+ and high polycount meshes, for silly things like buckets or candles!

 

Why?

 

If its not an object that you're going to spending allot of time admiring ( like a pretty girl, hence an improved skin texture and better body mesh) then don't load the mod which boosts up Resolution, just because you can.

 

 

When it comes to computer back plain through put from the hard-drive to the graphics card, the Textures, because of their large size, are actually a much larger performance problem, than the high res meshes with high polycounts.

 

The graphics card will be impacted by poly count, but most "high Res" mods focus more on textures, and improved poly count meshes take allot more skill to make. So, the number of mods with high poly counts is low enough, and the skill and knowledge of the mod makers who are making high poly count meshes, enough higher, that high poly counts is usually not the source of low frame rates.

 

In short, the people who can, know better.

 

 

Once your game is overloaded with high poly meshes and large textures, reducing it back down to good performance is a long and laborious task.

 

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Edited May 3, 2017 by VanKrill