Low resolution/unloaded textures since the update

[S0VEREIGN]

Hello. So I've been having this problem since the new update, as per the title (see the bottom of this post for pics). I started noticing it shortly after installing the new update of the game and the new version of F4SE. I've tried many things to track down the problem and haven't been successful. I'll try to be as detailed as possible;

 

My pc specs:

GTX 1070

i7920 CPU @ 4GHz

12GB DDR3 in triple channel

1TB SSD

 

So firstly, while waiting for the new F4SE to come out (not knowing it would be released the same day) I followed the instructions in the link at the end of this paragraph to reinstall the previous version of the game executable so I could play with my current mods. Right after I'd done that the new F4SE came out, so I deleted the outdated .exe that I'd just downloaded and redownloaded the new one using that same method detailed in the reddit thread. Then I installed the new F4SE (with the installer version), but did so without uninstalling the old F4SE first. I'm not sure if that was an error or if it could cause this. However, I've since uninstalled F4SE multiple times and reinstalled it only to find the problem still present. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/611h5e/guide_how_to_download_older_versions_of_a_game_on/

 

Things I've tried:

 

• I play with the high resolution texture pack (along with some texture mods), so it was instantaneously noticeable to me that the textures were blurry and not loading properly. I'd previously had this problem after installing loads of texture pack mods and the official high resolution texture pack. That time, it turned out it was because I was using all 8GB of my 1070's VRAM, and I fixed the issue using the enblocal.ini setting to increase my effective VRAM to about 13GB. However, that's not what's causing it this time. I've been monitoring my VRAM and RAM usage, and they are both far, far lower than what they were before this problem began. FO4 is using about 3GB of RAM at most, and only 3-4GB of VRAM is being used. That says to me that the textures, or at least the high res, close up versions of them, simply aren't being loaded into memory, as just yesterday my usage would have been all 8GB of the VRAM plus 6GB or more of RAM used by the FO4 application.
• After making note of this, the first thing I did was uninstall and reinstall F4SE. Then I uninstalled it again and reinstalled it manually with the 7z archive. No change.
• After that I tried uninstalling some of the mods I'd installed that same day. It was mostly small retextures of misc little items that shouldn't have had any effect on the large objects on which I was noticing these bad textures. I also had reinstalled DEF_UI and Valdacil's sorting that day just because I wanted to alter how things were being sorted. I uninstalled those as well just in case they were the cause. I also uninstalled the updated version of MCM that came out for the new game update. None of that fixed the problem.
• I tried opening the vanilla launcher to check the settings and noticed textures were set to medium for some reason, so I flicked the .ini's back to writeable and saved the settings with the textures set back to Ultra. This too made no difference.
• I tried turning on the mipmap fix in the FO4 config tool, and that didn't change it. I also noticed that when I turn on the mipmap fix in the config tool, my texture settings in the vanilla launcher will revert back to medium. Not sure if that's normal behaviour or some sort of bug.
• Next I tried verifying the integrity of game files in steam. Steam said some files failed to validate and it would reacquire them, which to my surprise was about a 4.5GB download. This was after the 1.10.75 update had already been applied. Alas, that didn't fix the problem.
• I've tried uninstalling the official high res texture pack and my larger texture pack mods like Langley's HD Textures Workshop and Valius' High Resolution Texture Pack.
• I've tried deleting all the .ini's for FO4 in my documents, along with fallout4preferences.ini in the installation folder, and letting the game create them again.
• I've checked for NMM updates.

 

What to do?

 

I'm not really sure what else to try. I'm also not sure if it was something I did or something caused by the update. At this point, I've got the official high res texture pack downloading again and steam consistently tells me that all game files are successfully validating, but the problem still persists. I've also tried just launching the game through the vanilla launcher, and the problem is still there.

 

• Could this be some sort of problem with ENB? Does ENB need to be updated for every new version like F4SE does?
• Is my install f***ed? Do I need to just delete the whole game and reinstall it all?

 

Example pics

 

Couldn't figure out how to embed pics in the post so just go to this imgur link: https://imgur.com/a/vkVZm

It has a few examples of the really poor looking textures.

 

A couple of things to note. You can see that the modded and vanilla terminals look different, so the game is clearly still retaining modded textures, but not displaying them at full resolution. You may not think the modded one looks so bad, but if you compare my modded terminal screenshot to the examples at https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/2154 you can see just how detailed it's meant to be, and how big of a difference there is.

You may also think the bed mattress doesn't look too bad at first glance, but with the high res texture pack you're supposed to be able to see that blue/white checkered pattern along the edge of it to a really crisp, detailed degree, which is how it used to show in my game.

Edited March 4, 2018 by S0VEREIGN

[Axiom5]

after the 1.10.75 patch, I also ran into this issue where many of my mods were not working and had patchwork meshes and textures. The f4se required updating. After this I tried reinstalling a couple mods that the f4se said were not at the right level. Still low resolution persisted.

 

I went back to the base file updates needed for modding.

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Fallout_4_Mod_Installation

 

How to enable modding

1. Navigate to your Fallout 4 Folder at the following location "Documents/My Games/Fallout 4"
2. Within this folder you'll find a number of .ini files.
3. Open (or create, if missing) Fallout4Custom.ini with your favourite text editor (we use Notepad++).
4. Add the following lines to your Fallout4Custom.ini [Archive] bInvalidateOlderFiles=1 sResourceDataDirsFinal=
5. Save and close Fallout4Custom.ini

Surprise, it started working again. I hope this helps.

[S0VEREIGN]

after the 1.10.75 patch, I also ran into this issue where many of my mods were not working and had patchwork meshes and textures. The f4se required updating. After this I tried reinstalling a couple mods that the f4se said were not at the right level. Still low resolution persisted.

 

I went back to the base file updates needed for modding.

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Fallout_4_Mod_Installation

 

How to enable modding

1. Navigate to your Fallout 4 Folder at the following location "Documents/My Games/Fallout 4"
2. Within this folder you'll find a number of .ini files.
3. Open (or create, if missing) Fallout4Custom.ini with your favourite text editor (we use Notepad++).
4. Add the following lines to your Fallout4Custom.ini [Archive] bInvalidateOlderFiles=1 sResourceDataDirsFinal=
5. Save and close Fallout4Custom.ini

Surprise, it started working again. I hope this helps.

Yeah, I'd already done that unfortunately. After I deleted my .ini's and let the game recreate them, I went back into the FO4 config tool and ticked the boxes that make it add those lines to the .ini. My problem seems to be more that textures in general aren't loading, rather than specific mods not working.

[AGreatWeight]

This isn't caused by ENB or any ENB presets. The issue you're having is that the game isn't streaming the texture data correctly; texture streaming was something that was introduced in an update to the game somewhere in the first six months or so of it's release.. Unfortunately, it's an engine issue, but it can be aggravated by using too many 4k textures.

There's no tried and tested 'fix' for it, although you could try the following. Before launching Fallout4, make sure that there aren't any processes running in the background that can hog system resources; things like anti-malware/anti-virus software, overlay stuff from Steam, Nvidia etc. Basically free up as much of your system as possible. Make sure that if your Fallout4 install is on a HDD, that this drive isn't fragmented. With SSD's that shouldn't be as much of an issue. If you're using ENB, you could go into your enblocal.ini file and alter the VideoMemorySize= to a value more consistent with your hardware specs. Here's a link to a video by Tapioks explaining how to calculate the correct value to use based on your system specs... at the least it might reduce the chances of this texture issue happening whilst you play Fallout4.

 

Personally, I'd advise you to completely remove the 'HD' texture DLC, Bethesda did a terrible job & pretty much only upscaled the vanilla textures. There's plenty of texture overhauls mods available on Nexus that do a fantastic job.

[S0VEREIGN]

This isn't caused by ENB or any ENB presets. The issue you're having is that the game isn't streaming the texture data correctly; texture streaming was something that was introduced in an update to the game somewhere in the first six months or so of it's release.. Unfortunately, it's an engine issue, but it can be aggravated by using too many 4k textures.

There's no tried and tested 'fix' for it, although you could try the following. Before launching Fallout4, make sure that there aren't any processes running in the background that can hog system resources; things like anti-malware/anti-virus software, overlay stuff from Steam, Nvidia etc. Basically free up as much of your system as possible. Make sure that if your Fallout4 install is on a HDD, that this drive isn't fragmented. With SSD's that shouldn't be as much of an issue. If you're using ENB, you could go into your enblocal.ini file and alter the VideoMemorySize= to a value more consistent with your hardware specs. Here's a link to a video by Tapioks explaining how to calculate the correct value to use based on your system specs... at the least it might reduce the chances of this texture issue happening whilst you play Fallout4.

 

Personally, I'd advise you to completely remove the 'HD' texture DLC, Bethesda did a terrible job & pretty much only upscaled the vanilla textures. There's plenty of texture overhauls mods available on Nexus that do a fantastic job.

I believe I've already tried everything you mentioned there... The only resource hogging program I frequently use is chrome, and I've been making sure not to run it while gaming since I applied the enb vram fix.

 

My games library is on an SSD that is optimised/trimmed regularly.

 

As for the enblocal.ini memory allocation, the value I'm already using is what I determined to be suitable for my PC's specs, as per the instructions in that video. I figured 2GB for windows, 4GB for the FO4 application which is about the most it seems to use on its own, and 1GB extra to be on the safe side. That totals 7GB to be left free. With my 8GB of VRAM and 12GB of RAM, I have 20GB in total, which minus 7GB leaves 13GB; the value I used for enblocal.ini. This did fix the texture streaming issues I was having the first time it happened (about 2 weeks ago) after installing the high res texture pack and various mod texture packs. However, as I said, it seems that this time the issue is not memory. From my monitoring of RAM and VRAM usage, the amount of memory being used now (with the texture streaming issue) is down to about half of what it was before the issue started. That is to say, the game and textures aren't using much memory, so it is as though it's not loading the higher resolution textures onto memory at all, rather than attempting to do so and running out of space.

 

Also, this is something that's happening instantly, as soon as the game starts. It's not as though the game runs for a while and then the issue starts happening when memory usage gets too high. It just isn't loading them properly from the get go.

 

On the high res texture pack, the reason I installed it and left it installed is I did notice a fairly large improvement in detail on many different objects. For example, here (https://imgur.com/a/MeqgF) the first picture is vanilla and in the second I'm using the high res texture pack. From a quality perspective, it's better to have a set of highly detailed textures as the base, and then further alter those with mods to change or improve the look, if you want to. Also, as I said, I've tried removing the the official high res texture pack and most of my texture packs from mods, but the issue is still present. This, added to the fact that the memory usage is low, leads me to believe the problem isn't being caused by too many large textures. Even when reduced to its vanilla state, without the official high res texture pack and with no texture mods, the game is still having this issue. And I know for a fact my card has more than enough beef to handle vanilla FO4 without any problem.

 

Sigh. I guess I'm going to have to reinstall the game. Doesn't look like there's anything more I can do...

Edited March 4, 2018 by S0VEREIGN

[AGreatWeight]

The ironic part of this is that Bethesda implimented texture streaming in order to improve performance; judging from my own experience of this, as well as all the forum posts discussing this exact problem over the last 18 months or so, it's actually had the opposite effect. The image you shared illustrates the problem, the full size textures not replacing the mipmaps.

I had to reinstall Fallout4 on a new drive towards the end of last year due to a hard drive failure, and since then I've not experienced this issue (so far) Hopefully it stays that way, and that reinstalling the game from scratch (at least until a more permanent solution is found) helps you out.

[S0VEREIGN]

I reinstalled the game from scratch and it has indeed solved the issue. Not only that, but my game is now running better than ever - better than it ever did in its unmodded state before. I also decided to take your advice in removing the high res texture pack. I figured, even if it does slightly improve the visuals, the difference is indeed very slight, and the cost of that is going from ~3GB of VRAM usage to over 7GB on average. I can fully retexture just about every item in the game with mods, have it looking considerably better than the high res texture pack does, and also have the game using less VRAM in the process.

 

Anyway... I'm now encountering another problem, lol. The same thing mentioned in these threads:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/discussions/0/135508489638286537/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/discussions/0/365172408526815525/

https://bethesda.net/community/topic/25727/shadow-rendering-glitch

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/4636120-fallout-4-weird-lighting-bug-on-guns/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxBuTodCnCw

 

Basically, when using long guns like the hunting rifle with the long barrel, the game will not render shadows on the tip of the weapon when you're facing any direction between south and west. It's like the sun continues shining on the tip of the weapon (assuming it's day time), but it does so regardless of where you are. You could be behind a shadowed wall, or even in a building under a roof as long as you're still in an exterior cell. I.e., somewhere where you could walk back outside into the expanse of the commonwealth without going through a loading screen. The only time it doesn't happen is when you're in an interior cell.

 

I'm not sure what causes this, or if it's a new bug in my game or something that was always there. It's the kind of bug you could easily not notice if you're not paying conscious attention to the patterns of shadows on your weapon when moving around. I've tried running without mods, verifying game cache, reinstalling the game and running with mods, reinstalling the game and running without mods, and deleting the .ini's, and none of these fixed the issue. A commenter on that youtube video mentioned that you can increase fBlendSplitDirShadow (in fallout4prefs.ini). Doing this does cause the tip of your weapon to start getting properly shadowed again (although you have to increase it to like 700+ for this to work), but it introduces a similar lack-of-shadow bug on your hands instead of the tip of the weapon. I'm not sure what that setting actually does but it's not a "solution" as such.