Is there a mod that lowers the resolution of walls?

[Delnar_Ersike]

As the title says, is there a mod that replaces the stock Oblivion wall textures with a lower resolution one?

 

My scenario is the following:

Recently, I moved overseas (from the US to Europe), and my main desktop rig is stuck with the rest of my stuff on a cargo boat. While my desktop is waiting inside a box for another month or so, I have the company of my working, though crappy, laptop. Oblivion ran beautifully on my desktop, and so I decided to try and get it to run on my current hardware, which is composed of a dated 2.13Ghz Pentium M, 1.5GB, and an even more dated Intel 900GMA.

 

It's a wonder I even got Oblivion running without crashes, thanks to the help of numerous performance mods, mainly Oldblivion. The thing is that while the game normally runs at a smooth framerate (albeit graphics that are sometimes worse than Morrowind's were), it gets HUGE framerate hits (drops from ~30 FPS to ~2 FPS) whenever anything resembling walls is on screen. I am not talking about the tiny little wall textures inside dungeons: I am talking about the textures on the outside of buildings and the outside of the city walls. Even if I reduce the textures to small size, I still get huge performance hits near the outside of any settlement (from the big Imperial City to the tiny Weynon Priory).

 

Is there any mod that reduces the resolution of such textures? FYI, Wiseman's Texture Pack does not reduce the texture sizes of walls. And if there isn't any mod like that, can anyone tell me how to extract the stock small textures from Oblivion, and say, reduce them by half their original resolutions?

[Vagrant0]

Try oldblivion.

 

There aren't many mods which use smaller textures since most aren't trying to run the game on a computer that can't handle it, and more often than not, smaller textures would only result in the game looking bad. Something like this, you would probably need to do yourself.

 

I can't seem to find any hardware specs for your videocard, but would guess the issue lies with the actual architecture of the chipset and how Oblivion makes use of vertex shaders on almost everything. It may even be something with the type of lighting you are using (HDR/Bloom)

[Exodus1161]

Try oldblivion.

 

he's got that

thanks to the help of numerous performance mods, mainly Oldblivion.

 

no i don't know of any such mods that decrease the quality of any stock oblivion feature. I dont think they would exist.

[Delnar_Ersike]

Well, the other mods I use include operation optimization, all of the unofficial oblivion patches, Hmnr's Script Optimizer, De-parallaxer, RGB's low-low poly grass and low poly trees, Wiseman's Reduced Textures, no wind, etc.

 

Oh, and I've also got the resolution down to 800x600 (since many of my mods screw up at 640x480, plus it doesn't make a difference... well, it does, but only by about 1 FPS, which is not enough), the texture size already down to small, the LOD toned down a lot, removed VSync, removed HDR, removed Bloom, and disabled Ambient, Diffuse, and Specular Pass in the Oldblivion config. All of these put together make one of the ugliest version of Oblivion ever, but it's only to continue my last saved game until my desktop arrives (since the only part I took with me personally was my hard drive).

 

So now that I know that there is no mod that reduces the texture quality of walls (specifically walls), can anyone tell me how I should do it myself? I already have BSA commander and many image editors (like GIMP and Paint.NET), so all I need to know is which files to extract and replace, and anything else I should know about before I start tinkering with texture resolution sizes.

[Vagrant0]

Within the textures.bsa archive there are all the textures in the game listed.

 

Before going too crazy, you should peobably start with only one town and see if it helps any. For the most part the Imperial City seems the best choice since both the main walls as well as most buildings use only one main folder of textures. Which would be "\textures\architecture\imperialcity". Inside BSA commander, extract them all. There should be 237 or so files. There are a number of signs and other stuff within that group that you probably won't need to do anything with. For now, just resize the main textures, not the normal maps (notated by a _n).

 

Simply open the texture in Gimp or whatever, copy the entire area of the texture within the paint program, change the texture size to 1/2 what it is set at, then scale the copy to match. If the texture looks a bit too blocky, apply a slight blur to those areas. By keeping the normal maps the same size you won't be losing too much detail, but should notice some improved performance if this is a memory issue.

 

I would however be tempted to think that the problem lies in the actual card not being able to handle either DirectX9, normal maps, vertex shaders, or any of the other things very well. It's a computer for business, it isn't meant to be used to play games on, so the videocard is probably a fairly cheap one.