Maxing Out FNV's Appearance...

[SargonV]

I've dabbled with New Vegas a couple of times, but I've just made a fresh install, and am ready to jump into it, but first I'd like some mod suggestions on maxing out the game's appearance. What kind of mods can I install that will up the visual detail and appeal? Thanks in advance.

[dubiousintent]

Please be aware that this is a 32-bit game designed for XBox as well as PCs from 2010. It has memory leaks and bottlenecks in the video pipeline as a result of those compromises. It is easy to go overboard with texture replacements that crash the game. While your hardware may support 4K graphics, the game won't for many large images.

 

Image size matters. A 4096 x 4096 image with 16 bit color resolution is 32 MB of data. If your screen is displaying 100 different models with textures that size, that's 3.2 GB of data just for the textures. Since a 32 bit program can only address up to 4 GB of data in total, you can see how trying to display a lot of high resolution models is going to run the game out of memory very quickly. (Thank you for the perspective madmongo.) Now, VRAM is not directly addressed by the program; it's controlled by the video card and can hide the actual addressing from the program, but you get the idea. If you are running on a laptop (which often doesn't have dedicated VRAM but uses system RAM for video instead) that is coming out of the memory available to the game.

 

Another thing to consider is that larger images take longer to pass through the video pipeline. When such larger sizes were not considered in the game design (and they weren't at the time), bottlenecks are to be expected.

There are basically two types of graphic improvements: foreground and background. Everything you see up close (such as weapons, armor, and NPC bodies) are "foreground". Their image sizes tend to be small as they are individual models. Everything in the middle to far distance is "background" (technically View While Distant/Level of Detail (VWD/LOD)). They encompass the entire horizon and their image sizes tend to be large. They both count against the video memory; choose between them carefully.

 

So, knock yourself out, but take it slow and test each texture addition.

 

-Dubious-

[JimboUK]

If you're going to use huge textures you'll want this https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/51670/ especially at high resolutions with a lot of AA, if you don't you could find yourself hitting the 4GB and crashing. As said this is an old game and it isn't designed to make use of modern hardware, installing on an SSD will help but that's about it, you'll find high end CPUs and GPUs aren't used to anywhere near their full capacity, you can find yourself stuttering and losing frames while your CPU and GPU are barely being used.

[SargonV]

Awesome, thanks for the feedback.

[dubiousintent]

I expanded upon the above response in the wiki article "Display resolution versus Image Size" if you care for more information.

 

-Dubious-

[JimboUK]

I expanded upon the above response in the wiki article "Display resolution versus Image Size" if you care for more information.

 

-Dubious-

 

That's an excellent addition, I think 4K is a waste at anything below 32 inch, I'm running the game at 4K on a 27 inch panel via DSR and it looks no different to 1440p, I'm only running it at that resolution for screenshots. I'm going to be connecting the PC to a 50 inch 4K TV this week, it'll be interesting to see what the image quality is like, the PPI is roughly equal to 1080p on a 27 inch panel.

[Radioactivelad]

If you have an Nvidia card, open up New Vegas' driver profile in Nvidia Inspector and change the ambient occlusion compatibility setting to Wolfenstien.

 

It gives more noticeable shading and isn't (as) glitchy as the default setting.