Is the Texture Optimisation Project going to help...

[GenkiM]

This is a picture of my GPU performance with NAC Enhancer ENB 0.2 enabled then disabled.

 

I'm getting, I think probably less than 30 frames a second with it enabled. :confused:

 

Will the texture optimisation project get me back below the 100% GPU line with NAC Enhancer enabled? https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/978

 

Is it worth me installing it?

Edited August 22, 2018 by GenkiM

[GenkiM]

I'm dropping from a solid 60 fps to a stuttering 48 fps jut by enabling NAC Enhancer ENB 0.2

 

It just looks so good I think I'm going to try using the optimised textures.

[payl0ad]

You seem to be misunderstanding how some of this works.

 

First, high GPU usage is good because it means the game is making efficient use of video hardware. It could literally not run faster on your rig than your video card allows.

 

Second, the GPU doesn't necessarily benefit from smaller textures because drawing textures on a surface isn't exactly expensive and scales really well with high pixel counts to project on a surface. That means a frame will take a little longer to calculate with HD textures but it doesn't scale linearly. You essentially lose almost nothing from quadrupling (2K->4K) texture resolution if all textures can fit into the fast memory on your video card.

 

Third, ENB runs practically entirely on the GPU and does pretty expensive stuff to boot. If you get 60 fps at 100% GPU utilization you're good. You don't need more than 60 fps and everything is running at full possible speed.

 

Fourth, you are some of the unlucky dudes who bought a GTX 970, which was equipped with 3.5 GB of fast VRAM and 512 MB of slow VRAM, which means you'll have stuttering if you test your VRAM limits. However, the vanilla textures should be perfectly fine for that, you don't generally need to lower their resolution (which is what TOP does). Just don't use higher resolutions than vanilla. Maybe post a screenshot of the GPU tab of Task Manager.

 

Your rig does hit 100% at 60 fps after all. That's a good thing. If it drops below 60, your GPU load goes down because the rest of the rig can't feed it enough data so it sits idle for ~25% of the time and does nothing. That's perfectly normal for FO4 though, game really pushes the limits of what Creation Engine is able to do.

Edited August 22, 2018 by payl0ad

[GenkiM]

You seem to be misunderstanding how some of this works.

 

First, high GPU usage is good because it means the game is making efficient use of video hardware. It could literally not run faster on your rig than your video card allows.

 

Second, the GPU doesn't necessarily benefit from smaller textures because drawing textures on a surface isn't exactly expensive and scales really well with high pixel counts to project on a surface. That means a frame will take a little longer to calculate with HD textures but it doesn't scale linearly. You essentially lose almost nothing from quadrupling (2K->4K) texture resolution if all textures can fit into the fast memory on your video card.

 

Third, ENB runs practically entirely on the GPU and does pretty expensive stuff to boot. If you get 60 fps at 100% GPU utilization you're good. You don't need more than 60 fps and everything is running at full possible speed.

 

Fourth, you are some of the unlucky dudes who bought a GTX 970, which was equipped with 3.5 GB of fast VRAM and 512 MB of slow VRAM, which means you'll have stuttering if you test your VRAM limits. However, the vanilla textures should be perfectly fine for that, you don't generally need to lower their resolution (which is what TOP does). Just don't use higher resolutions than vanilla. Maybe post a screenshot of the GPU tab of Task Manager.

 

Your rig does hit 100% at 60 fps after all. That's a good thing. If it drops below 60, your GPU load goes down because the rest of the rig can't feed it enough data so it sits idle for ~25% of the time and does nothing. That's perfectly normal for FO4 though, game really pushes the limits of what Creation Engine is able to do.

 

Thanks, I tried optimising the textures but it didn't work out and now everything in my game is purple and pink.

 

The thing is when I enable the NAC Enhancer (the optional plug in) it exceeds my card's processing power. I'm running at a solid 60fps with NAC but when I enable the additional NAC Enhancer it maxes out the processor and drops to a stuttering 48fps average.

 

I'm not sure it's the memory issue, as I did boot it up again with the GPU tab selected and it was the 3D section that was maxed out; the memory looked fine. But I just copied the backup textures back to my game file and I'm about to boot the game up to see if it's back to how it was, so I'll get a picture with the GPU tab selected and post it.

 

I wasn't sure if optimising the textures would actually do anything but I thought I'd at least give it a try; I'm really disappointed it just failed so badly. :/

Edited August 22, 2018 by GenkiM

[GenkiM]

Here's a picture of the GPU performance tab from Task Manager.

 

The dip in the 3D section shows F04 running with NAC running but with NAC enhancer turned off.

 

It launches with it on, I turned it off for about 15 seconds, then turned it back on again. The memory seems absolutely unaffected by the change. It's just the GPU that's maxing out with it activated.

 

Was hoping the lower textures might help but it's about a 12fps drop I'm experiencing (from a consistent 60fps (due to V-synch I guess) down to 48fps with constant stuttering) so it was probably just wishful thinking :/

 

 

 

EDIT: Okay, well, I used the BAT file installer to install optimised textures and it worked, so I've now got optimised textures and it has given me more overhead, but not enough to run NAC Enhancer comfortably with my GTX 970, which is also a factory overclocked model (I've not been able to increase the overclock on it without the FPS actually dropping).

 

I'm going to try Subtle, and also Decent ENB as it's supposed to be optimised for performance and not so resource intensive but in any event I'm probably going to stick with NAC at least , just without NAC Enhancer as an ENB. :/

Edited August 23, 2018 by GenkiM

[GenkiM]

Okay, so I screwed up. I was running NAC Enhancer on top of the NAC stand alone presets. That sent my frame rate through the roof.

 

It only occurred to me when I installed another ENB that it might have been necessary for me to not choose the NAC stand alone settings.

 

Now with reduced textures, NAC set to non-stand alone settings and NAC Enhancer activated, this is how my graphics card performance graph is reading (it's a GTX 970 but, it's a factory overclocked GTX 970, so, your milage may vary)...

 

 

Not sure how much of a difference the optimised textures made to the processor load but I'm going to swap those files back in to see what kind of difference it makes. I'm tempted to add CBBE, if the extra polygons don't max out my processor.

 

Edit: Seems the optimised textures do make all the difference. Without them I'm back to 100% on the processor and a stuttering 48fps. A definite endorsement for the Fallout 4 - Texture Optimization Project and Bat File Installer for Fallout 4 - Texture Optimization Project. Also, NAC with NAC Enhancer looks fantastic.

My GPU Graphs with Vanilla (non-optimised) textures and NAC with NAC Enhancer enabled (NAC Stand Alone configuration not enabled)...

 

Edited August 23, 2018 by GenkiM

[GenkiM]

I've managed to eke out a little more headroom with my Factory Overclocked GTX 970 by manually tweaking the overclock. It's just about a stable 60fps now, with a little bit of mild stutter here and there. It's just about nudging by.

 

I'm going to try and push it a little higher but I'm more or less at the limit of what this card is capable of. When I press the Print Screen button, to get a screen shot, it crashes. :tongue:

 

The increase on the core clock graph (the step up to 1585 Mhz) is the transition from the load menu to the game.

 

 

Edited August 23, 2018 by GenkiM

[payl0ad]

I've taken a short look at that BAT installer and all it seems to do is repack the vanilla texture archives as DDS-type archives which might fix some streaming issues if the vanilla archives are packed as General archives. So it shouldn't have any effect on VRAM usage, which is in line with your screenshots: It has no measurable effect on your video card load. How it manages to gain you FPS headroom is beyond me, it shouldn't. You're also not crossing the 3.5 GB threshold so the stutters are not related to the specifics of the 970.

 

Again, maxed out GPU usage is good. It's exactly what you want.

 

ENB is more or less incompatible with these tweaking tools. Use either Afterburner or ENB. This might already be why ENB/NAC Enhancer hits you so hard. But I can tell you from experience that pretty much any good ENB hits me for ~10 fps on a GTX 980, while using optimized textures gains me nothing. Same as how HD textures don't cost me anything measurable.

 

Is there a specific reason why your CPU doesn't scale up to 4 GHz when the game is running? I have the 4790 non-K and as soon as FO4 starts the CPU clocks up to 4 GHz from the same base 3.6. That should have a noticeable impact as your bottleneck is pretty much always your CPU. FO4 runs its renderer in a single thread so you're limited by raw clock rate, core count doesn't matter beyond 4.

[GenkiM]

I've taken a short look at that BAT installer and all it seems to do is repack the vanilla texture archives as DDS-type archives which might fix some streaming issues if the vanilla archives are packed as General archives. So it shouldn't have any effect on VRAM usage, which is in line with your screenshots: It has no measurable effect on your video card load. How it manages to gain you FPS headroom is beyond me, it shouldn't. You're also not crossing the 3.5 GB threshold so the stutters are not related to the specifics of the 970.

 

Again, maxed out GPU usage is good. It's exactly what you want.

 

ENB is more or less incompatible with these tweaking tools. Use either Afterburner or ENB. This might already be why ENB/NAC Enhancer hits you so hard. But I can tell you from experience that pretty much any good ENB hits me for ~10 fps on a GTX 980, while using optimized textures gains me nothing. Same as how HD textures don't cost me anything measurable.

 

Is there a specific reason why your CPU doesn't scale up to 4 GHz when the game is running? I have the 4790 non-K and as soon as FO4 starts the CPU clocks up to 4 GHz from the same base 3.6. That should have a noticeable impact as your bottleneck is pretty much always your CPU. FO4 runs its renderer in a single thread so you're limited by raw clock rate, core count doesn't matter beyond 4.

 

I'm not really sure what's going on with it, I'm just going by the readings I'm getting from the Performance tab of Task Manager and how smoothly the game's running.

 

But one thing I am experiencing is the frame rate seems to be settling and stabilising and the GPU overhead seems to be growing the more I play. I've been increasing the Memory Clock incrementally, so that's another variable but I'm not sure that that would affect the GPU processor load.

 

As for the BAT file I kind of assumed it had some sort of secret sauce, because after overwriting the optimised textures with the original textures to get a comparison, I copied the optimised textures back into the folder and seemed to get a reduction in performance compared to when the BAT file wrote them to the folder; so much so that I went through the batch file process again, and even had it "optimise" the two texture files that it doesn't actually update, just because the process itself seemed to add something to the optimisation.

 

That being said, I didn't really run FO4 for long with the re-pasted optimised files before I ran the Bat Process again; I mean it was more or less instantly that I did that, so, maybe it's just the limited sample size that renders what I'm reporting as anecdotal at best. That could be the case, given the increasing overhead I'm seeing as I play; maybe it is something to do with the streaming efficiency of the files, but I really don't know; that's outside of my understanding.

 

As for why my CPU isn't ramping up, I've no idea I just assumed it didn't need to? FO4 doesn't really seem to be touching it; I thought my main bottleneck was the processor on my GPU.

 

But yeah, I'm not sure how it's all working out this way but the GPU overhead seems to have increased, or at least smoothed out, as I've played.

 

Edited August 23, 2018 by GenkiM

[payl0ad]

You still don't understand how to optimize the game. Let me try to help out:

 

If your GPU is firing at full power, 100% load, giving its literal best and you hit 60 fps you're at peak performance. That's your optimization target: Best visual fidelity at 1080p@60Hz. To achieve this, the game has to feed enough information into the rendering API (DirectX) so it tells the GPU to do stuff 100% of each clock cycle. Feeding the GPU is done by the CPU. So if your GPU load goes down and your frame rate does too, that's because your video card isn't fed enough data from the rest of the system. Your CPU in turn is bottlenecked by a million different factors. Disk latency is one of them (slow storage murders performance), driver overhead and API overhead too. And of course Creation Engine itself with its thousands of config switches. Some of those factors are out of your control (software overhead), some are not (game settings, disk latency).

 

Only if your frame rate drops and the GPU load stays at 100%, you're bottlenecked on the GPU. This is typically the case if you add postprocessing to a game that's running fine. ReShade for example.

 

Now, if you add ENB to your vanilla setup, most of its effects should cost you a few fps because ENB sits inside the application and mostly adds some step to the render pipeline, which makes each frame take some miliseconds longer to render (read: your frame rate is lowered). In some cases it doesn't because the system is running so efficiently that you were actually above 60 fps all the time and could buy more fidelity without violating your optimization target.

 

In short, do not try to optimize your GPU, it's able to crank out enough pixels to hit your performance target at 100% load. Optimize the rest that feeds your GPU.

 

Also, STOP. USING. AFTERBURNER. Boris (the author of ENB) mentions this specific software as incompatible with ENB.

Edited August 23, 2018 by payl0ad