Do textures affect FPS when not loaded?

[KazaiChan]

Okay, I may have phrased the title weirdly, but my question is the following:

 

When you are using a textures, obviously you can take a hit in your FPS. However, lets say you have an 8k texture in Riften, could that effect your frame rate while you're in Windhelm, or out in a forest somewhere? Does merely having loads of textures accumulate and potentially affect your FPS even if you're in a cell with no affected textures?

 

Thanks!

[VulcanTourist]

No, it's not "obvious": textures don't normally affect framerate. Textures require VRAM (on the graphics card), and if you don't have enough of it for the texture requirements of your modded game, you'll have worse to worry about than a reduced framerate. The only time textures could affect framerate is when the bandwidth of the VRAM is too anemic, but the Skyrim engine AFAIK doesn't perform any dynamic texture loading (like Empyrion and No Man's Sky, for instance), instead loading textures required for a cell during the "loading screen" at entry when framerate is not an issue.

 

Once textures are loaded into VRAM, they do not affect framerate.

[iXenite]

Games don't load all assets at once, so you'll never need to worry about something on the other side of the map causing performance problems. A variety of factors are in play in terms of how games cull certain things in an attempt to lessen system load while maintaining the illusion of a cohesive world. Skyrim, like all BGS titles, loads things in a grid pattern (5x5 grid around the player). Within those cells some AI packages will function (allowing NPC's to die without the player being there). It also has an affect on level of detail, which in the base game is severely culled. So you may see a building from very far away in Skyrim, but if you were to zoom in or just look closely you should see it's a much lower resolution version than what you normally see when you're close to it. A perfect example of this would be to look outside a cities walls - the "outside" is usually very bad looking but easy to miss if focused on what inside the city walls. Hopefully that made some sense.

Edited August 27, 2020 by DaddyDirection

[VulcanTourist]

It's not textures painted on models that cause framerate issues: it's the detail of the models themselves, the "meshes", that can and does affect framerate. Painting textures is normally not an especially intensive operation for recent generations of graphics cards, but 3D model meshes still are past a certain point. Some Skyrim mods threaten or blow right past that point, and used in combination, especially with high-resolution displays, they can have an obvious detrimental effect on framerate.

 

That isn't to imply that meshes are the only threat to framerate; far from it. Papyrus scripting, SKSE plugin DLLs, and especially broad application of physics can affect it as much or more.

Edited August 27, 2020 by VulcanTourist