11/3/2023 0 Comments Gimp dds plugin texture size limitHow important is the correct format? By way of example I'm running a good 30 odd texture mods - some are large replacers (landscape, NPCs, clothing, armour, weapons for example) while others focus on particular areas (objects, architecture etc). And if you're an author, keep in mind that if your mod is too demanding people may elect not to use it - and if you made it to be shared and used, you're losing out from having your work bringing joy to the denizens of Skyrim (read: everyone!) Visual fidelity can be sacrificed in order to stay within the limits of video memory. Users are told to run at a lower resolution, or turn down their AA, to recover performance - but if the problem is a poorly packaged texture mod pushing you past your card's limit, then there may not be a need to do this at all. There may be users playing now with texture mods that don't realise the sudden FPS jumps and stuttering they're experiencing are due to taxed video memory on their cards.īut it's not just performance that takes a hit. When video memory reaches its limit, textures are streamed from main memory causing a huge performance loss. And given Skyrim is already more demanding memory wise than its predecessors, it's more important than ever to keep an eye on memory usage when using texture mods. Unfortunately texture mods, especially large ones, if saved using the wrong format can waste a lot of valuable video memory real estate. However I noticed, delving into the files, that some of them have textures saved in the wrong format, while others often forget mipmaps. There are so many texture mods of all makes and models that have been released so far, some of them fantastic and very professionally made. You either enable S3TC support or don’t play it.Disclaimer: I'm not actually a texture artist myself, though I have some limited experience manipulating textures (re: MMM), so those more knowledgeable than me please feel free to chime in! Then you have maps that are made with compressed hi-res textures (eg. This still leaves the issue of larger textures, where there is the possibility of miss-alignment if they are not perfect.ĭepending on the map you may not notice any problems, and it will never break a map. Since the newer video renderers became available, this is no longer a problem and they will display. Traditionally, mappers were told not to use compressed textures for editing because they would not display in UEd. This means users only have to enable/disable the setting, and can use the same packs. NOTES: Correctly made textures should have both standard and compressed “DXmerged” in the file. Simply ignoring the textures on CD2 and using the UTTexture packs instead will avoid any problems, and keeps things simple. The replacement textures do not compare to the two broken ones on CD2, so anything said about experience with broken textures can be ignored if you aren’t using them. This means I can happily edit with v436 and standard textures, and play with v451 and hi-res textures. Over the years I found it best to keep 2 installs.ġ clean and raw for editing, and another for playing and adding mods to. Generally DXT3 is best suited to images with sharp alpha transitions, between transparent and solid areas.īecause DXT5 uses an interpolated alpha scheme, it generally produces superior results for alpha (transparency) gradients than DXT3. Use DX1 for normal textures with no transparency. and have the textures at the original full photo-real quality.ĭo not use compression or mipmaps for interface/HUD images or map screenshots. You can prepare a full colour photo, or a transparent 24bit PNG or TIFF as a DDS in GIMP or Photoshop etc. The biggest advantage of using S3TC/DDS textures is that you are not forced to use 8bit 256 colour-mapped images. You can make large non-compressed textures, but it is not wise. Since the newer DX8+ renderers, Hi-res and compressed are not inclusive. Non-compressed will be 8bit – 256 coloursĬompressed will be 24 bit – 16,777,216 coloursĬompressed transparent images are 32 bit including alpha channel It has been standard since DirectX 6.0 and OpenGL 1.3 (via the GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc extension) What is the benefit of using compressed textures, and which should I use ?Īre they standard and will they break anything ?ĭDS = Direct Draw Surface – (File extension eg.
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