SKYRIMLE Bethesda Performance Textures - Armor - Clothes - Weapons

[Nearox]

In my quest for optimizing vanilla and DLC textures, I stumbled upon this mod which I believe hasn't been discussed here yet.

 

Bethesda Performance Textures - Armor - Clothes - Weapons

 

I guess it could be an interesting mod for core STEP, seeing as the author declares he examined every texture independently and optimized accordingly. With minimal install effort, it could further reduce the load on basic systems. 

 

I'll try it out for some time and if it looks well, I may actually decided to stop using my own DDSopt 1k x .5k (which I applied to all vanilla textures). Instead, using said mod + the STEP mod Bethesda Hi-Res DLC Optimized should be a very good foundation to build upon for any mod list, imo, without the need for time-consuming (and for most users, difficult) DDSopt. I'm going to try and see where both mods overlap, and how they compare to eachother.

[Aiyen]

Its a nice compilation for people with very old machines, or just laptops.

For any computer with a semi decent graphics card then its a bit meh.

I am still not entirely convinced that it is required to go so low in resolutions to maintain stability. But that is a discussion for another thread!

 

The main benefit from this is that then people do not have to go about and use DDSopt themselves, since someone else have already done it, and uploaded it. Would help the people who are really keen on just getting playing with a minimal amount of fuss.

[Nearox]

I'm not convinced either whether it is necessary for stability, but in the last hour I have personally not perceived a difference between DDSopted Vanilla/DLC textures (from the DDSopt optimization guide, standard quality settings 1k textures & .5k normals) and Besthesda Performance Textures. On the contrary, some of the textures from the mod actually look better than DDSopt standard quality settings. Notwithstanding the fact that the normals from the mod are generally not halved, this is also because the author has optimized color balance and contrast of individual textures as well. What I personally also really like is that he scaled textures based on the size needed, thereby reducing load while minimizing quality loss. Personally I just think he did a really good job.

 

Textures are scaled appropriately to the size of the item. Armors and clothes are resized to 1024x1024, while helmets/hats, boots/shoes, gauntlets/gloves are resized to 512x512. Most shields are 1024x1024 (some odd sizes due to texture dimensions). Large weapons (longswords, warhammers, etc.) are 1024x1024, while swords and axes are 768x768. Daggers are 512x512 (with a few exceptions for unique weapons).

When I place the mod in my SR install, right after the unofficial high-res patch, a total of 1018 textures are provided by this mod (overwriting my DDSopted textures of vanilla/dlc) while 559 are provided by others (amidianborn etc). A substantial part of the 1018 textures in the list is enemy npc stuff like falmer/forsworn/nordic etc. of which I find it hard to notice the quality difference anyways as I am usually fighting these mobs.

 

Anyways, I'm really not holding a sales pitch here but just stating that at first glance I am really liking this pack :)

[egocarib]

I have also been impressed by these in my own gameplay. I'm running on a lower-end machine (hopefully will be remedied soon :) - but in the meantime...), after installing much of the STEP 2.2.7, I've noticed some long loading screens and slight stuttering, so still looking for ways to continue to optimize.

 

Anyone know how these compare with Bethesda Hi-Res DLC Optimized, both in terms of quality and size? It's also probably worth noting that the author of this pack has since released another set of textures for Animals and Creatures which appear to be of equal quality. I used both his packs during my last playthrough before installing STEP, and was impressed with them. I realize they're lower quality than the main STEP recommendations, of course.

[CaBaL]

did not try the mod ... but for general guideline:

main difference between manual resize of files one by one and ddsopt pass is visible in the blue channel of normal maps mostly... manual resize does a better job in this sense preserving 100% of blue channel data while ddsopt tends to erase halftones in blue channel.

on the other side color maps resize is better in ddsopt , smoother and less pixelate. must be also said that ddsopt increase mipmaps, so a better render of objects from distance.

a possible solution could be to keep normal maps resized manually and let ddsopt work on diffuse maps and enviromental masks .

presence of eventual parallax maps reduces a lot the problem of missing or messed blue channel from normal maps in ddsopt ,in case of parallax visibility of problem tends to 0

[alt3rn1ty]

Version 3 of this is now on the streets

 

Gamwich has eradicated the last of the non-power of two textures which were previously included, and done a heap more work besides.

[FuzzRocket9]

I'm downloading this and the animals and creatures pack, I can't wait to run this with Warzones 2k15 one of these days!

 

I gotta uninstall the Bellyaches mod from STEP Core to see the complete changes of the animals/creatures mod. I hope they're better!

 

Btw, I just discovered this mod and I know more exist! Please share them. Optimized Vanilla Textures is another good one.

Edited January 25, 2015 by FuzzRocket9

[Harpalus]

I quite like the Bethesda Performance Textures. I use just about all of them. I don't even have a particularly weak graphics card: I just think that the textures are quite good, and so far every time I've compared one of them to a different mod's textures I either like Gamwich's textures more, or I like them equally (in which case I prefer the option that uses less VRAM). I think this texture series would be a good choice for STEP, personally - it also simplified the texture list from STEP Extended somewhat. It also covers some textures that even STEP Extended doesn't touch (like the Dragon Priest masks).

Edited February 27, 2015 by Harpalus