stoppingby4now

An update for that ice would be awesome. I'm getting light reflection on my end both with Bethesda's textures as well as yours, which I'm assuming is due to you not modifying the meshes. But the reflections are very pixelated and look ugly. I'm also seeing what looks like ice between stones in the ground all over windhelm. In most places the reflections just don't look right.

Thanks for the update. While I agree with you that modders can do whatever they want with their mods, the inclusion of the extra game content was a sore spot for me. Is the extra content being removed completely, or is it going to be optional?

The 300 drivers support all cards, it just adds direct support for the 600 series. I have a 580, and I definitely notice smoother gameplay and increased FPS (release notes say it should be around 20%, and so far I'm seeing it).

I'm going to redo DDSopt tonight with just the vanilla and DLC and see what happens. The other thing I notice is when looking at the ice patches at an angle, reflections look great. When I get close, the reflection is very pixelated.

I'm a fan of the SRO textures as well, especially with grass and stone. I also loaded up SRO and did a test, and I'm getting proper reflections with it installed as well from the ice patches in Windhelm. I don't know what's going on, because indications are that my results and zMan's are swapped.

So I redid DDSopt. The only caveat is that I had applied Vano's Core files to the texture set, so that is still there. I don't have the extracted files without, so I'm going to redo that process and not apply Vano's to see if there is any difference. In any case, I'm still not getting any type of correction that you are seeing with those ice patches. I've lost all reflections on them, so in my case, the non DDSopt'ed versions look better. Snow looks normal again though:

I'll compare with DDSopt versions soon. Based on the position of the sun, not all patches are reflecting. But in the first image, look at the area just below the top stairs. The right most ice patch has a bright reflection. With the second image, I shifted to the left, and the right most patch, and two to its left are reflecting. I wasn't getting this prior to these drivers. Walking up to them reveals more reflection (which is more demonstrated in the 3rd picture).

This is very interesting. I installed the latest Beta drivers from nVidia, and wanted to see what kind of performance increase there was with the untouched textures and DLC. When looking at those areas that have always appeared smudged before...they actually look like what they were intended to be...ice patches, complete with light reflection.

@zManI did use your settings from this post rather than the ones in the guide for the constraints tab. So essentially, I don't need to do the steps using Compressonator at all, right? I must have missed, or it didn't sink in, about the MSE being a false negative. To recap what I did: Extracted textures and dcl01 & 02.Fixed paths/filename.Combined the dlc and the vanilla textures. Applied Vano's 00 Core files from his archive. Ran DDSopt with constraint settings that you provided in this thread. Ran compressonator to get the report. Used Excel to generate commands.Gathering from your post, I can drop 4, 6, and 7? EDIT: I wanted to run through this to see what the results were on my system. I have 3GB of VRAM, so I'm not worried about running out.

Completed the guide and just copied everything into the Data directory rather than packing it all. No other mods installed, and I have some different visual results. This first image is in a similar location in Windhelm from zMan's images. I'm still getting a lot of smudging. The second image is of the snow. It's exceptionally bright, and has extreme blue/purple tints to it.

DDSopt finished. When you said 1.5 - 4 hours, figured It'd be there for awhile, but took just over an hour. But I could not get the 64bit version of The Compressonator installed, so having to use the 32bit version. Also NOT a fan of it's windowing. I double clicked a file to check it out, then closed it thinking it was a new window...nope, had to re-compare all over again. And yes, I missed the note, but it should probably have the button name in there. EDIT: In step 6.4 the formula has extra information that creates an invalid path. ="del ""\textures"&A7&"""" should be ="del """&A7&""""

Sure, but you can't turn off everything, and it's still going to occur. Bottom line, safest recommendation for those with HDD's is to use one. SSD's are the way to go for maximum speed and to avoid the fragmentation problem.

Completely disabling the pagefile when using HDD's can still be detrimental to performance. Some Windows components force information out to the page file, and if one doesn't exist that information gets created as temp files, which further adds to the fragmentation problem.

+10 to zMan. I didn't even notice the setting.

+1 to zMan's comments. Having your page file that big won't cause performance problems, it's just unnecessary and a waste of disk space. But I'll also add that while putting your page file(s) on other disks is good for performance, it's still recommended to put a small amount on the C drive. Otherwise, Windows won't be able to write out debug information should you blue screen.

I agree with zMan, 400GB for a page file is not enabling your smooth play. While it doesn't hurt anything, that is a huge waste of disk space. With that much RAM, I would set the min and max to 6GB. If you wanted to be on the ultra safe side, you could go 8-10GB. I'll also through this out there. While there are articles that paint a picture on the benefits of having a min and a max for the page file to allow it to grow, it's a load of bull (I always set min/max to the same). You don't want the page file to adjust, as it leads to unwanted fragmentation. If the min value is set too low, it can lead to disk thrashing which is definitely detrimental to performance. In other words, for best performance, you never want the min to be exceeded.

That guide is in need of update ...It should not matter which HR pack overwrites the other, as there should be no overlap, so the end result will be the same I think. However, 02 traditionally overrides in-game, so maybe it is best to write over 01 with 02.Yep, go with the most recent Vano package. I have found some more textures in that pack compressed as DXT5 when they should be DXT1 (half the size), so I imagine he will update this when I let him know (probably will address specifically tonight). I'll have much more on DDSopt for SHD and SRO shortly. Testing both now and should finish tonight (if the wifey lets me ;)) I thought at first it was just going to be the directories that it asks to merge, but the copy hit a dds file which is why I asked. Stupid me didn't even think about load order and base it off that.

@zMan I'm going through your DDSopt guide, and step 4.2 you say to combine the directories from 01 and 02 and let them overwrite, but you don't say which one should overwrite the other. Also wanted to make sure I'm getting the right file for Vano's fixes. In step 2.2 you have a link to Textures BugFix ---FOR EVERY VERSION---, but the link no longer references a valid mod. The only file from the first link is Bethesda Hi-Res Optimized --FOR EVERY VERSION-- which is over 700MB in size. Should I go ahead and apply that one still?

I had the same problem at one point during testing, but it was when I had all AA/AF turned off and vsync disabled. If you are hitting the cap of your monitors refresh rate, you might try using the FPS limiter via nVidia Inspector to limit it to 60 FPS and see if that helps.

Thanks for the update, I'll play around with those settings. As for creating a video, you could try Cam Studio, or get an eval of Fraps.

Good find Ano, I created a new thread to track the mod individually.

Discussion thread: More Village Animals by MyGoodEye and Gopher Wiki Link Originally posted by Anosognos:I think More Village Animals by Michele Angelo would fit side-by-side with this one [birds and Flocks]. Similarly, it adds content which is technically interactive. With the mod, you could kill and skin two cows in a given settlement instead of just one. But cattle rustling clearly isn't the point of the mod. I suppose you could use it that way. I doubt that's how the average user would treat it, however. I'd call it graphic/immersion. BTW, it's a solid mod with no bugs that I've run into. It makes the towns and villages feel a bit more real. I suggest it along with Birds & Flocks.

Going to install the beta drivers myself and see if I experience the same.

I've only used that online tool once, and I had used all of the max settings just for grins, and my game wouldn't load. Would get a CTD before the loading screen had even finished displaying. Haven't used it since being turned onto Skyrim Configurator.

Thanks for the information skware. I'll probably give this a try once I get over 25.