DDSOpt (by Ethatron)

[stoppingby4now]

Discussion thread:

DDSOpt by Ethatron

Wiki Link

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DDSopt is a tool which manages (preview & resizes) and recompresses your DDS-files. It is an optimal tool for ensuring your textures are saved in the right format, to create high quality DDS-textures from your sources (PNG etc.) and to package down-scaled versions of your textures. It has been forked off NIFopt and both programm share the same underlying technology regarding DDSs and BSAs. It does everything BSAopt does, you don't need both tools.

[Gyro]

As an aside, it appears that DDSOpt uses hyperthreading (as monitored by Process Lasso; it appeared to be using both the four physical and four virtual cores).  So some of us folks with i7 chips are getting a little bit of Skyrim benefit out of them, which is exciting.

[GrantSP]

Since I now have a machine that can handle greater textures, I thought I'd have a look at the Optimised Textures either through DDSOpt or the pre-rolled versions on Nexus.

So first question.

According to the description on the Nexus page the following constraints were used to produce those textures:

 

yet according to the DDSOpt guide the constraints should be these:

 

So, which is the preferred setting?

[Kelmych]

There isn't uniform agreement on this. First, the only time there is a difference is with uncompressed textures; both constraint sets yield the same result with compressed textures. The first set of values reduces the size of uncompressed color maps, model space normal maps, and tangent space normal maps by 50%. Some users have said they have had corrupted model space normal map textures in a few cases using these constraints, while others feel that these evaluations are incorrect. A few (hopefully un-controversial) comments:

 

• there can sometimes be problems with DDSopt optimization of textures, with either set of constraints, that have only a single color; it collapses these into a 1x1 texture but some graphics editors and the creation kit can't always handle these collapsed textures properly.
• outside of the uncompressed small terrain textures in vanilla Skyrim (there are a large number of these), there are very few uncompressed textures in vanilla Skyrim or in mods. The differences between these constraint options don't affect many textures.
• the lower set does not change texture file size so it is "safer", but as I said some feel the R5G6B5 textures don't cause problems in the game and have the advantage of smaller texture file size
• Some users have said that the graphic editors they use can't handle R5G6B5 format textures properly. I haven't personally tested this, but I have found that some programs I use for displaying textures don't always handle it properly. I don't know whether the Creation Kit can handle this format because I haven't tried to use textures in the CK.

Personally I prefer the R5G6B5 textures because of the smaller size, but I always test the result when I use this.

[GrantSP]

Thank you. That being the case I will just grab the pre-rolled set from Nexus then.