Swapping Installed Texture Packs?

[Vyperhate]

I'm trying to lower the quality of my installed texture packs in order to hopefully increase stability on my SR install without having to do it all over again. However the new textures aren't being used, the old higher res textures are still used even if I completely remove them from the mod list in MO. I'm pretty new to MO so I suppose I must be doing something wrong... Not sure how it even can use the old files, they aren't even in it's mod folder anymore... How can I get it to use the lower res textures instead of the higher res ones that were installed before?

[phazer11]

Make an archive of the files you optimized (in a folder of course) then add that to Mod Organizer, and follow the steps Neovalen explains in the Skyrim Revisited guide for adding SKSE to get the mod info correct. Then delete your old mod from Mod Organizer (making note of it's load order position number). Then place your optimized archive in place of the old textures in your load order.

[Vyperhate]

It's not working... I don't get it. How is it able to load and use the higher res textures when they are no longer in ANY of the MO folders that I can see? I've completely removed them from MO and they are still being used in-game. I can't even go back to vanilla textures. They load even if I deactivate and remove 2K Textures and Serious HD from MO.

[Neovalen]

Simply not possible my friend... as when you remove (i.e. delete) them from MO they are removed from your hard drive as well... so there is no way they can be loading. That is, unless you installed them manually to your data directory somehow?

[Vyperhate]

Yah I think I must have. Deleted the data folder and restored from a backup. Now it's working. No idea how that happened. :/

[Quahogs]

I have 16ram 2gvram. I'm about to undertake Step Revisited.

 

Textures: 2048x2048

Normal Maps: 1024x1024

Skyrim HD - 2K Textures

 

above are NEO's recommendations. I've been reading about people swapping out to 1024 because of a 3.1 ram issue ? Is this what they are referring too ? If that's the case will each of the textures have 1024 options ?

 

( I plan on going the CoT, RLO, RealV ENB route if that matters )

[EssArrBee]

No not everything has 1k option, but all the large texture packs that cover exteriors do. The interior stuff can be 2k.

[Quahogs]

No not everything has 1k option but all the large texture packs that cover exteriors do. The interior stuff can be 2k.

so as a rule of thumb to save possible headaches down the road is run 2048 interior and 1024 outdoors if they have them ?

[EssArrBee]

Yeah, but with texture packs you can just install over them with different versions. If you decide to go with the 2k version and start getting outdoor crashes, it could be the 3.1GB limit. Just uninstall the 2k version and install the 1k version and put it in the place of 2k version in you mod list.

[Kelmych]

I've been able to use 2K outdoor textures along with 1K compressed normal maps with 2Gb VRAM on my card. We've also been looking at the best way to handle uncompressed normal map textures when they are for outdoors; there aren't very many of these.

[Quahogs]

I've been able to use 2K outdoor textures along with 1K compressed normal maps with 2Gb VRAM on my card. We've also been looking at the best way to handle uncompressed normal map textures when they are for outdoors; there aren't very many of these.

SR Legendary has alot of optimizing compared to the prior v.  DDSOpt textures and normal maps - is this what you are referring to ?   I too have 16g ram and 2g vram.   Am I really biting off more that I and my system can chew trying to follow legendary or is all the optimizing creating a more stable platform ?

[Aiyen]

Optimizing is for both better performance and for better visual.

Some textures lack mip maps (Lower resolution of a texture that will be used when looked at further away). If they are not there then you will get increased "popping in" of textures.

The better performance comes with altering the compression of certain textures that suffer no visual difference by going to a higher compression (Less memory use). Less memory causes less stuttering potential.