Hey all. I'm pretty experienced with modding Oblivion and Morrowind, and I've finally decided to get New Vegas. I have a general policy of not modding games on my first run-through, just to get a sense of where the dev team was at with their decision making (whether that's in terms of gameplay or aesthetics), but one thing has really been bugging me.

I've got all of my graphics settings cranked up to 11, but I'm still getting a lot of "pop-in" when it comes to trees and stuff. It usually happens on the edge of my screen as I'm turning. I know that not even vanilla Oblivion had this problem, so I'm hoping you can either give me a quick DIY fix or at least tell me what mod(s) I can use to fix the problem. I'm not looking for anything that's going to add a bunch of statics to distant land or anything, as I don't think my horrible CPU can handle the strain (for those of you familiar with RAEVWD for Oblivion, I have trouble running that on my modded install).

Thanks in advance for whatever help you can give

They should go up to 14-15. :mellow:

It's not a bug/glitch or anything, but grass & trees do have a very short (to me anyway) max. draw distance compared to your in-game vision capacity, so yeah, you can still see them 'pop in' all the time. You can alter the max draw distance past the default max via the .ini files but this can have a minor impact on performance (which is why I think they left it so short). I tend to leave grass off completely because I'd rather have no grass than see it 'pop in'.

Things like distant cliffs & some buildings/large objects will still sorta feel like they 'pop' in no matter what, because they have different texture qualities (near, far), so as you get closer the texture quality is altered and that change causes a 'pop' or fade-in like effect to the eye. So while you can alter the .ini settings to increase LOD for those, it's still going to do that because of the near/far textures. You could/can also alter how many "cells/grids" the game will render in higher quality around your character - that is, how far away the so-called 'high quality' textures will still appear, but this would/does have a fairly high impact on performance.

If you don't know how to mess with the .ini files, you can try this little program that makes it easy: http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=40442
Just be sure to copy/back up the original .ini files somewhere else, in case you want to put them back as they were & don't remember what all you changed etc.

Unless they're marked in the DistantLOD files, they won't appear in the distance. It's not a graphical setting.

Thank you for the response, very helpful

I did some tinkering and noticed that my issue was only related to distant land and LOD stuff (as opposed to actors, items, etc.), tweaked some of the settings in the ini file and haven't had a chance to really see the changes myself. Walking around Primm gives me no noticeable drop in framerate though, so hopefully we're looking good.

Two other questions: how much of a performance hit can I expect if I increase the uGridsToLoad setting? Will it affect my CPU or my GPU primarily?

EDIT:

Is there a mod that tweaks DistandLOD files, or is that more of a DIY thing?

That I'm not sure about, although I'd suspect it'd be a bigger load on the GPU.
I have a pretty good rig (i7-920, nvidia 275GTX, 12RAM etc) and when I increased it from 5 to 7, I seemed to have an average FPS drop of about 10-15. So if you can handle the fps drop, play away. But I didn't notice that much graphical change either. I never tried it on the max possible setting.


Not any that are good, that I've found. There are hi-res texture mods but most deal with things like roads and items & don't affect the far-away texture fade in much.
The problem is if you create very hi-res textures for everything around you, that WILL affect performance, particularly loading times, very substantially, even on a good rig.

Why TES4LodGen was never ported for Fallout anyway?

Careful with the grids to load, there have been reports with Instabilities setting gridstoload past 5

Most of this is essentially due to the horrible game engine the game runs on.