Here's my theory (and this rings especially true with added texture packs):

When playing a non-open-world game such as... let's say a Quake deathmatch arena, the entire level can be loaded in RAM at match start and not have to change.

When playing a game like FO3, which never knows what direction you're going to spin around in and start running in at any given moment, it has to constantly head to the HDD to load up new textures.

As such, isn't it possible that the single greatest bottleneck to FO3 is actually ones hard drive?

I upgraded my video card from a 9500 GT to a GTX 460 and there wasn't that big of an improvement. I also hear my HD clattering much more than most games cause it to.

Do you have SATA drives? If so, then your already going as fast as you can there.
Also, a lot of mod makers make extraorinarily large textures to go with stuff and for the most part, its not necessary. I always go through and shrink them down. Some of those clothing and body textures are 30+MB each... So, yeah, it could cause some issues.

I'm 99.9% sure you are wrong about SATA drives being faster than Solid State Drives. Unless I took that out of context somehow.

If your video card has lots of video RAM, then hopefully it can keep more textures in RAM so it isn't pulling from memory all the time.

What I don't understand is that Microsoft has been shipping 64-bit operating systems for 8 years now, and game companies don't ship 64-bit binaries that can access more RAM.

Who said anything about Solid State Drives? You didn't.

It also depends on how much garbage you have running in the background, like anti-virus and other demanding processes that may be running.
I have a Radeon HD5770 and run at 1920x1080 with no problems at all on my SATA drive. The card has 1GB of GDDR5 memory which really helps.

dbl post

When you asked if I had SATA drives and followed up that question by saying "If so, that's as fast as you can go there", I assumed the "there" in question was hard drives. Since SSD drives were to my knowledge faster, that's why I brought them up.



Anyway, my whole premise is that the computer must constantly need to fetch NEW data from the HDD due to the open world type game play comprised in Fallout. So it didn't really matter what OLD data was already in ones Ram or video card memory if the game was polling for new data.

This was all just a hypothesis on my part. It seems to make sense to me. Of course, old data matters as well. If one stops moving and that data is already loaded up then that's that.

I'm curious:

1 what is the procedure you use for shrinking them down?

2. If you use Marts Mutant Mod, did you go and shrink those textures as well--I did notice big performance changes when I added that

Solid state drives are SATA

Ah, I see. I guess I heard them referenced so much in comparison to IDE, that when the term SSD came out I assumed it was a completely new thing.

I load the textures into Photoshop. Anything that is an outfit, I shrink to 1024x1024. Other 'accessory' items, I might shrink to 512x512 or 256x256. And if transparency is not needed, I save it as DXT1. Otherwise I save it as DXT3. I also make a new normal map as a DXT3.
And I only include 4 mip-maps. All this saves a lot of space and makes loading quicker with very little visual difference.

For example, the 'Skinny' body replacer, the texture for that is an unbelievable 85MB in size. That is way overkill and does not play nice with a lot of computers. I shrank that down to 5MB and its still a very high quality texture.

Are you referring to Dimonized bodies?

I remember he had an uncompressed version and a compressed version and explained why you might want the uncompressed instead of the compressed. I'm *hoping* the uncompressed was the 85 megabyte version if that's what you're referring to.

In any case I'm lucky enough to have a decent enough computer, because I space out upgrades one at a time so that it never really breaks the bank but it keeps me up to date.

I made this thread because I'm considering whether or not to get an SSD, CPU, Motherboard, or Motherboard + Ram (because to upgrade my Ram I would need a new MB). The only game I play is Fallout. I dabble in other games but I quickly lose interest because most games don't have enough content. I've got 35 gigabytes worth of content in my Data folder and it's keeping me busy.

No, the 'Skinny' body mod. The default texture is 85MB.

The most important thing to get is the best video card you can afford. I have 2GB memory, dual core intel 2.13Mhz, SATA hard drive for my games, and an awesome video card. My biggest performance gain was when I got the new video card. I can now play all options on and maxed with a 1920x1080 screen size.
For games, the video card is the most important thing you can invest in.

Well that's certainly not true. As mentioned, Solid State drives are much, much faster than SATA. They're currently the fastest drives that are available. You can also link SATA drives together into a RAID array, which can increase the transfer speed considerably. Having 2 on an array isn't quite twice as fast as a single SATA drive but fairly close.

Because the vast majority of the buying public are still using 32 bit OSs, and 64 bit programs won't run on them. Which means that a company would have to code a game twice, which isn't cost effective.

Sounds like the vast majority of the buying public is [censored] then. Jeesh, I'm a poor college student barely making it by and I still have a 64 bit cpu and OS. It's not like it's THAT expensive. It might have helped that the os was on sale for 100% off but w/e.

You can ship 64-bit and 32-bit binaries side by side and support both. Putting out a 64-bit binary doesn't mean that 32-bit users would be completely ignored.

I believe Half Life 2 ships with both for instance.

Microsoft has been shipping a 64-bit OS for 8 years now. And Microsoft started pushing OEMs to put out 64-bit by default with Vista. Not everyone did, but every Windows 7 PC I've ever seen has shipped with 64-bit.

32-bit Applications and OS's took years to catch on, just like it's taking for years for 64-bit applications to catch up. But the days are among us. Many many applications are now offered in both 32 and 64-bit. A few more years and it will be as ubiquitous as 32-bit.

As for the OP, the HDD isn't the biggest bottleneck in games. Like WillieSea said, it's the graphics card. If you want to improve performance, buy a good graphics card, next buy a good CPU (and tied into that is the motherborad -- the single most important component in a computer), then buy a good HDD or preferably, a SSD.

SATA is a device connection technology, not a device itself. Nowadays, I'd estimate that 100% of all currently shipping SSD's and HDD's use SATA. You can still find older drives out there that use the ol' ribbon cable (IDE) interface, but it is limited, and has reached it's maximum throughput. You cannot make an IDE connection any faster than it currently is.

There's really two types of stuttering which occur in heavily modded games. One is hard-drive stuttering, whereby the amount of data constantly being loaded cannot happen fast enough and the stuttering is the game waiting for it. Using lots of large texture packs / retextures as hi-rez is the usual culprit. Faster hard drives help here, the best being SSD on SATA.

The other stuttering is to do woth memory, both RAM and VRAM. Again this can be exacerbated by large textures, but not necessarily. Things like FSR, or just turning the graphics setting down can help, but ultimately more RAM and VRAM is the answer.

Using mods which add lots of extra creatures and especially NPCs can really hurt your system. This usuallly pushes the bottle neck onto your CPU as they're all running their radiant AI at once.

So really, lots of extra stuff running about, fighting, all using massive textures will cause stuttering

Aren't they just SSD? and i think are a lot more faster

There are solid state drives that connect to your computer on the SATA bus, although you can buy PCI ones too. But, yes, they are a lot faster than moving parts drives.
Typically Read 285MB/s, Write 275MB/s

Cough, let's not forget SATA II.

Anyway -- Bottlenecks are CPU and HDD, possibly RAM but who would know that anyway? The most bang for your buck for improving your system, if you don't have enough ram then you probably don't have good anything. People think it's video card but it's not. A lot of it is cruddy graphics processing done by fallout itself as well. It uses MSAA when Nvidia can force CSAA on it and that improves performance by around 400% for AA alone. It's anisotropic filtering is horrible, you can compare it's x15 to nvidia's x15 when you tell nvidia to override application settings and use its own anisotropic filtering instead. Then stand by grass or trees and marvel at the difference newer technology can make. Fallouts multithreading capabilities are also horrible.

In other words; it's not such more a hardware heavy game as it is incredibly poorly coded and old software. This is why turning on CSAA and getting FSR will help so much. You're not getting new hardware by doing either of those things but they will both probably help more. Which is why saying that a better video card is needed is just bunk. The video card isn't needed, just a better way to process what's already going on is needed.

However, there's no way to really do that with HDD stuttering. If a person has larger textures than normal, and the person is using a sprint mod in an exterior cell just traveling to their destination, where do you think the new LOD's and other textures are coming from that keep popping up as they move around? Not everything is there sitting in RAM to begin with. In order for something to be loaded into ram... it has to be read from the hard drive! That's not even to get into the fact that paging can occur very easily. Those rocks I mentioned alone are 130 megabytes and they have to be placed all over the place. Fallout 3 doesn't use all of your ram either. I've got LAA enabled and I've still never seen it use more than 2 gigs of ram.

So yah, again, CPU + Videocard are simply inefficiently used by fallouts default settings. Both can be fixed with the correct know-how. But unless you have a solid state drive the slowest single component on any system... aside from no-brainers like USB and fallout isn't using that anyway... is the HDD. And for big texture pack users like many of us, that's something that you can literally *hear* getting a workout as you play the game.

^ Lets hope Skyrim's new engine is better then, and by extension Fallout 4's eh?