[brandon frier]

Oh, certainly, but I've never been one to ignore a good solution just because a better one exists
However, RAEVWD is an optimised masterpiece, so I imagine only a small subset of users would need it.

[Courtney Foren]

I don't think there's a guide anywhere on the various LOD mods and what they do. Probably because consensus has been reached that RAEVWD is the only sensible choice because of the mesh optimizations I've made and the fact that it covers the most actual distant viewable objects without completely crippling the game. Maybe I should throw together a quickie guide though. I'll think about it.

I'm currently using *normal* AEVWD 2.6 and wonder how it compares to RAEVWD. From what I've read so far I gather that RAEVWD's performance impact depends on what mods are installed when TES4LODGen is run.

Does RAEVWD + TES4LODGen create more LOD objects, when run on vanilla OB, than are present in *normal* AEVWD (sounds like the answer is yes) yet still perform better?

Is it best to uninstall mods like the UL's before running TES4LODGen if performance is the goal?

I'm unclear because your comparison on page 1 is to AEVWD *large* + a bunch of other LOD mods. :huh:

My specs- C2D e8400, 9800gtx+ 512, 2g ram- are being pushed a bit with FCOM, QTP3 redimized then reduced, HGEC + high rez textures... and I hate to play with less than 20fps. Even with Streampurge Vram regularly exceeds 512 when lots of action and cell transition is happening.

A simple guide might help with this kind of inquiry.

[celebrity]

Standard AEVWD has a lot of meshes with ugly looking holes in them and many of them contain defects that not only cause anomalies like colored blobs but also slow the game down trying to process them. In some cases including collision. Even if you were to stick to using the prebuilt LOD files AEVWD comes with.

Yes, RAEVWD contains more objects. And yes, IMO it performs better. I noticed no impact at all on performance when I tested it under pure vanilla with only RAEVWD loaded, other than the extra 50MB it gained. It's only going to start becoming a factor once mods come into play along with texture packs and such.

ULs come with very few if any LOD objects of their own, though some do generate a larger number of trees. I've not noticed trees to be much of a burden to the game. My guess is the 2D billboards are no more than 2-3 triangles each. Even in large numbers it won't matter.

AEVWD Large has only one difference with AEVWD - Large uses bigger texture files with more detail. In the end it made no real difference in performance but the visual is better.

Your hardware should be fine with QTP3-R+RAEVWD+FCOM. Where you're going to get hammered is HGEC+Hi-res body textures unless you've got at least 1GB VRAM. 2GB would be ideal. NPCs add up quickly on resources and FCOM is already demanding enough on those. Having a bunch of higher resolution NPCs wandering about can't help anything.

[Aman Bhattal]

Your hardware should be fine with QTP3-R+RAEVWD+FCOM. Where you're going to get hammered is HGEC+Hi-res body textures unless you've got at least 1GB VRAM. 2GB would be ideal. NPCs add up quickly on resources and FCOM is already demanding enough on those. Having a bunch of higher resolution NPCs wandering about can't help anything.

Sounds good, thank you for the info. My concern re the UL's specifically relates to Chorrol Hinterland and the Bravil UL because they contain many buildings and extensive walling- not sure if all the walls around Chorrol would get LODs. Obviously I have little understanding of the LOD generation process and I've read some comments here and there re these 2 UL's + TES4LODGen= slowdown.

When I try out RAEVWD I'll describe my results here. :talk:

Will also be trying the Vibrant Texture replacers in my search for visuals/performance/stability. Am unwilling to give up HGEC (haven't upgraded to EVE yet) as I like that kind of candy.:liplick: The only time I've actually noticed a performance hit (lost 3-4 fps) related to HGEC and the 4096 texture I use is with the beautiful http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16401 which of course covers up the texture. Strange too because I haven't seen any hit with all the other detailed and elaborate armor I've tried out. :shrug: Never-the-less it all adds up in the Vram... hence Vibrant Texture consideration.

[Marina Leigh]

Arthmoor

I went into console with the Sdt 13 and tdt as you suggested. The memory usage showed just under 600mb. Then the strangest thing happened. I clicked out of console which left the info still going top left of screen and movement immediately freed up.

I quit the game, later went back in and movement was ok again. This time the mem usage had dropped to around 500mb.

Any idea why entering console seems to have fixed things?

Regards
Graham

[Blackdrak]

You probably had cells still being accounted for that after reloading were of course not being loaded - not really purged just not loaded again yet till you move around again.

[Matt Terry]

Using the console temporarily suspends the game. It's possible that upon returning some AI was no longer being processed and it freed up resources allowing you to move around again.

Psymon has the second part right, if you quit and reloaded into the same place, some of the buffered cells were not reloaded so there's not as much to keep track of until you start wandering around again.

[Timara White]

Hey there

New to this mod and after installing just wanted to check in with the old salts here and see if what happened was appropriate for my system or maybe see if I might have done something wrong.

Hardware...
Q6600@3.3 - 4870 1GB - 4GB DDR2 4-4-4-12 - Creative Extreemusic - 300GB Velociraptor

I hope I followed the installation instructions carefully. I DL'd the package from nexus, made an omod of it and deactivated both the regular and imperial city options. After that proceeded to DL and run the LODGen you said to use.

After it was all done I noticed quite a steep performance hit and after reading posts of some folks saying they only lost a few frames thats when I decided to check in here. Under normal circumstances Im very used to running anywhere from 40-90 FPS depending on where in the worldspace I happen to have my character. After installing this mod my frames dropped to 15-35 depending on where in the worldspace I have my guy. I noticed the biggest performance hit was running from Anvil to the IC(where I was seeing roughly 15-20 with FRAPS). I am running FCOM on this boot as well the EVE project. I do of course run more mods than that but cant think of anything more relevant to list as far as those that would incur such a performance hit though. Never at any time did my tex mem go over 360 as per the in game monitor but I do use 2xAA and HDR.

So just basically wanting to know is that normal or what?

Thanks again guys

[Natalie Harvey]

Hey there

New to this mod and after installing just wanted to check in with the old salts here and see if what happened was appropriate for my system or maybe see if I might have done something wrong.

Hardware...
Q6600@3.3 - 4870 1GB - 4GB DDR2 4-4-4-12 - Creative Extreemusic - 300GB Velociraptor

I hope I followed the installation instructions carefully. I DL'd the package from nexus, made an omod of it and deactivated both the regular and imperial city options. After that proceeded to DL and run the LODGen you said to use.

After it was all done I noticed quite a steep performance hit and after reading posts of some folks saying they only lost a few frames thats when I decided to check in here. Under normal circumstances Im very used to running anywhere from 40-90 FPS depending on where in the worldspace I happen to have my character. After installing this mod my frames dropped to 15-35 depending on where in the worldspace I have my guy. I noticed the biggest performance hit was running from Anvil to the IC(where I was seeing roughly 15-20 with FRAPS). I am running FCOM on this boot as well the EVE project. I do of course run more mods than that but cant think of anything more relevant to list as far as those that would incur such a performance hit though. Never at any time did my tex mem go over 360 as per the in game monitor but I do use 2xAA and HDR.

So just basically wanting to know is that normal or what?

Thanks again guys

From the OP:

1. uGridDistantCount in the Oblivion.ini file is set to 25 by default. Lowering this to 20 or even 15 will provide a dramatic improvement.
2. If lowering uGridDistantCount is not enough, selectively removing parts of the architecture meshes RAEVWD provides will help the most.


I personally use setting of 8, combined with Streamline?s Streamview feature configured accordingly, which adds distance fogging which makes the world feel bigger and makes impossible to see the difference caused by using lower uGrid values.

I actually got a performace BOOST with these settings and this mod, compared to running without this mod and never bothering to configure those settings.


EDIT: I have removed Architecture folder from this mod, as that seems to help pretty much, without doing that I don?t know if I would get the perfomance in check.

[Jessica Lloyd]

So just basically wanting to know is that normal or what?

Perfectly normal. Adding this much LOD will impact performance, it's unavoidable. The readme and OP cover what you can do to improve things, though I have to say that 15-35fps is more than adequate to play the game. This isn't a mindless shooter where falling below 60 will get you picked apart by vultures

[X(S.a.R.a.H)X]

Yeah sorry bout that, I seem to forget to say that Ive done the miniscule tweaks listed to do....seem to have to say that here or folks dont think you have actually done it regardless how obvious it is. At any rate I had it down to 15 grids as was the lowest suggested rating. I didnt turn this down too much more than that when testing as I started to notice that huge chunks of the world looked clear-cut as it were(being from BC...well, they are allowed to do that here and its a huge turn off visually).

EDIT: I have removed Architecture folder from this mod, as that seems to help pretty much, without doing that I don?t know if I would get the perfomance in check.

This did everything to rectify my situation thank you very much! After following this suggestion and doing some quick in-game stress testing Im pleased to say that my frames are back up to a 35-70 range. In all honestly the only thing I was looking for out of this mod was to be able to see the forts and ruins at a distance instead of having them pop up almost right in front of your face as they do by the default game settings. The way its set now is almost perfect though, the only thing I can see myself doing is manually adding maybe Weye and Pells Gate back in.

Thanks again lads, help was much appreciated

[[ becca ]]

Arthmoor and Psvmon

Thanks for the response. Thinking through your responses and advice had me think to recheck some early save games. I found my first visit to the Ranger camp, and movement/frame rates were fine, as they were for the 2nd visit. The framerate issue occurred from the 3rd visit on, so I think my problem may be the age old one of "save game corruption". I will restart my character from the 1st Ranger Camp visit and see what happens.

Arthmoor

I don't want to hijack this thread to a hardware one so if you would prefer I will re-post this next question in the Oblivion hardware section. I am on a mission to get the utmost out of modded Oblivion without going too overboard moneywise. As I previously mentioned I have a GTX280 card which was the best at the time of my purchase. I was thinking of either getting another GTX280 (in SLI) or upgrading to a new GTX295 dual card (the current fastest card available). I read with interest your comments on your HD4870X2 especially noting how you believe VRam usage can get up to 1.2gb at times in highly modded Oblivion. With the GTX295, although quite a bit faster than my GTX280, it actually has slightly less memory. I am now thinking I may be better upgrading to an HD4870X2 (which is still very fast) because of the 2gb memory. What are your thoughts? My X58 motherboard can run in Crossfire or SLI, is there any benefit at all to run 2 HD4870X2's in Crossfire? Would that create too much heat to be comfortable? I don't want to watercool.

Regards

Graham

[Lyndsey Bird]

Oh, I don't just believe VRAM usage can get that high, I saw it happen once - on my old 8800GTX. Actually, I had it hit 1.4GB once, stuttering like hell, before the game choked and crashed. It's not as hard as you might think to drive things that far with all the texture replacers that are out there.

Don't waste your time on an X2 or an SLi if you're after VRAM. The box may say 2GB, but it's a lie - your PC will still only see it as a 1GB card because of how Crossfire and SLI both work. The memory on each card is a shared pool, not separate, so it's effectively only half of what the box says you're getting. You want to be sure it's something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102826 notice how it doesn't have the X2 designation. That's the card I have now and I'm nothing but thrilled to death with it since VRAM is no longer an issue for me. It's also dead quiet at 50% fan speed, and not terribly loud bumped up to 100% so no worries about overheating it either. You should be able to play anything you can throw at it on highest detail levels with 8xAA+16xAF and never look back. And they're nice and cheap too.

[Kirsty Collins]

Oh, I don't just believe VRAM usage can get that high, I saw it happen once - on my old 8800GTX. Actually, I had it hit 1.4GB once, stuttering like hell, before the game choked and crashed. It's not as hard as you might think to drive things that far with all the texture replacers that are out there.

Don't waste your time on an X2 or an SLi if you're after VRAM. The box may say 2GB, but it's a lie - your PC will still only see it as a 1GB card because of how Crossfire and SLI both work. The memory on each card is a shared pool, not separate, so it's effectively only half of what the box says you're getting. You want to be sure it's something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102826 notice how it doesn't have the X2 designation. That's the card I have now and I'm nothing but thrilled to death with it since VRAM is no longer an issue for me. It's also dead quiet at 50% fan speed, and not terribly loud bumped up to 100% so no worries about overheating it either. You should be able to play anything you can throw at it on highest detail levels with 8xAA+16xAF and never look back. And they're nice and cheap too.

I can't believe I didn't know that they had 2 GB versions out.

It's a shame I bought my new machine with a 4870 with 1 GB of VRAM for more!

That's dirt cheap for 2 GB. I might Ebay the "old" card just for that. Or I'll wait a year and get it for $50.

[Lizzie]

I can't believe I didn't know that they had 2 GB versions out.

It's a shame I bought my new machine with a 4870 with 1 GB of VRAM for more!

That's dirt cheap for 2 GB. I might Ebay the "old" card just for that. Or I'll wait a year and get it for $50. smile.gif

Wait a few weeks to see if they release 4890 versions of that card.. It's likely they will. I'm waiting too.

Then I'll get 2 x 4890 2GB for about the same price as the GTX 280 was when it first came out!

-----

So I wanted to run TES4LODGen after reading about it in the release notes for UL. I'm not sure if there's a way to get it to make "less" data, because it caused the amount of geometry on my screen to increase about tenfold. Before I was going about 40FPS and after it was <10FPS.

So I renamed my DistantLOD folder for now and it's fine, but I guess I'll need to reinstall RAEVWD if I'm going to be scrapping my DistantLOD folder?

And is it even possible to USE the TES4LODGen, and get it to provide usable LOD without killing framerates? I like what RAEVWD provides just by itself, but since I read that for some of the UL mods I'll need to use that app to get proper distant LOD, I'd like to figure out how without killing my computer.

Also, I figured it's the best place to ask, since RAEVWD is so relevant, but is there anyway to systematically go through what was generated in my DistantLOD folder and take out all the stuff that is killing my computer? Because otherwise I'll have to just entirely reinstall anything that's ever added to DistantLOD, or get into the mod archives and drag over the DistantLOD folders. Which sadly I can't do for some, like the OMOD compilation for UL.

And then I was wondering what I should do when "fixing" my DistantLOD.. Install RAEVWD first, and then overwrite anything in there with the data from UL etc? I don't want to totally fubar my Oblivion install, as I backed up the directory (all 16GB!!) very very long ago. *sigh*

[herrade]

Simplest thing to do is to uninstall RAEVWD first. If you didn't OMOD it or use BAIN, then you'll have to make Windows find all the _far.nif files in your Data\Meshes folder so you can delete them. Keep in mind, Windows doesn't discriminate, so you could end up killing stuff belonging to other mods that need it.

Once you've done that, unpack RAEVWD somewhere and start yanking the bits out you don't want. And be sure you look over the info in the OP/Readme file on how to boost FPS. It's in there for a reason

And yes, no matter how you go about it, tes4lodgen is necessary. Those files in your DistantLOD folder are cell-wide. It's an all or nothing affair for each cell. Which is why those files are such a pain in the ass to find provided in mods.

[tannis]

Hey Arthmoor,

Sorry for the slight OT, but I feel I should ask this here since your the expert on this and any advice you give me will most likely be more useful here than on some random thread I create (which never get any answers ) or a PM.

Seeing as how I'm just as obssevive about having a perfect game, I decided to make my own landscape LOD files for my own setup. I loaded all my landscape editing mods in the CS and it took the CS like 2 minutes to Generate the Landscape LOD NIFs. I made a backup of my previous Data/Meshes/Landscape/LOD folder just in case as well. However, now I'm puzzled with questions. Are these new NIFs optimized? Should I run PyFFI in them? Will they look better than some of the ones provided by certain mods (such as UL mods)? What's you bottom line opinion on this?

Also, what about the LOD textures? Should I make these too? Are they as good as the ones from mods such as Qarl's LOD Normal Maps or the Diverse Grasses LOD Colored Maps? Again, whats your bottom line opinion on this?

Sorry for the barrage of questions ^_^ .

Thanks,

[Nick Jase Mason]

Landscape LOD generated by the CS shouldn't look any better or worse than what you have because it all came from the same source. That said, the CS really does svck for this sort of thing and it's debateable as to whether it was worth it in the end other than for the major stuff that makes huge landscape changes, like UL Rolling Hills, or OC Leyawiin Reborn, or obviously stuff like Elsweyr Anequina. PyFFI probably won't do much if anything significant to these as all they are is a pile of shape data.

If you have mods that significantly change the landscape texturing, not generating those will leave some things looking out of place. The most obvious cases I can think of are Elsweyr Anequina, Brena River, and Dark Forest. The vast majority of other things you probably won't notice unless you're really looking for them. The quality isn't all that great either as the CS only generates up to 1024x1024 and you also have to edit the normals it produces because otherwise they have no mipmaps which leads to weirdness. If higher quality landscape is what you want, the CS isn't the way to get it, and neither are utilities like tes4qlod which sadly don't do much better.

[Elle H]

If higher quality landscape is what you want, the CS isn't the way to get it, and neither are utilities like tes4qlod which sadly don't do much better.

Color LOD map - I agree the normal cs normal method or tes4qlod does not look has good has if you do this method for making color lod map themselves..

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Generate_High_resolution_LOD_textures - this method is what will give you qarl quality color lod map..but it is pain to do it this way..

----------

Hieightmap editor - I wish Lightwave would just update tes4qlod or tessannwyn to generate lod meshes since he can get that extra 6% in detail that cs editor can do not do..

[Stephanie Nieves]

Color LOD map - I agree the normal cs normal method or tes4qlod does not look has good has if you do this method for making color lod map themselves..

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Generate_High_resolution_LOD_textures - this method is what will give you qarl quality color lod map..but it is pain to do it this way..

----------

Hieightmap editor - I wish Lightwave would just update tes4qlod or tessannwyn to generate lod meshes since he can get that extra 6% in detail that cs editor can do not do..

I might have to try that myself and see if I can't get my LOD to look a bit better. If nothing else, if gives me an excuse to poke around in the CS and finalyl get around to learning how to use it properly... A question: is it worth doing if I'm already using one of Qarl's LOD texture replacements (currently using http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11441 and http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=3392)?

[FITTAS]

A question: is it worth doing if I'm already using one of Qarl's LOD texture replacements (currently using

If you have alot of ul mods yes since that change landscape so much and lod color map would not be accurate, otherwise no if not using ul mods..not worth it considering how much detail both qarls and blade do..

[Joe Bonney]

If you have alot of ul mods yes since that change landscape so much and lod color map would not be accurate, otherwise no if not using ul mods..not worth it considering how much detail both qarls and blade do..

Since I use all the released UL mods, I may have to look into this, then. It might come down to which I would rather have: color accuracy or detail, unless the new color maps would be as detailed as the qarl/blade ones I'm currently using are... :shrug:

[Roberta Obrien]

One thing I found works wonders when trying to build LOD textures, even using the CS default method, generate the textures for a quad while the CS has a closed city worldspace loaded. Why you might ask? Because loading too many mods into the CS will crash it if you try and do this from the Tamriel worldspace, and takes an insanely long time even when it doesn't crash. If instead you load, for example, one of the IC districts, then tell it to generate LOD textures for that quad, it will fly through it in a fraction of the time and produce identical results. The only thing you need to do is make sure you rename the resulting .dds file so the first number is 60 instead of whatever it gets created as. Since the CS won't spend time loading objects it won't crash either, and you can repeat the process over and over again in as many quads as you want.

Also, when you start, don't switch windows to something else to work on while it generates, this leads to corrupted squares in the final image which show up as black. You need to leave the CS window focused, and it's probably best to simply not touch anything. I've never failed to get good files by leaving the CS alone to work.

For land meshes, it's a one shot deal. You can generate the first 4 quads, but the CS blows it big time if you move to another spot to generate new ones. All subsequent attempts will be corrupted with missing triangles and such. You have to close the CS and reload it to move on to a new spot. Annoying as hell, but that's just how it is. Fortunately since it generates 4 quads at a time, it doesn't take too long to get them all

[Mistress trades Melissa]

One thing I found works wonders when trying to build LOD textures, even using the CS default method, generate the textures for a quad while the CS has a closed city worldspace loaded. Why you might ask? Because loading too many mods into the CS will crash it if you try and do this from the Tamriel worldspace, and takes an insanely long time even when it doesn't crash. If instead you load, for example, one of the IC districts, then tell it to generate LOD textures for that quad, it will fly through it in a fraction of the time and produce identical results. The only thing you need to do is make sure you rename the resulting .dds file so the first number is 60 instead of whatever it gets created as. Since the CS won't spend time loading objects it won't crash either, and you can repeat the process over and over again in as many quads as you want.

Also, when you start, don't switch windows to something else to work on while it generates, this leads to corrupted squares in the final image which show up as black. You need to leave the CS window focused, and it's probably best to simply not touch anything. I've never failed to get good files by leaving the CS alone to work.

For land meshes, it's a one shot deal. You can generate the first 4 quads, but the CS blows it big time if you move to another spot to generate new ones. All subsequent attempts will be corrupted with missing triangles and such. You have to close the CS and reload it to move on to a new spot. Annoying as hell, but that's just how it is. Fortunately since it generates 4 quads at a time, it doesn't take too long to get them all

Thanks, I'll have to keep all that in mind if I decide to tinker with it.

[Angelina Mayo]

Like I said in the Better Cities thread, I was having serious performance issues on my GTX 260. I took the previously mentioned tip of not installing the architecture part of this mod and suddenly I have massive gains and the showstopping lag I was having is now gone. Thanks for the tip!