Fallout 3 / New Vegas 0.237

[Marcurios]

Sorry Boris, didn't want to hassle you or anything..
I wasn't complaining at all, just asking for your opinion, well you gave it allright..

I didn't change anything though, but i managed to solve it.

I thought because New Vegas is OK, i copied the shaderpackages from New Vegas into my FO3 shader directory and it is fixed.
I remembered that i had the 3.0 shader package in my Fallout 3, but a few weeks ago i reinstalled my windows and decided too shut the 3.0 shaders of in my ini file.
But the shaderpackage was still the 3.0 one, so now it's 2.0 again.

Strangely the game worked fine up until yesterday, when it suddenly switched to these dark shadows.

But anyway, i solved it by copying back the Original game's shaders back.

And, take a beer, relax for a while, it will do you good..

[DragonWrath]

Dragonwrath. Your first formula is the one to go with. Total RAM both GPU and System minus 2048. You can play within the number and I beleive it was mentioned, deep within one of the skyrim updates, that it's only good to 8-10 gig. I have mine running at 10240 and have little issues. Minor stuttering, but that's more to my textures and the fact I can't decide which companion I like most so I travel with many and between their textures and their armor textures it's a system hit.

The 512 is for the GPU RAM.

As for the rest of your questions. I do not know. I would suggest contacting one of the more helpful ENB preset authors and see if they wouldn't mind enlightening you.

Ok, that's what I thought and what I had been using to some good success (though I haven't gotten up to 60fps yet... then again I'm using the Book of Water armor retexture pack, Weapon Rexture Project - WRP, AND NMC's Small Texture pack (all optimized via the "ordinator" or whatever that optimizes and reduces texture sizes without quality loss), and then on top of that I'm traveling with 4 vanilla companions and had the Willow companion.... Sooooo that might be why I get a 10fps drop when I look in their direction or towards a medium/large group of NPCs (in towns)

As for contacting the ENB preset authors, I may do just that for even more information.

DragonWrath
The ReservedMemorySizeMb is based on your actual, physical VRAM. However, as I've seen with Skyrim, sometimes even with more than 2gb of VRAM, 256 works better. So, in your case, go with 256, maybe even 128 if you're having any issues. That parameter reserves a certain amount of VRAM for... umm... well, I forget why, but the memory is reserved (i.e. not used for normal purposes) so if you don't have a bunch to spare, don't reserve too much. So go 256.
Cheers!

I reduced the memory from 512 to 256mb like you suggested and there has been minor improvements so I'm going to stick with it. The improvement wasn't a lot (about 5ish fps), but enough and it worked great for me. My vram is set to the first formula with the 256 reserved and my OSD is showing that I'm using 950-1024mb vram, and my system ram is around 4-6gb and swap is around 7-8gb usage. And most importantly, things are ridiculously smooth (even when I drop down to 30-40fps), I still have the roulette wheel stutter when loading, but it's always done that due to all the mods and textures I'm using I believe. It only stutters when loading the game for the first time. If I move between cells it's really fast and I haven't noticed any stutter yet. So bottom line... thank you all as my game is going extremely well so far at some really good settings (and going to tweak them a bit with new vegas configurator such as increasing the lod distance from 50k to 100k) .

Thanks everyone
DragonWrath

[robgrab]

All this discussion about Memory settings inspired me to go back and tweak mine. After some fiddling I'm finally getting a buttery smooth 60fps in most areas. I also changed from windowed borderless to fullscreen and enabled Vsync. It's funny how changing just a few values can make such a huge improvement in performance. Thanks for the tips even though this thread should be moved where more people could benefit from it.

[midhras]

Can anyone else replicate this behaviour? If I change the inclination of the camera a bit I can alternate from good looking shadows (settings are off here though, as well as silly lens dirt):


to horrible artifacts and shadows not rendering as they should:


All I am doing is tilting the camera a little bit. If I look upward, everything is sweet, but during normal play, when my camera is level, I get these gooky shadows (which is something that I've been getting for a couple binaries now, so it isn't something new). I only just discovered that camera tilt has something to do with it.

[midhras]

And another example.

Good:


Bad:



Also note the FPS dip (which might have something to do with more terrain being rendered with regard to camera angle).
In the profiler this change is accompanied by a minor change in available video memory, where more is available in the 'good' version of the render.

[Marcurios]

4 frames isn't really a dip in Fallout terms imo.

I've seen some guys complain about a shadow glitch on the nexus.
something about them jumping around (obviously caused by them shadows switching on and off while screenshotting with the freecam).
i had a strange glitch too, shadows became all very dark all of a sudden, but that was because i used the 3.0 shaders and also had it on in the ini file.
since i switched to the game's default 2.0 shaders and did not allow for 3.0 to be used in the ini file all is well.
youre shadows are quite dark, maybe you also use the 3.0 shaders (shaderpackage013) ?
if so, that could result in unwanted behaviour cause Boris writes and tests the ENB with default game shaders from what i understand.

those trees look silly..Vurt really did a number on FO3..haha..

[midhras]

My game uses the shaderpackage 13. I've disabled 3.0 shaders via the ini, but I'll probably have to force the game to redetect what sdp to use anew. I've set shadows to dark here to prove a point.
Also, it seems the angle of the camera in which I have proper shadows can have both a lower and upper limit depending on the scene.

I've tried another shaderpackage than 13, but I'll give the launcher a whirl. What sdp do you use?

Also, the shadow flip-flop from good to bad is not only angle- but also distance-dependent. WTF? I have no idea what could be the cause of this behaviour.
Also, when I flip from good shadows, to bad shadows, I get a huge stutter. Not so when going from bad to good.

[Marcurios]

yeah, shaderpackage013 are 3.0 shaders from what i understand.
i might be wrong and Nvidia could use those shaders i dunno, but if you set them manually you might want to correct that.
Otherwise ENB effects can go wrong i think, but Boris knows best ofcourse.

i think that the lightrays come into the camera in a different angle when you tilt the cam switching the shadows off, but again, i could be wrong, just a thought.

i use shaderpackage017 for ATI.

Boris once said to me to use the game's Original shader, not the 3.0 ones, if i would use them i would be a dumbass he said...just kidding..haha..

[midhras]

The thing is, if I either enable or disable 3.0 shaders via Fallout.ini (bAllow30Shaders=0/1), my game always wants to use sdp13. I've already tried using sdp17, but that didn't help one bit.
So you're not getting this behaviour then right? It's most noticeable when you look at a character with sideburns for instance.`

[Marcurios]

so if you let the game detect your hardware it uses shaderpackage013 in the rendererinfo.txt file no matter what ?
that seems strange cause the sdp013 is supposed to be shader 3.0 compliant.
But maybe the info from Tweakguides.com is incorrect i don't know.
If the game chooses the 013 sdp for Nvidia it seems higly unlikely that it actually is shader 3.0 compliant.
cause i don't think Beth would give Nvidia users 3.0 and ATI users 2.0.

No i don't get that behaviour, maybe in tfc mode, i didn't check that, but definitely not when i'm playing.