Performance Boost : Disable Texture Streaming (at your own risk)

[Szoreny Klepko]

I switched texture streaming off in 'graphicsettings.lsx' and am getting a much smoother scrolling screen. Less hitches and slowdowns especially when moving the viewport rapidly with WASD.

So far no downside has been encountered, wondering if anyone had any experience with this setting?

[Sanquiz]

No, i will try.

How to switch off ??

[Szoreny Klepko]

Its a little weird as far as .ini type things go I edited it with notepad++ from this ->

<node id="ConfigEntry">
<attribute id="MapKey" value="TextureStreamingEnabled" type="22" />
<attribute id="Type" value="0" type="5" />
<attribute id="Value" value="1" type="4" />
</node>

to this ->

<node id="ConfigEntry">
<attribute id="MapKey" value="TextureStreamingEnabled" type="22" />
<attribute id="Type" value="0" type="5" />
<attribute id="Value" value="0" type="4" />
</node>

Its located in C:\Users\username\Documents\Larian Studios\Divinity Original Sin

In Win 7 anyway

[Seraphyx]

Thanks, texture streaming almost always causes slow down in any game I play so I'm not a fan of it.

I'm not sure if you're asking what it does but from my experience it changes the texture resolution based on cpu or gpu usage or something. So basically if there's a lot going on that needs to be rendered it might use lower resolution textures, when there's not much going on it will use higher res textures.

This could be "technically" wrong but the idea is it changes the resolution of textures. Wikipedia or a site like guru3d/gamedev likely has far better and more detailed explanations, I'm just going off of what I remember.

[Szoreny Klepko]

Originally posted by Seraphyx:

Thanks, texture streaming almost always causes slow down in any game I play so I'm not a fan of it.

I'm not sure if you're asking what it does but from my experience it changes the texture resolution based on cpu or gpu usage or something. So basically if there's a lot going on that needs to be rendered it might use lower resolution textures, when there's not much going on it will use higher res textures.

This could be "technically" wrong but the idea is it changes the resolution of textures. Wikipedia or a site like guru3d/gamedev likely has far better and more detailed explanations, I'm just going off of what I remember.

It would be nice to know how streaming relates to to Original Sin's engine specifically, - another possibility is more textures are frontloaded when streaming is off, resulting in a higher memory footprint and longer loading times, but better performance...provided the GPU isn't running out of VRAM.

All I know for sure is that I like the results so far, and will play on and look for problems.

[IMRavnos]

Any clue if this will lower my CPU/GPU temp? For some odd reason This game runs my PC hotter then Skyrim on Ultra. 86c is just too damn hot.

[Seraphyx]

Originally posted by IMRavnos:

Any clue if this will lower my CPU/GPU temp? For some odd reason This game runs my PC hotter then Skyrim on Ultra. 86c is just too damn hot.

86c is definitely way too high for CPU and probably even the GPU... I'm not sure what's going on as I have a pretty average PC and I'm not having any of these insane issues people seem to have like 5-10+ minute loading times or high temps. When playing CPU temp is about 40-50c which is okay, have a AMD FX 8320. Idle temp is 20c.

[Sustain]

Woot this should be stickied this tweak made the game actually playable for me, the framedrops from 60 to 10-20 fps while scrolling and the resulting stuttering drove me crazy.
It's smooth as butter with this Tweak.

[Selvec]

Been searching for the ini's for ages. Why can't these companies use the My Games folder. Its there for a reason...

[feliscon]

Originally posted by RavenDice:

Been searching for the ini's for ages. Why can't these companies use the My Games folder. Its there for a reason...

Because this is also a native mac game and planned (will be unless something goes wrong) a native Linux game.

[Blink]

Originally posted by feliscon:

Originally posted by RavenDice:

Been searching for the ini's for ages. Why can't these companies use the My Games folder. Its there for a reason...

Because this is also a native mac game and planned (will be unless something goes wrong) a native Linux game.

That's no excuse. Compiler directives exist for a reason, people need to learn to use them. They can easily define the saved data paths by querying the OS identity at startup.

[kozmik]

My game crashes on startup when I do this.

Edit: Only when textures are set to Medium do I crash - when set to HIgh I can load the game just fine.

[Selvec]

Seems to me that texture streaming is a means of taking advantage of fast CPU's to get a better preformance. Unfortunatly Larian has made a misjudgement here in assuming gamers have faster CPU's then GPU's, when its the other way around. So disabling texture streaming may indeed improve performance for many players, while others who have a faster cpu then their gpu (Laptops etc) may find this decreases performance.

[76561198103719531]

Texture streaming is responsible for loading textures in the required quality (right amount of mipmaps). The further away from your character a certain texture is, the lower the detail level of that texture in memory. If you jump the camera between separated characters you might notice texture quality being lower for a few frames. Disabling the texture streamer will indeed increase load times (but might be hardly noticeable on a good SSD) and can easily increase memory usage by about 1GB or more. You can disable texture streaming, but keep in mind that the game might crash if running out of memory. If you notice the game starting to crash quite often it's probably better to enable texture streaming again. And while having a lot of memory will help to some degree, please keep in mind that like every 32bit program only 4GB of ram can be used at a time.

[76561198103719531]

Forgot to mention: The loading of textures in the background might slow down loading of things like sound, which might be the cause of the jittering on some systems. We're currently looking into it.

[Sustain]

The stuttering while scrolling with texture streaming enabled makes the game unplayable for me so it's the only way to play for me anyway crashes or not.
My cpu could be the cause of that since it's only a i3.