HD Texture DLC vs. Vanilla

[За Монолит]

I recently purchased Fallout 4 and so far have at lots of fun, In the beginning it ran pretty good at 60 fps, then it dipped down lower when I go to Boston - I had heard this was an infamous location for drops. I did my very best to optimize the game to not have any drops of performance and so far - so good.

However when I was trying to find a reason as to why my games FPS drops when in third person, I came across a Steam discussion speaking of the HD Texture pack DLC.

When I purchased the game all I bought the pack with all the DLC and all that and of course there is the HD Textures. One of the minimum requirements for the DLC is a GTX 1080.
(Quick info here, I only recently obtained my first ever gaming laptop, all my gaming years I've played with optimized desktop laptops.)

With this gaming PC, I have GTX 1050 Ti, I have the space for the game and also have the Core i7.

Should I uninstall the HD Textures? Will it increase performance or fix any miniscule problems I have? Should I just keep it?

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!

[JDaremo Fireheart]

Unless you're running 2k or 4k it's really not worth the download.
Besides, there's better texture packs on Nexus that are a lot better and a smaller download.

[DarkEternal]

The HD textures from Beth are absolute garbage. Just get a good ENB like Vivid Fallout. Your FPS drops will disappear.

[За Монолит]

I don't want to get any mods, this is my first time playing so keeping it vanilla is something I want to do - at least for now.

[deidian]

Test them and see by yourself. Usually textures don't cause massive performance drops unless the PC is starving for VRAM. But I don't know if a GTX1050 Ti will have enough VRAM for that. For sure 4Gb+ VRAM will be needed.

[За Монолит]

Yeah yunno, just yesterday I put some more mb into my dedicated vram. It was at 128mb, and I raised it somehow to 5g.

In total I have around 11+ vram

[DarkEternal]

An ENB doesn't affect anything besides the look of the game. So no, it won't affect the vanilla feel. ENB to your heart's content.

[JDaremo Fireheart]

Originally posted by Capt. Jyanix Bach:

I don't want to get any mods, this is my first time playing so keeping it vanilla is something I want to do - at least for now.

Getting Texture mods and an ENB won't ruin your Vanilla Experience. Vivid Fallout is a great package that only enhances.
A 1050 Ti is a great card and has plenty of VRam for this game. I'm running a lesser card (AMD RX 550) with 4Gb VRam and it runs just fine.

Originally posted by Capt. Jyanix Bach:

Yeah yunno, just yesterday I put some more mb into my dedicated vram. It was at 128mb, and I raised it somehow to 5g.

In total I have around 11+ vram

How can you add to your VRam, and how did your 1050 Ti only show 128Mb when it's supposed to have 4Gb?

[JDaremo Fireheart]

Oh, and at least get F4SE and the Unofficial Patch, Both will help your Vanilla Experience.
The Unofficial Patch fixes 100s of bugs & glitches that Bugthesda were too lazy to fix, and the F4 Script Extender also helps, especially when setting your game to only update when you launch it (through Steam) and then only launching through the F4SE Launcher so the game never updates when you don't want it to.

[За Монолит]

No idea, I went to my display settings and all that and the dedicated video memory said 128 - and my total available graphics memory was 11gb+

[deidian]

Originally posted by JDaremo Fireheart:

Oh, and at least get F4SE and the Unofficial Patch, Both will help your Vanilla Experience.
The Unofficial Patch fixes 100s of bugs & glitches that Bugthesda were too lazy to fix, and the F4 Script Extender also helps, especially when setting your game to only update when you launch it (through Steam) and then only launching through the F4SE Launcher so the game never updates when you don't want it to.

Yes for the Unnoficial Patch, especially if you have a translation available in your language, otherwise you'll end up with mixed native/english texts, but still will fix bugs.

ENB and post processing filters are still modifications over the choices made by the developer. See the vanilla styling, experiment with post-processing filters looking for different look and feel: choose what you like more, but don't outright state than is an improvement because it's not. Is a question of likes.

F4SE is only needed if you use a mod that requires F4SE, otherwise the only thing you are doing by installing F4SE will be complicating your own existence. If you don't use mods requiring F4SE updating the game will not break anything.

Updates may only break things if you mod the game outside the supported modding provided by "Creation Kit" and "Papyrus" scripting system.
This is, any modification doing DLL injection and/or that provides a modified DLL: dxgi, X3DAudio, x_input. Which all of them are part of the DirectX API.

[FrostCyborg]

Originally posted by Capt. Jyanix Bach:

No idea, I went to my display settings and all that and the dedicated video memory said 128 - and my total available graphics memory was 11mb+

It's likely you have a Optimus type setup, where it uses the onboard graphics as much as possible until it needs the discrete card. Just make sure that Fallout 4 is set to use the discrete card in the NVIDIA settings, and you shouldn't have to deal with the "graphics memory" as that's RAM allocated to help the on-board Intel graphics, and nothing to do with the NVIDIA card.

[За Монолит]

Originally posted by FrostCyborg:

Originally posted by Capt. Jyanix Bach:

No idea, I went to my display settings and all that and the dedicated video memory said 128 - and my total available graphics memory was 11mb+

It's likely you have a Optimus type setup, where it uses the onboard graphics as much as possible until it needs the discrete card. Just make sure that Fallout 4 is set to use the discrete card in the NVIDIA settings, and you shouldn't have to deal with the "graphics memory" as that's RAM allocated to help the on-board Intel graphics, and nothing to do with the NVIDIA card.

Alright, I'll look up how to change it. Thanks for the help

[Krupted Peasant]

I have a 1070 and run the HD textures, the biggest hit to frame drops in FO4 is actually the weapon debris and godrays. I have most other stuff cranked with HD textures but have weapon debris off and godrays low (won't disable for some reason).

[За Монолит]

Yeah I disabled godrays and weapon debris. If you want a simple way to disable godrays go to your Fallout 4 documents folder and open up Fallout Custom, in there put this:

[General]
sStartingConsoleCommand=gr off

You will be able to tell if it worked by just pressing the console key and it should show that command being used.

I did this plus manually finding the settings in the ini's and setting them to ready-only. Good luck!

[Krupted Peasant]

Originally posted by Capt. Jyanix Bach:

Yeah I disabled godrays and weapon debris. If you want a simple way to disable godrays go to your Fallout 4 documents folder and open up Fallout Custom, in there put this:

[General]
sStartingConsoleCommand=gr off

You will be able to tell if it worked by just pressing the console key and it should show that command being used.

I did this plus manually finding the settings in the ini's and setting them to ready-only. Good luck!

Oh, I've tried everything. Marking the file read only etc. but no matter what I do once the game actually loads it reverts back to low. I have over 700 hours and played modded and vanilla and know a lot of the tricks for BGS games and games in general but for the like of me, it will not stick.

I also have a very rare bug that I can only find a few mentions of on youtube or reddit. And I mean, like 3 or 4 - basically when I exit my pipboy while wearing power armor I get an FOV pop, or zoom in/out thing.

I've tried deleting the ini files, repairing the game, reinstalling after deleting everything. Tried to manually set fov in all instances to the know defaults and marking read only. Doesn't matter if it's windowed, full screen, or an odd resolution (just to test) it always does this. It's really annoying for some reason. Even started a new playthrough after deleting everything and reinstalling in case a save file was messing something up.