Fallout 4 High Resolution Texture Pack Review @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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Fallout 4 High Resolution Texture Pack Review - Bethesda has released its official High Resolution Texture Pack DLC for Fallout 4. We will look at performance impact, VRAM capacity usage levels, and compare image quality to see if this High Resolution Texture Pack might be worthy of your bandwidth in actually improving the gameplay experience.
 
Thanks for the slider comparison. it looks ok, but I think I'll be sticking to what nexus can provide. Also not sure if my 980 can handle it at a acceptable frame rate.
 
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As far as I can tell it makes the world a whole lot sharper. Well worth the DLC size IMHO. Glad I waited to play this title, only have about 4hrs in it. Looks like I'll need to turn godrays down for my lowly 980ti to get decent frames... I can live with that ;p. Thax for the review!
 
Evil Scooter said:
As far as I can tell it makes the world a whole lot sharper. Well worth the DLC size IMHO. Glad I waited to play this title, only have about 4hrs in it. Looks like I'll need to turn godrays down for my lowly 980ti to get decent frames... I can live with that ;p. Thax for the review!
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Makes you really question why they take this long to release the high-res textures..

My intuition tells me they do this on purpose to renew interest in the game..
 
Nice improvements, and with almost no FPS loss is a great thing.

Why didn't the PC version ship with these textures in the first place?
 
For the fun of it I would have been curious to see what something like a 3GB 1060 would do. Just curious how it would handle it, or IF it could handle it. Nice article though, Thanks.
 
I downloaded various 4k texture packs from the Nexus that look better than these and take a lot less space. My total install is 41GB and i top out at about 4500-5500MB VRAM usage, awesome review though love the sliders.
 
Evil Scooter said:
As far as I can tell it makes the world a whole lot sharper. Well worth the DLC size IMHO. Glad I waited to play this title, only have about 4hrs in it. Looks like I'll need to turn godrays down for my lowly 980ti to get decent frames... I can live with that ;p. Thax for the review!
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:( I only have a 980. Put god rays on medium or low, and set .ini shadow settings to 8000.
 
Yeah, the god rays in this game are a massive performance hit. Even w/ a 1080 I keep them to high to stay at a decently high enough frame rate.
 
i couldnt justify the 50 gigs towards my bandwidth cap to increase quality by only slightly.
 
Great article, answers a few questions I had.
fwiw my 980ti has seen slight stutters occasionally as VRam maxes.
But this is at 1080p with constant 60fps.
I agree with the texture improvement critic even at 1080p.
 
I am glad you guys posted an article about this. I could see a big difference at 4K myself. I was so surprised by some of these other news outlets saying it doesn't look any different. Made me wonder if they were running the right hardware and letting the nicer textures stream in. I did notice that textures took a bit to stream in from my lowly spindle drive, but that is to be expected. I got something similar to the sliders when I played because I stared at a wall for a few seconds and then watched the nicer texture appear like magic! :D
 
tungt88 said:
Combining this texture pack with ReShade nets some very pretty results which are well worth it in 4K, IMHO.
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It's a shame the testing was performed at 1440p instead of 4K.

I prefer to run at 4K with lowest AA possible vs 1440p + High AA. I like the sharpness 4K gaming brings. Texture quality is deffo more noticeable @ 4K but I must say I'm a little underwhelmed by this update. It still looks like a game "not of it's generation" - even with the 4K textures imho.
 
I think the problem with the texture in this game is that there are things that are pretty well rendered, then there are things that look outright primitive.

Examples of the latter include stuff like bushes (the model isn't even 3D, it's like paper cut-out) and metal boxes (they look like they were rendered 10 years ago).
 
Stev3FrencH said:
I am glad you guys posted an article about this. I could see a big difference at 4K myself. I was so surprised by some of these other news outlets saying it doesn't look any different. Made me wonder if they were running the right hardware and letting the nicer textures stream in. I did notice that textures took a bit to stream in from my lowly spindle drive, but that is to be expected. I got something similar to the sliders when I played because I stared at a wall for a few seconds and then watched the nicer texture appear like magic! :D
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A lot of the reviews kind of hamstrung themselves by stating..."I'm running this on a 4GB 970/980..."
 
Thanks for the review.

I installed last week and spent about 5 hours playing yesterday. Good frame rates. I played at 4k/60hz and 1440p/72hz(144hz G-Sync Monitor). I didn't want to mess with trying to up the FPS past the 60/72 limit since I've read the engine can have issues. I did however browse the the ini file and noticed a HBAO settng that did come up at first. When I switched the flag to 1 it showed in the advanced settings. There was also an HDR setting but I didn't change it since the displays I was testing don't support it anyway.

Overall the game looks pretty good. It seemed to me that the natural things, wood, faces, backgrounds looked more detailed than say walls, and some metal objects. Gameplay was very smooth looking to playing this through now since I held off on the original release because I wasn't initially impressed then.

Edit: I almost forgot. Total SLI support and not bad optimization either. Averaged 30-60% in 1440p and 60-100% in 4k. I'm sure someone might tweak the bits a little more but its nice having it there from the first install.
 
I wonder if processor is gonna be an issue. My old SB-E paired with a 1080 Strix, I just gotta find a way to free of space on the old Raptor :D
 
How does this compare with say, one of the high res texture pack mods from Nexus?
 
husker4life said:
I downloaded various 4k texture packs from the Nexus that look better than these and take a lot less space. My total install is 41GB and i top out at about 4500-5500MB VRAM usage, awesome review though love the sliders.
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The problem with user-created 4K texture packs is that they are so hit and miss. Some do look good, but others alter the way the environment looks too much, or they don't take into considering how well the textures blend into the surrounding area so you end up with super sharp looking textures that look very out of place. I usually don't bother with mod texture packs for this reason.
 
Rizen said:
The problem with user-created 4K texture packs is that they are so hit and miss. Some do look good, but others alter the way the environment looks too much, or they don't take into considering how well the textures blend into the surrounding area so you end up with super sharp looking textures that look very out of place. I usually don't bother with mod texture packs for this reason.
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That's my biggest gripe with texture mods, too. Some modders take too much artistic liberty with textures and ruin the original visual intent of the environment. I think the only person who got it right in recent history is NMC for Fallout: New Vegas.
 
IMO this HD texture really cleans things up nicely. There is really only so much you can do with just the flat texture images up to a certain point though, and the issue becomes more of the meshes that those texture images sit on top of. Again this is why we need enhanced static meshes for things like brick walls, fences, rocks, etc.

Generally though I will say this game looks fantastic most of the time and Bethesda did a much better job then they did w/ Skyrim texturing/modeling.
 
Seems to be an apologist tone to this article but the bottom line is call it what it is, a nice, free texture upgrade for virtually everything in the game. It's not the best looking game out there but any company that shows some pc love is good in my book regardless of the actual content.
 
Armenius said:
That's my biggest gripe with texture mods, too. Some modders take too much artistic liberty with textures and ruin the original visual intent of the environment. I think the only person who got it right in recent history is NMC for Fallout: New Vegas.
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Qarl's texture/mapping mod for Oblivion is still the best texture modding i have ever experienced in a game. When it came out it was almost groundbreaking in fidelity for a pc game at the time.
 
Rizen said:
The problem with user-created 4K texture packs is that they are so hit and miss. Some do look good, but others alter the way the environment looks too much, or they don't take into considering how well the textures blend into the surrounding area so you end up with super sharp looking textures that look very out of place. I usually don't bother with mod texture packs for this reason.
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True but then some of these official textures are pretty bad too. Take the ground and leaf textures for instance; they still look really bad and look far worse than some Skyrim texture mods from years ago.
 
Bankie said:
True but then some of these official textures are pretty bad too. Take the ground and leaf textures for instance; they still look really bad and look far worse than some Skyrim texture mods from years ago.
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The ground/leaf/bush/vine textures are more of a mesh issue than anything else.
ReShade + Texture Pack is great @ 4K, but also worth trying out in 1080p/1440p.
 
thingi said:
It's a shame the testing was performed at 1440p instead of 4K.

I prefer to run at 4K with lowest AA possible vs 1440p + High AA. I like the sharpness 4K gaming brings. Texture quality is deffo more noticeable @ 4K but I must say I'm a little underwhelmed by this update. It still looks like a game "not of it's generation" - even with the 4K textures imho.
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Last I checked, [H] has basically stated no single card does 4K without compromise that it's no longer doing 4K reviews of them. Adding a high-res texture pack neither helps nor hurt that objective.
 
With regards to Fallout 4, no GPU on earth is going to fix the performance of the game in some areas. The engine is simply dated and the game can be CPU bound in some shadow intensive areas.

Textures don't really impact the performance anyway, per the review, so if you have enough VRAM I don't see any reason to not use them. 50GB hard drive space is peanuts today. My gaming PC has 9TB of storage.
 
Mchart said:
Makes you really question why they take this long to release the high-res textures..

My intuition tells me they do this on purpose to renew interest in the game..
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Probalby also to avoid people whining that their brand new computer cant run it full speed at ultra setting so it much be badly codet.
 
Algrim said:
Last I checked, [H] has basically stated no single card does 4K without compromise that it's no longer doing 4K reviews of them. Adding a high-res texture pack neither helps nor hurt that objective.
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Says the man that hasn't got a 4K screen lol :p Your rig could easily run Fallout 4 with hi res textures @ 4K at a decent framerate, my similar-ish rig does (admittedly my 1070 is watercooled to a solid silent 2100 boost clock).

The point of running @ 4K is to make things further away more defined. 4K's higher DPI allows higher res textures to be rendered further away, hence making the visuals a lot better than at 1440p + high res textures.

So when looking at textures just because a single card can't do 4K at a 'decent' framerate (chortle, chortle ever played Vulkan DOOM @ 4K (no AA) lolz :) ) doesn't mean to say using a 4K screen to look at the assets isn't worth it.
 
Mchart said:
Good enough if the hardware supports it.

This game really needs a static mesh improvement mod like Skyrim does though.
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Agreed this looks good but is only going to do so much without a huge overhaul like you've stated. Skyrim manages to look great with mods years down the line.
 
Krenum said:
Thanks for the slider comparison. it looks ok, but I think I'll be sticking to what nexus can provide. Also not sure if my 980 can handle it at a acceptable frame rate.
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Wait what? Is this game really that demanding?
 
Algrim said:
Last I checked, [H] has basically stated no single card does 4K without compromise that it's no longer doing 4K reviews of them. Adding a high-res texture pack neither helps nor hurt that objective.
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We did look at some mods back last year.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/02/01/modding_fallout_4_for_image_quality_immersive_gameplay/4

4K gets to be quite a butt kicker though. 1440p brings the low end down low...

http://www.hardocp.com/image/MTQ2NjEyMDQ2Mk00bzAzOHFaNTJfNl8zX2wuZ2lm
 
Texture Pack is definitely a decent upgrade but I don't see 58GB of improvement...I might just install the game on my WD Black hard drive
 
oldmanbal said:
Qarl's texture/mapping mod for Oblivion is still the best texture modding i have ever experienced in a game. When it came out it was almost groundbreaking in fidelity for a pc game at the time.
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Ahh the good old days. I remember modding Oblivion for 8 hours straight, using a combination of OBMM and Wrye Bash. Then I did the "Invalidate Archive" wrong once and had to redo it all, but oh was it worth it at the end (y)
 
Kudos guys. Not a single publication I've seen has come anywhere close to as good an evaluation of this pack.

Not sure why there have been naysayers to this pack. It absolutely does give improved, very noticeable fidelity, and even if it didn't, being negative here is like saying "I don't like free shit". And great to see Bethesda's commitment here, just wish it would have come sooner when I was still playing FO4.

And on the "custom mods are better" argument... sure, I can spend several hours piecing together and downloading individual mods, then worrying about compatibility and crashes -- and all the best to those who do this -- but I really don't have the time or patience anymore, honestly.
 
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