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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 22nd Aug 2021 at 11:47 PM Last edited by thornowl : 23rd Aug 2021 at 12:09 AM.
Default Low resolution textures on Intel HD Graphics (kinda?..)
Yeah, I know. Another one of these.

I usually play TS3 on lowest possible settings + mirror reflections, it doesn't bother me that much. However, I want to start posting my CC online, so I need better quality settings to test the textures in game and make pictures, but my game refuses to go above 512 px textures. Most of the time.

While working on a recent project, I decided to edit my GraphicsRules and replaced the low SimQuality with very high. I opened the game to look at my last outfit (with 2048 px textures) in action, and to my surprise it actually loaded the 1024 px textures for the outfit — and only for it, the rest was still 512 px. I've heard that texture loading issues could be caused by low RAM, yet this happened despite me running 20+ browser tabs, two Blender windows, Photoshop with ~7 tabs and a ton of other stuff — really, it's a miracle the game launched at all. I closed the game and most other programs, later launched the game again, and for some reason it went back to 512 px even though I didn't touch its files again, and there was now more free RAM. Idk man.
Today I edited GraphicsCards, and it went back to loading 1024 px textures for that one outfit. For now, anyway.
I assume what's happening is the game loading textures one resolution over the original size, so 2048 turns into 1024 and 1024 turns into 512, and I wanna know if I can kindly ask it to stop doing that.

What I've done so far: edited GraphicsCards, changed set texturememory to 1024, cleared the game's cache, unparked CPU, probably some other stuff I don't remember anymore (I've been trying to find a solution for months). Nothing helped.
Honestly, I would be fine without 2048 px textures, I just want 1024 px. The game has already proven to me that it can load them anyway.
Don't worry about my performance, I've played Dragon Age Inquisition for over 400 hours despite it running at literally 4-5 fps. I'll survive a slight fps drop.

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Test Subject
Original Poster
#3 Old 23rd Aug 2021 at 1:45 AM Last edited by thornowl : 23rd Aug 2021 at 2:21 AM.
Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
You're running this on an awfully old system.

I'm aware. Unfortunately, I don't have a house to sell to be able to afford a used GTX 1060 during a cryptomining boom, so gotta work with what I have lol

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
If you're just trying to load 2048 textures, I'm not sure you need to do that. I can be wrong, I don't fiddle with this.

Playing on 2048 textures isn't really my goal, I only tried that out of curiosity. It did, however, made the game actually load a 1024 texture, which has never happened on this laptop before.
I assume that my explanation wasn't clear enough and made you think that I normally play with 1024 px textures, but want to go even higher? What's actually going on is that I've always had 512 px textures in my game (even in CAS) and now want to fix that. Like, I usually make CC with 1024 px textures, which look nice and sharp in my friends' games but heavily compressed and blurry in my own, it's weird. I get questions like "Why are your textures so ugly" all the time when I post screenshots.
Even after I changed Sim Detail to Very High in game or edited GraphicsRules to force 2048 textures on Low, all clothes in the game still used low res textures.

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
But from what I understand, your hardware shouldn't be a issue, it will just slow down and slow down or it will crash.

Fun fact, in the 7 years of playing the game with all expansions on this laptop it hasn't crashed once. Doesn't really slow down over time either, even though I keep it running for real life days sometimes...

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
It shouldn't really load the lower resolution textures. That may have to do with your setup and what modifications you made to the graphics rules.

If you mean loading the lower res during gameplay, that doesn't really happen. It loads the 512 textures and it keeps using them. Either way, it's not caused by me messing up my GraphicsRules, the game has never even tried to load a 1024 texture before I modified GraphicsRules. I guess that leaves my setup?

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
The only thing I can add is that you should modify the graphics rules to fool the system to believe your GPU and CPU are maxed. Because while they're not maxed, there are certain triggers in the graphics rules which may be responsible for the low resolution.

I've actually never heard about that before. How do I do that?
Test Subject
Original Poster
#5 Old 23rd Aug 2021 at 3:08 PM Last edited by thornowl : 23rd Aug 2021 at 4:53 PM.
Months of trying to figure this out, and no one has told me that I'm a clown. I've never even tried changing the texture quality settings in GraphicsRules because I assumed that it only affects objects and stuff, not clothes. I replaced the low setting with medium, then also changed DropTexMipsOnLoad to 0, after which the game started loading 1024 textures properly — but only in CAS. I've tried replacing it with the high setting, but despite me now technically having my texture quality at high and my sim detail at very high, clothes outside of CAS still use 512 px textures.

Before and after:



My GraphicsRules after some tweaking (i lowered some stuff since it didn't work):


Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
There are times I accidentally downloaded 2048 textures, but I always quickly convert them to 1024.

I mean, that sounds like too much work when you could just set them to 1024 px max in graphicsrules, but idk.

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
I'm not really sure why you are doing this. If you want the game to run on very high Sim Quality, just move the sims detail to very high in the options menu on the slider. It is the same thing.

So the reason why I do this is because the game sneakily switches some graphics settings to low or medium if it thinks your GPU isn't good enough. You can set Texture Quality to High, but nothing will actually change, the game will use the Low setting anyway. So I just keep everything at Low and tweak GraphicsRules when I need to.
Just yesterday I set texture quality to high in game, reloaded, nothing changed. Set it back to low, tweaked the low setting in GraphicsRules, boom, now I have high quality textures in CAS. So no, it's not the same.

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
As far as I know, the texture in very high sim detail is 2048. If you set the setting to this, it will load your 2048 textures and should not load anything lower.

As I've said multiple times already, I have tried using the very high sim detail setting. Both by changing it in game and by replacing the low option in GraphicsRules. Despite the textures being at 2048, 2048, 512, 128, the game still uses textures one resolution lower than original: if an outfit uses 2048 px textures, the game loads 1024, and if it uses 1024 textures, it loads 512. Changing DropTexMipsOnLoad in texture quality stopped it from doing that in CAS, but not in game.

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
This does absolutely nothing. It is a recommended fix for systems that did not recognize the GPU memory, but even so it is only for display and triggering such as setting "gpumemLevel". But all this does is set the default graphical setting, which you can easily change in the options menu. Since your GPU is already identified and texture ram at 1.7GB, you do not need to touch this.

Before I changed set texture memory and GraphicsCards, it showed 32 mb and [Found: 0, Matched: 1] in DeviceConfig. Idk if it actually fixed anything, but yeah, it wasn't properly identified before.

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
What do you mean? You mean other outfits only load at 512? This might be a dumb question, but did you make the texture itself is at least 1024?

All Maxis clothes use at least 1024 px textures, there isn't a clothing piece that uses 512. If you really doubt my intelligence (which I wouldn't blame you for), here are the properties of my CC textures.

The outfit that uses 2048 textures:

Again, I've sent my CC to a couple of friends with better PCs, and their game loads full res textures just fine. Even my game now uses full res in CAS.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#7 Old 25th Aug 2021 at 2:41 PM
Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
No one is doubting your intelligence, we're just trying to cover every corner.

It was a joke, no worries.

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
So the reason I do not run into this is issue you mentioned is because I forced the graphics rules to set all ratings on high. This is the correct and easy method to resolve this issue and I'm surprised you haven't encountered other posts about it. People don't usually mess around with the actual numbers as you have, unless they're messing around with the HQ mod to go beyond the limits set in the EA graphicsrules.

Oh, so that's what you meant. Yeah, I did this and the game doesn't force lower settings anymore, which is nice, though it still uses 512 px textures in game even on legit high settings. Oh well. At least I can look at my stuff in CAS now.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#9 Old 6th Sep 2021 at 6:37 PM
Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
If the option is set on highest sim detail, it should use the highest available texture. In this case, I have to ask if you clear the simscompositor cache? Though it should update it, but sometimes, you know TS3 is buggy.

Yep, I cleared cache every time I changed GraphicsRules or settings.

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
If you've made the modification to the graphics rules to max the CPU/GPU, then the issue on the TS3 side is fixed. It might be the Intel HD setting. In the Intel HD control panel, did you set it to "maximum performance?" But again, I highly doubt this would affect texture, usually that just affect the GPU/mem clock.

I did, it's set to max performance everywhere I could find in the Intel control panel, and DeviceConfig now shows GPU: 5 GPU Memory: 4 CPU: 4.

Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
Here's my option setting: (did you make sure "advanced rendering" is on?)

Yeah, I have it on. I changed all settings in game to match yours, except for object hiding and windowed mode, closed the game, cleared cache again and restarted the game. 10 fps and still 512px textures. Oh well.
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