I was wondering if anyone has tried upgrading the textures on Skyrim? Is it possible to do this without affecting the performance too much on Steam Deck?
I actually haven’t played the game since the original release, so if it’s possible to run it now with extra enhancements that would be a great incentive for me to get back into it.
What mods would you recommend, and how hard is it to get them running?
Textures are a little weird because they don’t affect performance how you might expect. Once you load a texture into memory, it doesn’t take any effort to keep displaying it. The main ways textures will impact performance is the time it takes to actually load them - typically through game startup or loading screens. In theory you can also run into stutters while trying to load textures on the fly, e.g. Skyrim loads objects in a cell system, so you’re always loading the next thing in front of you as you walk. If your big textures get paged in and out too much you might notice it.
For the Steam Deck’s purposes, this basically means that as long as you have enough VRAM to load all those textures, they’re basically free to install. Bad things will probably start happening if you run out of VRAM though. There’s probably a way to configure the MangoHud onboard the Steam Deck to show how much RAM+VRAM you’re using at any given point. If you have enough headroom, I would feel free to install some texture packs and maybe give them a few stress tests in a city or etc.
As for “what mods should I install” that’s a giant subjective rabbit hole. You could try a 1-click modlist setup from Wabbajack, or just use one as inspiration.
Thank you, this is very insightful! I believe the Steam Deck has 1GB of VRAM assigned by default - would that be sufficient for most purposes?
Most guides for the Steam Deck seem to focus on installing Vortex. If I understand correctly, Vortex has it’s own ‘collections’ (i.e. modpacks) whereas Wabbajack modlists are installed using the alternative program ModOrganizer2. Speaking of Wabbajack, I did find this specific guide for Linux/Steam Deck. The Dragonborn modpack in particular sounds interesting…
As another alternative, you can also install mods using the built in mod manager? I’m guessing that is a lot more limited.
1GB is nothing - I would be surprised if that’s the most you can get. As for mod managers I’m not sure how best to do it on a Steam Deck. You can get Mod Organizer working tmk, but it’s not native. I’m not sure what the built-in mod manager is but yeah I would stick with Vortex and MO2
I know you can turn up the VRAM to 4GB if you like. When I eventually give the modpack a try, I’ll see how I get on with the default first.
Yes, I’ve done it. It worked great after a clunky setup.
This video has most of the instructions, the rest are in the video description. I got it working and it’s working great.
Oh, and this is for Vortex only, so you could try a vortex collection I guess.
Thanks for confirming it works! The video seems comprehensive :)
Is Vortex a mod loader?Edit: ah yeah I think I’ve got my head around it now. Check out my other comment for a link to set up ModOrganizer2 as an alternativeNo problem. The nice thing with this setup is that I can find a mod on my PC, send that tab to Firefox on my Deck, and I can actually use the mod manager download button on the site. I install the mod like normal, execute a shortcut to run the script to make it work (takes 3 seconds), switch back to gaming mode and just launch it like I normally would.
But MO2 is better from what I can tell, especially if you want to to install Wabbajack packs.
Oh and by the way! To save SSD space, delete the downloads folder from the MO2 directory once you’re don’t setting up the game, and you confirm it works. It’s just a backup copy of the mod zip files. There’s no real reason to keep them. I once installed a pack for Fallou4 that was 100GB and I realized that it was using double the storage space. The only downside is that if you fully uninstall a mod, you’ll need to redownload it. But you can still disable and enable mods even if you delete the downloads.
Thanks for the heads up with the downloads folder - that definitely would have caught me out.
I did fallout 4 and it worked. Skyrim should be mostly the same and most Bethesda games have packs that claim better looks and performance. I used steam tinker launch to install mod organizer 2 to the prefix. You could do vortex the same way. I also toggled case sensitivity for the prefix folder in case of weird mod behavior, probably not necessary but it can only be toggled on empty folders, so before install or delete and reinstall, and if you haven’t used the btrfs mod.
