Fallout 4 BA2 Archive or Loose files?

[Kakabishan]

Now, I wanted to know what is the advantage of having a mod packaged as a BA2 Archive. I've read that it improves on load times for fallout 4 having it as a BA2 archive. If it is true, how much does it increase by roughly, and is it that substantial? I am on a HDD so anything I can do to improve load times would be a plus.

[LeFlemard]

It depends of your storage reading speed :

• BA2 are preloaded from the start of the game
• Loose files are loaded on demand

Remember though that preloading means that you have to store it temporarily somewhere else after loading, which is VRAM.

For a console mod, using vram is much more efficient than load on demand, for a pc with SSD, too much reading can lead to data destruction (not as much as before, but the more a ssd is read and write, the lesser is life span is), a hdd in contrary would prefer load on demand as it's speed is constant but lesser than ssd (preload = high data = slow loading in hdd).

 

[ousnius]

Writing or reading "too much" really isn't a problem with SSDs anymore (unless you buy a $10 model).

 

BA2's aren't fully preloaded. That wouldn't work, no console or PC ever has so much VRAM available to have all of it loaded at once.

What happens is that the files in BA2 archives are compressed, so when a file is read from it, the CPU (not HDD/SSD) has to decompress it first.

 

If you're using an SSD and want better performance, not using BA2 archives is the better option. For an HDD it depends on the state and speed of it.

[Kakabishan]

Thanks for the reply guys. So in any case having it as loose files isn't worth it? (for hdd at least) ? Since you could just pack it as ba2 files easily, won't be losing out on much not having at loose files right?

[gyuuula]

Loose files will usually increase your loading times. The game can stream textures into the memory from ba2 files much more efficiently. Old versions of "wasteland 512" textures were in BA2 format. Then the author released them in loose file format, and after installing it my loading times more than doubled. I have a samsung ssd...

[ousnius]

Loose files will usually increase your loading times. The game can stream textures into the memory from ba2 files much more efficiently. Old versions of "wasteland 512" textures were in BA2 format. Then the author released them in loose file format, and after installing it my loading times more than doubled. I have a samsung ssd...

 

Yeah, my previous post was related to the general BA2 and the Oldrim BSA archives, not the BA2 texture archives.

 

Oldrim BSA: Can be slower than loose files if your PC has a good SSD. Uses slow zlib compression.

Newrim BSA: Are always better than loose files (they have a faster LZ4 compression algorithm than both the old BSA and BA2).

FO4 General BA2: Depends on the system, might not make much of a difference compared to loose files. Uses slow zlib compression.

FO4 Textures BA2: Will be way faster than loose files, since it can stream a single mip only. Uses slow zlib compression.

 

It would be nice if BA2 had both the faster LZ4 compression and the texture streaming at the same time, but unfortunately SSE has only LZ4 and FO4 has only texture streaming.

[WarsunGames]

On 2/20/2017 at 9:50 AM, ousnius said:

 

Yeah, my previous post was related to the general BA2 and the Oldrim BSA archives, not the BA2 texture archives.

 

Oldrim BSA: Can be slower than loose files if your PC has a good SSD. Uses slow zlib compression.

Newrim BSA: Are always better than loose files (they have a faster LZ4 compression algorithm than both the old BSA and BA2).

FO4 General BA2: Depends on the system, might not make much of a difference compared to loose files. Uses slow zlib compression.

FO4 Textures BA2: Will be way faster than loose files, since it can stream a single mip only. Uses slow zlib compression.

 

It would be nice if BA2 had both the faster LZ4 compression and the texture streaming at the same time, but unfortunately SSE has only LZ4 and FO4 has only texture streaming.

Excuse me. Please tell me how to convert folders to BA2. This is annoying for me.