Oversized assets in FiveM: what the warning means and how to fix it

If your server has custom cars, clothing or maps, you have probably seen lines like this in the server console at startup:

Asset mycars/police1.ytd uses 62.5 MiB of physical memory. Oversized assets can and WILL lead to streaming issues (such as models not loading/rendering).

The server is not warning about itself. It is telling you that this file will cause trouble on your players' PCs.

What the numbers mean

GTA V assets such as .ytd texture dictionaries, .yft vehicle models and .ydr models are split into two parts. The virtual part is loaded into system memory. The physical part, mostly textures and model geometry, goes into graphics memory. The warning is about how much memory the asset takes once it is loaded, not about the file size on disk. A compressed file can take several times its size once it is loaded.

FXServer checks every streamed asset when a resource starts. These are the limits in the current server code:

• Over 16 MiB: the line is printed in blue.
• Over 32 MiB: printed in yellow.
• Over 48 MiB: the sentence about oversized assets is added.
• Over 64 MiB: printed in red.

Physical and virtual memory are checked separately, so one asset can produce two lines.

What players see

The game has a limited budget for loading models and textures as players move around. A few very large assets use up that budget. Players call the result texture loss or the city bug: roads and buildings that do not load, cars without textures, and models that stay low detail. It is worst in busy areas with many custom vehicles nearby.

How to fix it

• Downscale textures. This is the fix in almost every case. A 4096 by 4096 texture on a part nobody looks at closely can usually be 2048 by 2048 or smaller. Halving the width and height cuts that texture's memory to a quarter.
• Use compressed texture formats. DXT1 for textures without transparency and DXT5 for textures with it take far less memory than uncompressed formats.
• Edit the texture dictionary. Tools such as OpenIV let you export the textures from a .ytd, resize them in an image editor and import them again.
• Remove assets nobody uses. They cost no memory until they are loaded, but they still make every player's download bigger.

Restart the resource after each change and check the console again. The line disappears once an asset is under 16 MiB.

Smaller assets also download faster

Shrinking textures does more than fix streaming. Every asset is part of what new players download when they join, and what everyone downloads again when you update it. A vehicle pack that shrinks from 1.2 GB to 400 MB saves 800 MB for every new player. See how to reduce bandwidth on your FiveM server for more, or take downloads off your server entirely with FiveMCDN.