FiveM Weapon Pack Performance: Size, Memory, FPS

Keeping weapon packs light

The short answer

Each weapon costs download size once and memory whenever it is near the camera. Most of that is textures: keep main textures at 1K–2K in BC1/BC7 with mipmaps, make sure +hi dictionaries and _hi models are reasonable, give models LODs and sensible polycounts, and remove variants nobody uses. Audit by listing each weapon’s texture sizes and fixing the heaviest first.

Weapon packs are small next to car packs, but they add up: fifty add-on guns with 4K textures can be hundreds of megabytes to download and a noticeable chunk of streaming memory in a firefight. A short audit usually halves the cost with no visible difference.

#Where the cost is

Part	Typical weight	Fix
4K uncompressed textures	Tens of MB per weapon	Downscale and compress
`+hi.ytd` duplicates of the base textures	Doubles texture size	Keep `+hi` for real detail only
Heavy models without LODs	GPU cost in fights	Add LODs, reduce triangles
Colour variants of the same gun	Multiplies everything	Keep what you sell

Memory numbers per texture size: texture resolution.

#Auditing a pack

Sort the pack’s stream files by size.
Open the largest .ytd files in CodeWalker and note resolution and format.
Check oversized-asset warnings in the server console.
Fix the top ten weapons first — see editing YTDs and DDS formats.
Re-measure the pack size and warnings.

#How many add-on weapons?

The number matters less than their weight. Fifty well-optimised weapons can cost less than ten unoptimised ones. Keep the catalogue to what your economy uses, and prefer retextures of vanilla models (small, no new geometry) for variety — see replace vs add-on.

#Models

Polycount and LODs: polycount optimisation and LOD models. Server-wide asset budgets: texture loss explained.

Questions

Do weapon packs cause lag in FiveM?

Heavy ones can — mostly through large textures that fill streaming memory and slow first joins.

What texture size should weapons use?

1K–2K, compressed with mipmaps. 4K is rarely visible on a weapon.

What are +hi and _hi files?

High-detail textures and models used up close; they add size and should be reasonable too.

How do I make a weapon pack smaller?

Downscale and compress textures, remove unused variants and add LODs.

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Look it up while you work

The reference tables this guide leans on, free and without an account.

The 100 blip colour indexesEvery index SetBlipColour accepts, with the hex value the radar actually draws.
All 921 vehicle spawn namesEvery vanilla model with a picture, its display name, its class and the hash CreateVehicle takes.
The same tables as JSON and CSVFree downloads, CORS open, no account and no API key — ship the list inside your own resource instead of scraping a page.