What is the streaming budget in FiveM?

The game world is far too large to hold in memory at once. The engine keeps only what is near the player loaded and continuously requests new assets ahead of the camera and releases those left behind. Every model and texture dictionary has a known memory cost, and the streamer fits as many requested assets as it can into the memory it has. When requests exceed capacity, it prioritises: closer and more important assets first, lower-resolution mipmaps and lower LODs where the full version does not fit.

This system is what lets a FiveM server add content at all: files in a resource's stream folder join the same pool of streamable assets as the base game's.

Textures dominate. Texture memory scales with the square of resolution, so a vehicle with 4096 px textures costs roughly sixteen times what the same vehicle costs at 1024 px. Stock GTA V vehicles use far smaller textures than most showroom-quality mods.

• High-resolution vehicle textures, especially several custom cars parked together, as at a dealership or a car meet.
• Uncompressed textures, which take four to eight times the memory of a DXT-compressed one.
• Custom clothing packs, where every player nearby may wear different high-resolution items.
• Models without proper LODs, which stay at full detail at any distance.
• Large custom maps and interiors layered over an already dense part of the city.

The budget is per client and depends on the player's hardware and settings, so the same server can look perfect to one player and broken to another.

• Per-asset size: the server warns when a single streamed asset needs more than 16 MiB of memory. Oversized assets are the ones most likely to fail to load. This is a per-file check and is separate from the total budget.
• Extended Texture Budget: FiveM adds a slider of this name to the in-game graphics settings that lets players with spare video memory give the game more room for textures. It helps those players, but a server cannot set it for them.
• Vehicle texture cap: the client setting str_maxVehicleTextureRes limits the maximum resolution of vehicle textures and defaults to 1024 (FiveM console commands). On a default client the 4096 px level of a vehicle texture is not displayed, so it adds download size and warnings without adding detail.
• No server-side switch: there is no line in server.cfg that raises the streaming memory of connected clients. Server owners control the demand side only.

1. Find the heavy assets. Sort stream folders by size, or run resources through the Resource Inspector, which ranks the largest files.
2. Reduce texture resolution. Body textures rarely need more than 2048 px and most other textures are fine at 1024 px or below. The Texture Optimizer does this per file in the browser; Glory Optimizer processes whole folders.
3. Convert uncompressed textures to DXT1 or DXT5.
4. Prefer vehicle mods that ship real LODs, and check before installing.
5. Remove duplicate textures and cars nobody uses. Every asset removed is memory returned.
6. Avoid concentrating dozens of unique custom vehicles in one spot.

The vehicle streaming guide goes through this process step by step, and texture loss and the texture budget describes what players see when the budget runs out.