Fallout 4 PC Performance Thread

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/3scaku/why_fallout_4_is_running_so_bad_on_your_amd_card/

Bethesda jacked up Tessellation to excessive levels, similar to CDPR and Hairworks. Why?

Because Nvidia can show off their geometry engines. Simple.
God rays on low or medium should run fine on AMD.

Let's not forget that the performance issues on AMD cards can't be pined down on Nvidia, it is a known fact that AMD drivers are just not on the same level when a game stresses the CPU heavily.
 
That post makes no sense. Nvidia paid Bethesda to put in an option that you can turn off and configure with the console to make AMD look bad?

1) You can already with the launcher option and command options
2) Maybe
3) See 1

I own Nvidia and AMD systems and have no loyalty to either. Nvidia definitely do some murky stuff at times but this reddit post is nonsense that's only going to cause more fanboy bullshit. Can we stop with this please? When did the pc community turn into a massive clusterfuck?
I agree the conspiracy theory is abit much but the tessellation is still pretty high.

How do you reduce tessellation with command options? I needed to force driver control panel.
 
Huh just an update on my end since i reached lexington now

And as people say, weird drops for some reason

Have been playing a steady 72fps since the start all max with grays on low

I'm on a gsync monitor and using a 980ti

no hitches and slow downs until i came to lexington .. Feels weird though dropping to 52 to 60 then if you look at different directions even impacta the framerate and varies on that area

What's your GPU usage like during those FPS drops? Most likely CPU bottlenecked, similar to Skyrim in some parts of towns. I wonder if Bethesda compiled the game without using any of the optimization flags, like they did with Skyrim (later fixed in a patch). Anyone else remember TESV Acceleration Layer / Skyboost, helping boost FPS in those CPU intensive locations?
 
I agree the conspiracy theory is abit much but the tessellation is still pretty high.

How do you reduce tessellation with command options? I needed to force driver control panel.

How much tessellation is there anyway? They use it for dismemberment right? Everything else is rather low poly.

Getting back to topic though I have to say that seeing this game drop to 40 (max settings with ultra god rays at 1080p) on a gtx 970 feels wrong. I do admit that the game looks much better than I expected after seeing livestreams and screens from the pc version before release. I actually think it looks pretty good now. As a whole. The lighting does a lot for the game.

It does however not look good enough for me not to keep it at a solid 60 at all times.
Wonder how much I'd gain from a newer CPU. Still rocking my 2500k at 4.3GHz.
 
last night i couldn't manage 1080p 60fps in diamond city. it was dropping hard to about low 30's. textures where ultra, shadows at high, decal/lighting at high, godrays low, ssao on, dof bokeh off. can't remember all the exact settings.

now i'm getting 1440p 60fps in diamond city! it only drops to 50fps when i'm at the entrance but when i walk down to the little stalls it goes up.

i updated to amd 15.11 driver, override tessellation to x6 in CCC, lowered settings to medium except textures. i'm leaning towards the tessellation being the issue. maybe it's more intense to render them while near a lot of buildings compared to out in the open?
 
At some point my save got a bug that prevented me from fast travelling at all. I fought 4 legendaries as I was exploring and among other things I found shoulder armor that gives me the effect of a steal boy as long as I'm crouching in place. I refused to revert saved and simply played without fast travelling.

Now all NPCs are glitched for me. I cannot enter dialogue boxes with them. Instead I ask them if they want to trade and they open their inventories for me letting me freely look them.

Instead of doing things like say allowing me to turn initiate/ complete quests or, well, any other type of interaction.

My save is effectively broken. Again.
 
I Think the speedbug only presents itself if you fiddle with the iFPSClamp setting in the ini files. If you don't fiddle with it and get 100+fps, the engine will "autofix" the speed (some people have reported stuttering when the engine re-adjusts). though you'll get stuck at terminals instead :)

Yep, it could be the case. I have g-sync and my FPS fluctuation varied from 80 to 144 fps, and I have thinking why I see this micro stuttering (very annoying) and some times stuck on terminals (veeeeery annoying).
Bethesda...
 
How much tessellation is there anyway? They use it for dismemberment right? Everything else is rather low poly.

Getting back to topic though I have to say that seeing this game drop to 40 (max settings with ultra god rays at 1080p) on a gtx 970 feels wrong. I do admit that the game looks much better than I expected after seeing livestreams and screens from the pc version before release. I actually think it looks pretty good now. As a whole. The lighting does a lot for the game.

It does however not look good enough for me not to keep it at a solid 60 at all times.
Wonder how much I'd gain from a newer CPU. Still rocking my 2500k at 4.3GHz.

Lol. "It looks only good enough that I expect exactly 73.5fps at all times".

To answer your question, around a 20% boost from upgrading your 2500k to a Skylake - but I guess that's only if you truly are CPU bottlenecked in this game. Which it sounds like most people aren't. The engine just goes slow at certain points for unknown reasons.
 
Yep, it could be the case. I have g-sync and my FPS fluctuation varied from 80 to 144 fps, and I have thinking why I see this micro stuttering (very annoying) and some times stuck on terminals (veeeeery annoying).
Bethesda...

Just cap it at 110 or less.

Safest is to cap at ~60fps with driver frame limiters. Trying to fix microstuttering/stuck at terminals with the ini fixes seems to present other bugs (like the speedbug). And I've read people reporting stuck at terminals at 100fps as well, so 110 might not help.
 
Safest is to cap at ~60fps with driver frame limiters. Trying to fix microstuttering/stuck at terminals with the ini fixes seems to present other bugs (like the speedbug). And I've read people reporting stuck at terminals at 100fps as well, so 110 might not help.

Hence the "or less". Yes, I personally capped it to 60 fps myself. Too much of a hassle otherwise.
 
Update 9.30h in: Diamond City.

Still getting a rock solid 60fps, no dips or any other issues at all, so I guess I am one of the lucky ones. Not sure what is going on with some peoples setup that has better spec than me, but are getting huge frame rate dips in cities etc. Anyway, thought you guys might want to know.


OLD POST

Performance Report 8 hours in.

Everything Ultra except for God Rays on high. 1080P

Win10
Latest Geforce drivers.
6700k no oc
Vanilla Msi GTX980 no oc
16 GB RAM
SSD

Solid 60fps regardless (no tearing, stuttering, dips etc) so far, border less windowed or full screen.

I wonder if you almost need an SSD to get rid of stutter etc. Maybe someone who doesn't have an SSD can chime in. I also wonder if some people with overclocked CPUs/GPUs might have more problems cause of the engine is poorly optimized and more error prone. (Speculating here)

wow you have almost the same setup as me, im using a 4770k instead and installed on a regular HDD.

im heading to diamond city as of now, hopefully getting a solid 60fps..
 
Safest is to cap at ~60fps with driver frame limiters. Trying to fix microstuttering/stuck at terminals with the ini fixes seems to present other bugs (like the speedbug). And I've read people reporting stuck at terminals at 100fps as well, so 110 might not help.

I got stuck at terminals when my FPS was uncapped and it went in the 120+ range, capped it at 105 and both me and my friend haven't had an issue in two days since.
 
Not having G-Sync is making me immeasurably pissed off. I did not buy an $800 monitor to have screen tearing like this.

After updating the Nvidia driver it turns vsync on in the nvidia control panel. Leaving it on throttles the framerate and causes input lag out the ass. Turning it off causing tearing even with gsync.

Fuck this game.

This will happen if the frame rate exceeds the refresh rate of the display. It's the intended behaviour with Gsync on together with Vsync off.
 
Lexington's a piece of shit for anyone.

I'd challenge any of the locked 60 claims to record a ten minute video exploring there because I'm not believing it.
 
I agree the conspiracy theory is abit much but the tessellation is still pretty high.

How do you reduce tessellation with command options? I needed to force driver control panel.

The conspiracy theory is stupid when you realize the Godrays kill Nvidia cards just as bad. Gameworks is just horribly optimized.
 
Not having G-Sync is making me immeasurably pissed off. I did not buy an $800 monitor to have screen tearing like this.

After updating the Nvidia driver it turns vsync on in the nvidia control panel. Leaving it on throttles the framerate and causes input lag out the ass. Turning it off causing tearing even with gsync.

Fuck this game.

I had issue with this in all my games after a certain driver update, all borderless windowed game would get like 20 fps.

What they neglected to update users with is that they added a new option that has to be turned on in nvidia control panel for 3d settings. In the global settings change Monitor technology to G-Sync.

I also had make a fo4.exe profile to make sure it was set to that, and to make sure my fallout editing of configs for uncapping fps was set to read only because it will keep overwriting that field back to capped.
 
Don't think that is going to fix all the issue. They all seems engine/optimization based more than lacking enough horsepower.

Well, I more meant the fact that I'm struggling along with a GTX 570 from 2010 over here. I'm looking forward to having 16GB of VRAM to throw at this thing!
 
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/3scaku/why_fallout_4_is_running_so_bad_on_your_amd_card/

Bethesda jacked up Tessellation to excessive levels, similar to CDPR and Hairworks. Why?
Does the game use tesselation in anything else than godrays?
Just reduce the quality to get better performance. (Should limit the tesselation amount used by the effect.)

Can someone with AMD card test how much global tesselation factor affects performance when using LOW godray quality.
 
Not having G-Sync is making me immeasurably pissed off. I did not buy an $800 monitor to have screen tearing like this.

After updating the Nvidia driver it turns vsync on in the nvidia control panel. Leaving it on throttles the framerate and causes input lag out the ass. Turning it off causing tearing even with gsync.

Fuck this game.

Hmm? Gsync is working for me.
I run full screen, v-sync off in fallout .ini and limit fps with Nvidia Inspector and everything is fine.
I dont have newest drivers though.
 
Lexington's a piece of shit for anyone.

I'd challenge any of the locked 60 claims to record a ten minute video exploring there because I'm not believing it.

Best I could manage was 60fps with slight dips to 56fps on Ultra/1440p. My rig is pretty insane though, and I'm not at all happy at the performance I'm getting with this game.

There's just too much jank, shit that goes well beyond optimization. I think I'm giving up on this game, it's just not fun to play when you're constantly worried about quests breaking, and random bugs like weird surface normal glitches.
 
Even with Lexington's general shitty performance I also had bugs where part of the power plant didn't load correctly. So like there were some weird N64 like textures around, including some doorways to rooms that appeared to be just solid walls that I could walk through. So not only did it manage to tank performance, it didn't even manage to render right.
 
All right, finally managed to fix my problems. I don't have a clue what was the exact cause of the problem, but now I get 60fps on custom settings (TAA, Ultra on a few, except shadows + shadow distance, godrays low/off) in my 970, zero stuttering and no framedrops in Lexington or the main city. I changed to fullscreen + all the options above it in the ini to =1, except the vsync option. I also set my pagefile to 16gb, turned on adaptative vsync on the Nvidia control panel and set the fpsClamp setting to 72fps.

The loading times though, damn. I could make a sandwich while waiting for the first boot. Plus now that the stuttering is gone I'm noticing that the textures sometimes fail to load and the whole game looks like one/two generations behind.
 
Lexington's a piece of shit for anyone.

I'd challenge any of the locked 60 claims to record a ten minute video exploring there because I'm not believing it.

Shadow distance to medium. Try it and see if it makes a difference. I went from 30-40 to 58-60 in Lexington. All the other settings were meaningless, that single setting was the only way to fix my fps issues.
 
If I owned the game, I would rather hope that tessselation was used for geometry detail and some othe rjmore modern technique was used for volumetric lighting.
 
I know this isn't a high tech solution, but I just set my monitor to 60hz in display settings and run the game in borderless full screen and get a rock solid 60 fps with no tearing or stuttering on my 970 and 144hz non-GSync monitor.
 
I have the same card and I did the iFPSClamp=60 in the fallout4.ini file and no more stutter. But I had to turn shadow distance to medium and god rays to medium and object distance fade to high. Everything else is at ultra. Getting 60 fps most of the time but when it dips with that setting you get some slowdown just so you know.

Also you have to manually enter that line in the .ini under general tab should be the first one.

thank you I will give this a try
 
ok checking in after an hour of playing

Win 10
i7 3770K
GTX 970
16GB Ram
1080p

preset made everything ultra. i turned off god ray (dont know what it is or care). everything has been smooth 60 fps so far even once i got outside the vault. hopefully once i get some more time with it ill see if it continues or starting getting some hiccups

Good to know that Nvidia cards are running nicely on Windows 10.
Last time I checked, Nvidia drivers weren't fully optimised for Windows 10,
so I stayed on Windows 8.1. Maybe its time to upgrade to Windows 10.
 
Use driver control panel and Rivatuner.

Godrays, shadows and distance sliders

I dont know how to lock at 30fps. But the two most demanding settings are shadow distance, and god rays. Turn god rays to low, as it barely looks any different than ultra and performs a thousand times better.

And with my r9 280x the game in the city would hit around 20fps with shadow distance to high, i set it to medium and now i have 45-60fps everywhere.

Thanks guys. Got some major dips around Lexington and getting 35ish in Diamond City but 55-60 everywhere else.

Most likely just my PC AMD Phenom II x4 965, GTX 760 2GB, 8GB RAM
 
Guys do you really need 8GB Ram? I only have 3..

I can play Skyrim on everything on High and something on ultra with decent Framerate.

But reading the 8GB min, it looks like i can't even start this
 
Guys do you really need 8GB Ram? I only have 3..

I can play Skyrim on everything on High and something on ultra with decent Framerate.

But reading the 8GB min, it looks like i can't even start this

I have about 5GB usage out of 16GB. Maybe it's just because I have extra RAM to play with that it's using that much so it might be less if I only had 8GB but 8GB is definitely minimum I'd say. 3GB ain't gonna cut it.
 
Getting a smooth 60 fps started with ultra and dropped god rays to med shadow quality to high and shadow distance to medium, everything else maxed 1080p on a 960 gtx 4gb, 4870, 16gb of ram and ssd, very happy with load times and performance. Very good game so far too! Hope peeps are enjoying it.

Thank you for this! I have similar hardware; save for the 2GB version of the 960 and a 4790k.

I'll be giving these a go when I finally get to play tonight. :)

Any reason to go with medium god rays instead of low, though? I've read there really isn't any difference.
 
Shadow distance to medium. Try it and see if it makes a difference. I went from 30-40 to 58-60 in Lexington. All the other settings were meaningless, that single setting was the only way to fix my fps issues.

Tried it, didn't help.

Lexington is just a shit show for me. 57-60 everywhere else in the game, 38-60 in Lexington. Hope they fix that up soon.
 
Hmm? Gsync is working for me.
I run full screen, v-sync off in fallout .ini and limit fps with Nvidia Inspector and everything is fine.
I dont have newest drivers though.

I suggest reading my post more clearly because I specifically state that the issue is only present with the latest Nvidia driver.

Frame rate does not exceed my monitors refresh rate. Gsync is turned on and active under monitor technology.
 
Troubleshooting the PC version chasing the best experience seems like a fucking nightmare this time around

God Speed PC bros

It's weird but I used Nvidia settings from the Geforce experience and it runs absolutely fine. I just decreased God rays to low as per advice and get solid 60 everywhere so far. I'm only 6 hours in tho.
 
Troubleshooting the PC version chasing the best experience seems like a fucking nightmare this time around

God Speed PC bros

Welcome to PC gaming. It's called flexibility, not everyone share the same definition of "best experience" hence why settings exist in the first place.
 
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