Fallout 4 PC Performance Thread

Can anyone suggest a tool that will record FPS? I'm using MSI Afterbuner w/Rivatuner which is fine but in MSI it only shows me a graph of FPS for a certain amount of time.

I want something that shows me low/average/high and from start to stop instead of the last x sec/mins.

I just want to see how stable my framerate is while playing instead of always alt+tab'ing.

Honestly, for stability the only method that immediately comes to mind is using fraps to log a session and then using something like Frafs to visualize the benchmark.
 
This is without a doubt one of the weirdest performing games I've played in a long while. Normally while monitoring frame drops in a game I can at least correlate peaks and loss to particular content in a scene, whether it be asset complexity and density or choking due to game systems and data.

This game? No fucking idea. Playing with an unlocked framerate and no vsync @1440p maxed out my performance swings wildly between 100+fps and ~40fps. It's not unusual for open world games to perform erratically, and in the case of something like Wild Hunt I can look at ~30fps and instantly correlate the drop to a massive density of complex foliage rendering in a particular area.

Fallout 4 isn't anything like that. Simply turning the camera in one direction my cost my 20fps, even if there's seemingly nothing particularly outstanding, different, or unique that should warrant a huge performance cost. I can wander through the starter area, the town you lived in, with its NPCs, ruined buildings, shrubs and foliage, and be sitting comfortably at well over 60fps. Walk a little further southeast, turn right, look at one patch of water that has a handful of trees and a couple of bugs and we're down to 45fps.

I basically have no idea what's dropping performance.
 
This is without a doubt one of the weirdest performing games I've played in a long while. Normally while monitoring frame drops in a game I can at least correlate peaks and loss to particular content in a scene, whether it be asset complexity and density or choking due to game systems and data.

This game? No fucking idea. Playing with an unlocked framerate and no vsync @1440p maxed out my performance swings wildly between 100+fps and ~40fps. It's not unusual for open world games to perform erratically, and in the case of something like Wild Hunt I can look at ~30fps and instantly correlate the drop to a massive density of complex foliage rendering in a particular area.

Fallout 4 isn't anything like that. Simply turning the camera in one direction my cost my 20fps, even if there's seemingly nothing particularly outstanding, different, or unique that should warrant a huge performance cost. I can wander through the starter area, the town you lived in, with its NPCs, ruined buildings, shrubs and foliage, and be sitting comfortably at well over 60fps. Walk a little further southeast, turn right, look at one patch of water that has a handful of trees and a couple of bugs and we're down to 45fps.

I basically have no idea what's dropping performance.

I wonder if it's even something on screen it could be something in the background where it's keeping track of all the NPCs. I've definitely heard fighting and car explosions way off in the distance sometimes so it sounds like the NPCs carry on their routines.
 
Is there anyway to lock the framerate at 30fps? My 970 hits 60 most of the time but I'm getting tired of the random drops to what appears to be 30. Would rather just have it locked at 30.
 
Is there anyway to lock the framerate at 30fps? My 970 hits 60 most of the time but I'm getting tired of the random drops to what appears to be 30. Would rather just have it locked at 30.

Force a cap of 30 with nvidia inspector, that's what I did but I cant decide if I like it enough to use it. The constant drops in the Boston Harbor area where I'm at now are making me sick though.
 
I tried locking the game down to 60 using RTSS, but after playing at ~72 and having that extra smoothness, it's so hard to accept 60 even with the solid frame pacing RTSS gives. Maybe I'll try it again now that I've had a break and see if I can adjust. (Obviously 30 is not an option)

Does Inspector pace frames as well as RTSS?
 
sorry if asked a dozen times, but I see some posts saying how they cant run this at ultra with a 980TI and get 60fps..yet theres a video in the OP that has a guy running it with a 970 at ultra 60fps.

Is there something im missing?
 
Force a cap of 30 with nvidia inspector, that's what I did but I cant decide if I like it enough to use it. The constant drops in the Boston Harbor area where I'm at now are making me sick though.

I tried this through NVidia control panel (adaptive refresh at half) and it just made animations more stutter.
 
Is there anyway to lock the framerate at 30fps? My 970 hits 60 most of the time but I'm getting tired of the random drops to what appears to be 30. Would rather just have it locked at 30.

For the 1,000th time: RivaTunerStatisticsServer, which comes with MSI Afterburner.

Kraftwerk said:
sorry if asked a dozen times, but I see some posts saying how they cant run this at ultra with a 980TI and get 60fps..yet theres a video in the OP that has a guy running it with a 970 at ultra 60fps.

Is there something im missing?

Some sections of the gameworld appear to be poorly optimized, there's some discussion that the way the game handles shadowing and such leads to erratic performance in certain areas.

Really though it's a hit and miss thing so far. I'm on a 970, i5 and 8GB RAM and the game is 60FPS everywhere. I've found my sweet spot, but it took a little bit of effort to get there, as well as turning down some settings.
 
sorry if asked a dozen times, but I see some posts saying how they cant run this at ultra with a 980TI and get 60fps..yet theres a video in the OP that has a guy running it with a 970 at ultra 60fps.

Is there something im missing?

In some places, there are still weird frame drops (Corvega is a huge one). Interiors and normal wasteland exploring is generally locked at 60. Urban sprawls tend to kill frame rates as well, regardless of hardware.
 
Oh btw, put maximum pre-rendered frames to 1 in the Nv control panel for less floaty feeling aiming.
Note, this might (it doesn't always) cost a few frames.

For easy framecap, consider using Nvidia inspector.
 
sorry if asked a dozen times, but I see some posts saying how they cant run this at ultra with a 980TI and get 60fps..yet theres a video in the OP that has a guy running it with a 970 at ultra 60fps.

Is there something im missing?

The answer could not be more straighforward : some areas are more taxing than others.
Like it is the case in pretty much any other game, you can only compare using the very same scene.

I can hit 60fps no problem in many cases but cities will bring my framerate down to 50 or even mid 40s.
 
I've been playing the game in 3rd person mode with a gamepad since the beginning and haven't encountered these issue, except the random slight pause when I'm not using my gun.

I find this hard to believe. Can you test doing the same as myself in the video? With a weapon out have your right stick pushed and held so the camera is constantly moving and then push the left stick lightly so your character moves only a little.

If it's true that you are not having issue I would very much like more details on your setup, settings, resolution any tweaks you have used to fix stuttering. Full screen or windowed? Essentially anything that may be different that could cause or alleviate this issue.

Thanks
 
I'm running a 970 with a mild OC, a 3770k also with a mild OC, 16GB RAM, off a mechanical drive, at 1080p. I've set everything to Ultra, but backed off the Shadow Quality/Distance, and Godrays. The FPS is locked at 60fps 99.9% of the time (diamond city, lexington) with the occasional odd hitch where it will drop, and then jump immediately back to 60. Really wild variations I'm reading about on here, but this has been my experience.
 
For the 1,000th time: RivaTunerStatisticsServer, which comes with MSI Afterburner.

You know...you don't have to respond to questions that bother you.

Don't use half refresh. Set 'frame rate limiter' to 30 and it won't have the stutter.

you wanna change the adaptive to standard via nvidia inspector and use rivatuner to lock it to 30. that should fix the stutters.

Thanks guys...I will try this out. Does it diable to ability to take screenshot with steam...I think RivaTunerStatistics server does, at least when I used it on the Witcher 3.
 
How much of a hit is SSAO in this?

fallout-4-ambient-occlusion-performance.png

you wanna change the adaptive to standard via nvidia inspector and use rivatuner to lock it to 30. that should fix the stutters.

Why use Nvidia inspector to change Vsync and then another program for a framerate limit?
Just limit through the inspector.
 
Thanks guys...I will try this out. Does it diable to ability to take screenshot with steam...I think RivaTunerStatistics server does, at least when I used it on the Witcher 3.

not sure, i dont use steam for screenshots. i wouldnt think it would though.
 
Well I sorted my stuttering. Looks like an issue with 970 adapter frequency (was set at 59hz) when my TV is 60hz. Have used Nvidia inspector to lock the framerate to 60fps and set the adapter to 60Hz as well. Now it's smooth as butter. Probably didn't need to reformat the hard disc but it could have done with a cleanup anyway. Also am not running in any bordered windowed mode just stock settings all round (using Fallouts vsync).
 
Just did a video to show the difference between God Rays Medium/Ultra in Diamond City. Surprisingly enough, performance was almost identical

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8kr4OvL-18&feature=youtu.be

ill have another one up soon that shows Ultra godrays utterly destroying FPS by like 40FPS difference tho, rendering it now

frame rate is horrible on my 970 with godrays and shadow distance on anything other than medium.

Why use Nvidia inspector to change Vsync and then another program for a framerate limit?
Just limit through the inspector.

and what about the frame pacing?
 
Maybe someone can help?

My cousin plays Fallout 4 except he plays it on windowed mode. There's no way he can choose to play "full screen" that I know of because the option is grayed out on the options. Is there a way to fix this?

If it matters, he's using a TV (HDMI) and I think his native resolution is 1280x768.

This is the game running on his PC.
GXH29v2.png
 
Maybe someone can help?

My cousin plays Fallout 4 except he plays it on windowed mode. There's no way he can choose to play "full screen" that I know of because the option is grayed out on the options. Is there a way to fix this?

If it matters, he's using a TV (HDMI) and I think his native resolution is 1280x768.

This is the game running on his PC.
GXH29v2.png
The game forces borderless windowed mode (not normal windowed mode, so that case is odd).Go to my games/fallout4 and look for Fallout4Prefs.ini. Every time the game loads up it changes this value: bBorderless=.
All you have to do is make sure bBorderless=0 and bFull Screen=1, then change the file's properties to read-only.
 
Maybe someone can help?

My cousin plays Fallout 4 except he plays it on windowed mode. There's no way he can choose to play "full screen" that I know of because the option is grayed out on the options. Is there a way to fix this?

If it matters, he's using a TV (HDMI) and I think his native resolution is 1280x768.

This is the game running on his PC.
GXH29v2.png

Hmm...that's an odd resolution...is there a chance its not supported by fallout 4? He could try setting the game resolution to 1280x720 (720p) to see if that gives him a fullscreen option.
 
The game forces borderless windowed mode (not normal windowed mode, so that case is odd).Go to my games/fallout4 and look for Fallout4Prefs.ini. Every time the game loads up it changes this value: bBorderless=.
All you have to do is make sure bBorderless=0 and bFull Screen=1, then change the file's properties to read-only.
Thank you. I will try this out. This may be it. Il let you know if it fixes it in a couple hours.
Hmm...that's an odd resolution...is there a chance its not supported by fallout 4? He could try setting the game resolution to 1280x720 (720p) to see if that gives him a fullscreen option.
I've seen the resolution pop up on most games. It's an option. I'm using my memory to try to remember the resolution but I think that's it. It's odd nonetheless.
 
Just as a heads up for others, I had the bug where textures wouldn't load in properly because the game thought I didn't have enough [v]ram available (560ti with 1GB of vram, 8GB of ram). Downloading the latest version of ENBoost and forcing a higher new virtual ram limit fixed that issue with no additional performance cost.
 
Really, now? RAM speed is the bottleneck? really?
It's a bottleneck (if you have a fast GPU and CPU). I went to one of the worst locations; Looking down from the top of the Corvega Factory and compared 1333Mhz->1600Mhz (20% overclock):

Location 1: 41fps->45fps (10% improvement)
Location 2: 46fps->50fps (9% improvement)
 
It's a bottleneck (if you have a fast GPU and CPU). I went to one of the worst locations; Looking down from the top of the Corvega Factory and compared 1333Mhz->1600Mhz (20% overclock):

Location 1: 41fps->45fps (10% improvement)
Location 2: 46fps->50fps (9% improvement)

I've seen people with fucking ddr4 and a 980ti having 26fps in Corvega. So I kind of call BS.
And I have 1600mhz ram and got 26 in Corvega.
 
I've seen people with fucking ddr4 and a 980ti having 26fps in Corvega. So I kind of call BS.
And I have 1600mhz ram and got 26 in Corvega.
Numbers don't lie. I loaded the same save at 1333 and 1666Mhz. Where's the BS? Have you tried it yourself?

I have Shadow Distance/Quality on High (not ultra) and Godrays on Low, so maybe that's why I get higher framerate there.
 
Numbers don't lie. I loaded the same save at 1333 and 1666Mhz. What's BS about that? Have you tried it yourself?

I have Shadow Distance on High (not ultra) and Godrays on Low, so maybe that's why I get higher framerate there.

People with faster ram and computers are having problems with this game. FPS drops to 26 with not even the highest settings.
 
Numbers don't lie. I loaded the same save at 1333 and 1666Mhz. What's BS about that? Have you tried it yourself?

I have Shadow Distance on High (not ultra) and Godrays on Low, so maybe that's why I get higher framerate there.


Lower quality, not distance for a good performance increase
(medium looks better than high imo(and Nvidia's))
 
People with faster ram and computers are having problems with this game. FPS drops to 26 with not even the highest settings.
And? I'm sure there are several locations worse than the two I tested. I just gave two datapoints that I tested with numbers. Again, if you don't believe it, do the testing yourself. It's not that hard.
 
Lower quality, not distance for a good performance increase
(medium looks better than high imo(and Nvidia's))
Actually, changing shadow distance from high to medium is a big performance increase.

The reason why is more than just the render distance, it also lowers the shadow splits from 3 down to 2, making the game only have to render 2 different shadow resolutions rather than 3. You can actually keep the high shadow distance (14000) and change the splits to 2, and your performance will increase quite a bit from standard high quality shadows (shadows take a pretty big hit in quality though).

Keeping shadow distance on high with 3 splits causes some pretty huge FPS drops in certain areas, for seemingly no reason. You can literally look at one spot and drop 10+ frames, then look a foot away and everything will be fine.
 
So I fixed my issue (driver reinstall).

I've managed to find the ideal settings for me to lock it at 30fps at 4K (only early so things could very well change) with a 3570k/970 combo.

Installed the enhanced wasteland sweet fx 'mod' as well.... It's actually looking.....beautiful.
 
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