Fallout 4 Guide: Maximizing Performance and Getting a High Refresh Rate Experience

hey viewers there's probably another game you're interested in seeing today but I don't have it yet my new CPU only came with the standard edition of Starfield so don't expect any videos on it until after September 6th the next few days will be a long wait but at least I've got Fallout 4 and with this new computer I've wondered if today it's finally possible to get the high refresh rate experience we were denied back in 2015 due to terrible optimization and the infamous 60fps cap you know I like to give away the conclusion at the beginning and the conclusion is yes absolutely it is possible right now to get a locked 120 or 144 or even 165 FPS with the right Hardware the right settings and of course the right mods future Hardware might be able to push us past 240 FPS and if we're lucky in the future amd's fluid motion frames technology will help double whatever frame rate our computers can get assuming it's everything it's cracked up to be consider this guide a One-Stop shop for getting the highest frame rate you can possibly get in Fallout 4. regardless of your setup even on a potato this video will still help you pump up the frame rate and maybe reach that once unobtainable magic 60fps number the first and most important mod to download is high FPS physics fix you can't have a high refresh rate experience if you're locked to 60 FPS and even if you are fine with a 60fps limit you'll still want this mod because it fixes multi-monitor and variable refresh rate setups and it decreases loading times using it in combination with the author's new mod long loading times fix my loading times when starting a new game have decreased from 15 seconds to 5 seconds and loading save games is now practically instant and that's without messing with the settings you can disable loading screen animations to speed it up even more for the load time reduction alone these mods are essential but the ability to run the game at over 60 FPS is even more incredible it's well known that bypassing Fallout 4's frame rate cap causes the entire game to speed up more and more the higher your frame rate is but High FPS physics fix eliminates that problem entirely if there are any lingering issues resulting from the removal of the frame rate cap I haven't seen them the worst I've encountered is the lock picking minigame still being stuck at 60 FPS other than that even with frame rates in excess of 400 everything just works make sure you're running the game with the script extender and address libraries installed or else the mod won't work if you're only going to download one mod for Fallout 4 make it this one it is absolutely essential with the frame rate unlocked I ran many benchmarks of Fallout 4 using a variety of settings and resolutions and I looked at other people's benchmarks as well and here are some fast facts unlike bethesda's earlier games which no longer stressed the graphics cards of today and are primarily CPU bound Fallout 4 at ultra settings can still give today's gpus a bloody nose especially at 1440p and 4K if you only use high FPS physics fix and nothing else for a consistent 144 FPS ultra settings native 4K experience you'll need the RTX 4080 or 4090 from the benchmarks I've seen my poor RTX 4060 can only get around 80 to 130 FPS at 1440p Ultra depending on the situation which isn't bad but it's not good enough to max out a high refresh rate monitor but worse than the unjustifiably high GPU usage is the even more insane CPU usage Which is far higher than any of bethesda's previous games and while GPU usage remains relatively consistent throughout the game CPU bottlenecks are heavily concentrated to built up areas with a lot of NPCs it all comes down to too many draw calls and too much AI to process that's why the corvega factory Quincy ruins and the area just outside Good Neighbor run like complete ass while areas like the glowing sea tend to run fine even with all the fancy weather effects so performance is terrible we all know that but what can be done about it the first thing to look at is tweaking the graphic settings the game comes with in 2023 you shouldn't rely on the vanilla launcher to control settings instead use Bethany to tweak them but I'll use the vanilla launcher as a springboard to talk about how settings affect performance like most games with a few exceptions Fallout 4's graphic settings only affect GPU usage so if you're heavily CPU bottlenecked don't expect to see much improvement from most of these settings resolution should be set to the native resolution of your monitor unless you are on a very low end GPU and really need the extra FPS resolution like in any game has a massive impact on your GPU limited frame rate and this game is surprisingly demanding at 4K luckily there's an upscaling mod to help which I'll talk about later for anti-aliasing TAA looks better than FXAA although they both look like [ __ ] neither have a major performance impact you can get better anti-aliasing using the upscaling mod I just mentioned anisotropic filtering should be maxed out since it doesn't cost much and has a very positive image quality impact especially when viewing textures at oblique angles texture quality will have no impact on frame rate unless you are running out of vram for cards with over six gigabytes of vram this won't be an issue even at 4K lowering Shadow quality makes Shadows look Jagged and blurry but can give a substantial increase in GPU limited frame rate I wouldn't recommend going below medium but this could be a setting to drop if you need to pump up the frame rate sum Shadow distance is a much more useful setting because the further out Shadows are the more draw calls they seem to use like I've said before draw calls are a huge drain on CPU performance and reducing Shadow distance is the easiest way to reduce the number of draw calls however for all users I would actually recommend leaving Shadow distance at Ultra and using the shadow boost mod to dynamically control Shadow distance depending on frame rate when your frame rate is high the shadow boost mod will let you enjoy High distance shadows and when the frame rate is suffering it will pull Shadows back that's much better than using a static Shadow distance decal quantity is very unlikely to be a limiting factor for your performance so leave it at Ultra lighting quality does pretty much nothing as far as I can tell if you set it to ultra it's supposed to enable subsurface scattering on Fallout 4's ugly NPCs but if you can see it you've got better eyes than I do I'd say this is a good setting to drop down to high or medium if you need to eke out a little more GPU limited performance God rays are a massive FPS killer both when the game came out and now and the worst part is if you turn them off in the launcher they're still enabled just set to low the launcher is broken and has been for at least seven years if you want to turn off God Rays completely you'll need to do it in your Fallout 4 any by typing in the command I've left in the description eliminating God Rays provides a massive boost to Performance expect at least 10 to 15 percent more FPS in scenarios where you are GPU limited however I quite like the look of God Rays so rather than remove them outright I leave them at Ultra and use the shadow boost configuration menu to reduce their quality depth of field is another setting you're not allowed to turn off in the launcher but at least this one only has a minor performance impact however due to the upscaling mod I'm recommending next you'll probably want to turn depth of field off check the video description for information on how to do that ambient seclusion should be set to hbao on most modern systems it will will have a small GPU performance impact perhaps slightly larger on the Intel and AMD cards it wasn't designed for sadly this game doesn't support hdao because it was sponsored by Nvidia and they made sure to screw over AMD at every opportunity in the end they screwed themselves over with this next setting weapon debris should always be turned off yes even on Nvidia cards because it causes constant crashes it should just be removed from the game at this point it's literally unusable with newer NVIDIA drivers and graphics cards there is a mod that fixes the crashing but it also removes Collision from the debris physics making them as pointless as watching fart porn with the sound off do yourself a favor and keep this setting disabled screen space Reflections are often used on water surfaces and in The Institute these Reflections are usually very faint and blurry which makes it less distracting when they disappear due to the reflected object moving off screen personally I like how they look I keep them on but disabling them will give you a moderate FPS boost in G you limited scenarios wetness has little performance impact and makes everything appropriately shiny when it rains it looks better on than off so keep it on rain occlusion should also be kept on unless you want rain to disappear once you enter buildings it doesn't have much impact on frame rate and should only be disabled on the most pathetic of potato PCS motion blur and lens flare both have very little performance impact but again because of the upscaling mod I'm recommending I'd advise turning them both off on The View distance tab we finally get some more settings that actually impact our poor overworked CPUs of the four fade sliders actor and object distances are the most important minimizing them can improve FPS greatly but with disastrous consequences for playability ideally these two should be maxed out but never put them lower than halfway unless you absolutely need to grass and item fade are less important you can cut back on them a little to eke out more performance if you need it honestly on any system I'd highly recommend ignoring all of these settings and using Shadow boost to dynamically adjust them as the situation demands that way you can have the benefits of the highest settings when your system can handle it but also stable frame rates when your system falters I'll talk more about Shadow boosted later right now I'm going to cover a much less popular mod that is almost as much of a game changer it's called Fallout 4 upscaler and it introduces that newfangled AI image reconstruction technology into Fallout 4. you'll need to download the upscaler base plugin to use it and also download some dll files from external websites follow the directions on the Nexus page and you should have no trouble there's three different types of upscaling dlss2 fsr2 and xcss on an Nvidia RTX card forget about the latter two use dlss for older Nvidia gpus and all AMD and Intel gpus FSR will be your best bet xcss either crashes the game upon exiting crafting stations or causes some trippy screen effects making it unusable dlss3 frame generation is also available if you subscribe to the author's patreon but I've only made four dollars from this channel so far so I didn't want to invest five on something that might not even work even without DLS S3 dlss quality will give you an excellent FPS boost on par with the Boost you'll get from turning off God Rays keep in mind though that upscaling only increases your GPU limited performance if you are heavily CPU limited you could drop down to FSR or dlss Ultra performance and it wouldn't help you out one bit I know what you're wondering right now will upscaling from a lower resolution make the resulting image look worse well not necessarily comparing dlss quality to Native rendering with TAA tree branches and other thin geometry are actually more detailed and clear in the upscaled image there's less aliasing too and this footage is taken at 1080p upscaled from an internal resolution of 720p if you upscale from a higher resolution it will look even better interestingly FSR actually looks very close to dlss with this implementation so don't feel too left out if you're on an AMD or Intel GPU the image quality is not much worse and the performance Improvement is just as good unfortunately there's no such thing as a free lunch and upscaling does have some downsides for some people these downsides will be a deal breaker upscaling with motion blur and depth of field enabled will give you a horribly smeared image you'll need to turn off these effects lens flares must also be disabled or they'll be visible through walls furthermore upscaling is incompatible with both enbs and dxvk speaking of enbs and dxvk let's try out both of those and see how they affect performance in earlier Bethesda games it was possible to get better frame rates by using ENB with no preset loaded but in Fallout 4 this seems to no longer be the case so don't load e and B unless you intend to actually use it because it has no performance improvements but what about dxvk dxvk is a little dll file that converts the game's rendering API from DirectX 11 to Vulcan this conversion could be useful for newer integrated graphics cards or Intel Arc cards which may have better Vulcan support than dx11 but on an Nvidia GPU personally I'm seeing about the same or a slightly lower frame rate when using dxvk whether I'm CPU or GPU limited switching to Vulcan can cost me one to five frames depending on the situation I guess you just can't beat nvidia's DirectX 11 drivers they're crazy good dxvk might still be useful for AMD or Intel gpus though so I'd recommend giving it a try on those platforms next up we've got Far Far Away area reform people have said this mod improves performance but in my testing it didn't affect frame rate in any way or even reduce vram usage the effects of this mod are subtle distant Landscapes are a bit darker and noisier and appear less desertified and more grassy with this mod on the decision to use this mod or not should come down to your personal preference there's no discernible performance impact Sprint stuttering fix is our next mod and it's absolutely worth using the name is a bit confusing because this mod doesn't actually do anything to improve frame rates the stuttering caused by sprinting too fast is a camera issue not a frame rate issue basically when you move faster than a certain speed the game thinks you're in a vertebird and tries to stabilize your camera accordingly I wish I was joking this bug is so stupid that if we were talking about any game developer other than Bethesda I wouldn't believe this level of incompetence is possible thank [ __ ] we have modders to fix issues like this that have been neglected for eight years a mod that likely won't help you is Fallout priority I saw absolutely no performance difference with it enabled and I made certain to test at 800 by 600 to ensure a CPU bottleneck maybe this mod helps on quad-core CPUs that are being slowed down by background tasks but on my system there was no difference for Better or For Worse I guess it doesn't hurt to keep this plugin loaded but don't expect any performance improvements pre-visa beans repair pack on the other hand is a wonderful mod it does its best to optimize the awful pre-combined and pre-visibility system Bethesda had to put in place to get this game working at all pre-visa beans across the entire game have been rebuilt the end result being a sizeable reduction in the number of draw calls your CPU has to worry about resulting in a higher CPU limited frame rate areas like Boston Common in particular run significantly better now with a 50 Improvement for me when I lower the resolution to induce a CPU bottleneck when GPU limited you will see very little FPS US gain from PRP and the downside of this mod is potential incompatibilities with other mods that edit World spaces but luckily there are patches for most popular mods to make them play nicely with PRP I'll link some patch repositories in the description it's a shame that using PRP means half your load order is going to consist of patches but that's the way it is if you already have an excellent CPU limited frame rate like I do even without PRP it might be smart to forego it and save yourself the headache of installing all these patches and making sure your load order is correct but most players are going to need PRP to have any hope of reaching ultra high frame rates unfortunately next we'll try the Vivid Fallout textures mod in particular the 1K version these textures are much smaller than the vanilla games and I wondered if that might result in some performance improvements unfortunately no loading times are about the same and I didn't notice better frame rates even when moving between sales rapidly to try to generate stutter one percent and 0.1 percent lows remained unmoved I did however notice about half a gigabyte lower vram usage with these new textures on four gigabyte graphics cards or integrated cards this mod or mods like it that reduce texture resolution could make a huge difference in reducing stutter buff out 4 is next and I would highly recommend it because it fixes some engine bugs and adds a crash logger it doesn't improve performance very much though one to three extra frames at most is all I got and that might be within the margin of error still you should always use this plugin insignificant object remover unfortunately doesn't remove Marcy and June Long from the game but it does get rid of some small rocks and debris this will net you about two to five extra FPS at most it's not a big Improvement but if you're looking for a little boost to get you closer to your desired frame rate sacrificing a few little rocks and twigs may be worth it Shadow boost is the final mod I'll cover and possibly the second most important one After High FPS physics fix this mod is the secret ingredient to getting both the highest frame rate and image quality possible at all times after installing this mod you can bring up a menu by hitting F12 that lets you select the target frame rate as well as the minimum and maximum settings you're comfortable with if you drop below the frame rate target settings adjust downwards until they hit your minimums or the frame rate recovers and if you're well above the target settings get brought back up towards the maximum until your frame rate begins to drop again it's a genius idea and for the most part it works flawlessly the only thing I couldn't get to work is terrain lods those never seem to change on the Fly regardless of my settings perhaps they're broken in this version at least the more important Shadow distance and fade settings are working well you can also adjust God Rays quality through the shadow boost menu but sadly these settings cannot be made to change dynamically which is a missed opportunity considering their massive impact on frame rate so while Shadow boost it does have issues it's still an essential tool for helping boost frame rates everyone should be using it okay I hope you enjoyed this video I made it in a rush to get it out the door the same day Starfield Early Access releases so I could do the stupid joke about how I don't have Starfield yet so I may have missed some frame rate improving mods but I think I covered the essentials with help from these mods and tweaks I can very often hit my monitor's 165 Hertz refresh rate and even when there are drops the game never goes below 80 FPS so the vrr screen sorts it out nicely without a frame rate counter I could easily believe it's a locked 165 it's basically perfect it's too bad Starfield won't run this well maybe in eight years it will anyways leave a comment telling me how much your frame rate improved or didn't improve by following this video and until next time toodles subscribers I can't believe it wait what it's 2 000. holy [ __ ]

Channel: Pancuronium

Views: 29,421

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Id: vqRCNL5Ui88

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2023