Fallout 4 - FPS Drops in the Wasteland [Fixed]

The problem: In any place it is always 60, but when you go out into the open world with forests or even a small area with bare trees, the FPS drops significantly.

Contents

How to Fix FPS Drops in the Wasteland

How to Fix FPS Drops in the Wasteland

Solution 1

Three mods come to mind:

The first two are pure texture mods and optimise the vanilla textures to run a bit better. The third is a large one, which makes use of the engine’s combined visuals feature and precombines a lot of visuals for more performance.

The main reason why the game renders slowly is because of features like settlements. It allows visuals to be added and changed. The 3D world is not a static landscape like some shooters are. This then costs performance, because the game makes many indirect memory references. As a result can the frame rate drop in downtown Boston significantly. As the Previsbines Repair Pack shows lies the problem with the data of the game and the game engine can render faster if given the chance. Only the game was pushed out the door too soon with little to no optimisations as so often.

An important speed factor is the main memory speed. Fast memory modules make a big difference. One can find benchmarks where the game runs quite well with AMDs X3D CPUs that have a lot of memory cache directly on the CPU. This can also be seen by looking at the CPU and GPU utilisation. CPU and GPU are often not fully utilised in Fallout 4 and it is waiting on the memory.

Solution 2

Use the God Rays fix mod on Nexus or just set godrays to High/Medium for years now Ultra GR’s have destroyed performance same as Shadows, instead of Ultra set Shadow Resolution set to High instead since it renders all shadows within 20000 you in at full 4k resolution, at High it will render them at 2K/Half distance. Other than that try F4ShadowBoost I wouldn’t pin MUCH hopes on the update fixing any of this unless they change the engine/update it the way shadows and godrays are rendered. Hope this helps

Note: You can change the “dirShadowDistance” in the .ini files I have mine to fShadowDistance 20000 which is Ultra and FDirShadowDiistance set to 12000 so just over half are being rendered in at full quality, FShadowResolution mines 2048 (2K) instead of 4096 (4K).

Tips for Ultra Settings

There is a little trick to making God Rays work on ultra settings. In Fallout4.ini:

[General]
...
sStartingConsoleCommand=bat AutoExec

Then put a file named AutoExec.txt into the game’s Steam folder where Fallout4.exe is:

cl off
gr grid 16
gr scale 0.8
gr maxcascade 1
fov 90 90

This will execute AutoExec.txt each time the game starts in the console. What these commands do:

“cl off” turns the character lighting off
“fov 90 90” sets the FOV for 1st- and 3rd-person

… And here comes the trick:

“gr grid 16″ reduces the number of God Rays,”gr scale 0.8” changes their scale a little, and the most important one is “gr maxcascade 1” which stops God Rays from splitting into more rays. Cascading is the effect when light falls through one object, i.e. a tree, and splits into God Rays, to then hit another object, i.e. a roof, and splits the rays into more rays. This is what costs performance.

One can leave the quality of God Rays on ultra. One problem with setting God Rays to anything lower than ultra is that it can create pixelation on some edges. Because there are no .ini file settings for tweaking these parameters does one need to use a starting script.