Fallout 4 Lag In City

The Commonwealth in Fallout 4 is a gorgeous, albeit deadly place. If you’re playing on PC, you’ll want the game to look as good as it can without dropping below 30 FPS. In case you haven’t heard what the game’s minimum and recommended specs are, take a look:

In the second room, take up the empty bottle chest of drawers and carry it over to the teddy bear in the cradle. If you have already climbed the first floor and started a fight with robots, there may be a problem here. All sorts of explosions may move the bottle elsewhere in the room.

Minimum

Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)

Intel Core i5-2300 2.8 GHz/AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz or equivalent

8GB RAM

30GB free HDD space

NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or equivalent

Recommended

Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)

Intel Core i7 4790 3.6 GHz/AMD FX-9590 4.7 GHz or equivalent

8GB RAM

30GB free HDD space

NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB/AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB or equivalent Vikings war of clans stronghold.

As NVIDIA have detailed in their notes on the game’s settings, you can configure the graphics options extensively. Here are the most important settings grouped into those you can turn down (or turn off) to save frames, or those you should best leave on to keep that high fidelity standard.

Features to turn down or turn off

Actor fade: This feature determines how far away NPCs disappear or “fade” into the distance. Even the lower settings are still believably far, and the higher settings can have significant impact on FPS, so keeping this one lower is a no brainer.

Depth of field: This feature blurs everything except the camera’s subject (see how the fence above?) This is partly a personal preference, but NVIDIA does say this feature is “far from essential.” Bokeh vs. Standard vary on how wide an area of screen space they effect, but other than that, it’s up to you.

Rain occlusion: This setting ensures that rain won’t be rendered around your character if you’re under something like a highway or building overhang. Because player movement is taken into account, this can cost you several FPS during rain storms. Since it doesn’t break the fourth wall in any way, it’s best to leave it off if you’re going for better performance.

Screen spacereflections: These are usually found on nearby bodies of water. If you’re in a very wet area, this setting could cost you 10+ FPS. Since it doesn’t control all reflections, its best to leave this one off.

Object detailfade: While this setting has little impact on FPS, it also mostly works on distant objects, and barely improves fidelity. Because of that, it’s better to simply leave it off.

Lighting quality: This affects most skybox and environmental lighting in the game, and has a big impact on what’s on your screen. While there are improvements with the high and ultra settings, they are mostly subtle at 1080p resolution. If you need more FPS, you can leave this at medium and still get solid lighting effects.

Keep these features turned on

Ambient occlusion

Keeping this on has a roughly 5-10 FPS difference, but it can have a significant subtle effect on image quality throughout your experience. Since this is one of the distinguishing features between current-gen and last-gen hardware, you may want to keep this on.

Anisotropic Filtering: You should keep this as high as possible, since it can greatly improve image quality. There’s roughly a 5 FPS difference between the highest setting (16x) and having none at all, so this is worth keeping on.

Anti-aliasing: This feature can help smooth out jagged edges for all objects and NPCs in the game, along with jagged light glimmers. Turning this down from the max TAA to “off” does little to improve FPS. Jaggies can really stand out at any point in gameplay, so keeping this on will maintain high image quality.

Decal quantity: This setting adjusts how many things like bullet holes, blood splatter, and scorch marks can be seen on any given surface (including characters). Because these play a significant role in how the game looks, it’s better to keep on. The high setting offers the best balance, and the FPS hit is small. Besides, what would Fallout be without all that blood spatter on the corpses you’re looting?

God Rays: These are the rays of light you see whenever emerging outside or into a bright area. These were featured prominently from the first few moments of the game’s initial footage. This setting can add illumination and shadow volume to outdoor scenes, and is responsible for giving a lot of environments their character. Despite having an almost 40-FPS difference between no God Rays and the ultra setting, you should try to keep this one as high as your rig can handle.

Shadow Quality and Shadow Distance: This adjusts the length and fidelity of shadows throughout the game. Just like lighting, shadows are important to environments’ authenticity and character, so despite the big toll this may take on your PC, it would be better to keep this as high as you can.

Texture quality: There’s almost no difference, in both FPS and fidelity, between the medium and ultra settings for this. So keep this as high as you can and enjoy the great textures.

Lens flare: If you’ve seen one of JJ Abrams’ movies, you know what this is. The setting adds halos and highlights when the player looks into bright light. It’s a nice way to show off the Creation Engine’s advanced lighting techniques, and costs so little on FPS that you might as well leave it on.

As you delve deeper into the wasteland, make sure to check out some of our other guides, like our tips for making the most of the combat system or how to create your character. Happy scavenging!

Eurogamer and Digital Foundry have done their usual assessment of the technical aspects of Fallout 4. The results are pretty mixed across the three platforms, with PC coming out on top, PS4 putting in a decent showing, and the Xbox One having huge problems with frame-rate and stuttering. The problems seem to stem from the way that Fallout 4 loads. While entering new buildings and such the game might flash a loading screen, but if you’re out in the open world it loads dynamically. This has caused some problems for the Xbox One apparently.

From the findings, “First up though, we can confirm PS4 and Xbox One render at a native 1080p resolution, with no compromise in either case.” However, problems arise during the frame-rate tests. “To start, the game targets a 30fps update here, with v-sync engaged…However, it’s far from a perfect situation on consoles as far as frame-rate consistency goes, and neither can truly latch on to a rock-solid 30fps reading.”

The report continues, “Fallout 4 does hold 30fps as a general rule, but drops are noticeable. For example, moving between major city areas is a particular strain on the engine, causing PS4 and Xbox One to drop to 20fps in matching spots on the map. Like clockwork, each platform lurches downward for a spell when passing a threshold in the environment – suggesting assets are being decompressed on the fly for the next location. 30fps is restored relatively quickly on arriving at the next spot, and it’s business as usual from there.”

Here is where things get pretty problematic though, with the Xbox One having some major stutters. “Xbox One is unique in its suffering of a stuttering issue, halting the game experience for up to a second during play. It’s a glaring hitch downward, and matching runs to the gates of Diamond City shows Xbox One dropping to a record 0fps (zero) while PS4 turns the same corner at 28fps. Each has their blips, but having tested two separate Xbox One and PS4 consoles, the results are always the same across the world at large; we get sizeable stutters on Microsoft’s console that aren’t present on PS4.”

We can back up these claims with our time in the game. We looked at it across all three platforms, and while PC seemed to run without issue, PS4 had some problems, and Xbox One featured much more as our review explained. Of course, Bethesda could issue an update to fix these problems if they’re software related. We’ve seen Bethesda games launch in a much worse state than they ended up in before, so Fallout 4 could do the same. To see more about the visuals and how they compare check out the full Digital Foundry piece.

Fallout 4 PS4 vs Xbox One Frame-Rate Test