Any way to increase Fallout 3 draw distance ?

[MrDojo]

fully modded my GPU still only runs at 30-35% maxed out. I do notice however a slight bump whenever the draw distance refreshes. Is there a way to manually increase it so that the gameplay becomes more fluid ? thanks!

[bloodfromastone]

fully modded my GPU still only runs at 30-35% maxed out. I do notice however a slight bump whenever the draw distance refreshes. Is there a way to manually increase it so that the gameplay becomes more fluid ? thanks!

Yes.

 

Get this, before you change much:

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15962

Much of it is still stock, including distances, but it has many useful changes for nicer GPUs, allowing other changes to have less of an effect on FPS. It will have most settings which are not machine-specific from the tweak guide already set up. You can improve upon it, but it already handles many little things, so that you can just worry about the more major settings.

 

FOMM allows you to adjust LOD fades beyond what the launcher will allow. Go ahead and disable AA & AF for the game, inclduing transparency multisampling from the 2nd tab, along with Vsync. If you use any of these settings, force them by your driver control panel, or a 3rd-party settings profile tool (force triple buffering, if you use V-sync!).

 

Since stuttering is often caused by a VRAM shortage, if you don't have a 2GB video card, get MSI Afterburner, and use its OSD, with memory usage showing in the OSD. It is a quality program, written by the guy that made RivaTuner, and works fine with practically any video card, should you not know of it. Texture mods, high uGridsToLoad, and far off LOD distances, can all get you using too much VRAM. Ultimately, the problem is that Gamebryo still has many behaviors that should not be there in a modern game engine.

 

Then, uGridsToLoad, which must be odd, greatly impacts both FPS and VRAM usage (with 1GB VRAM, I can't use a value of 9 inside of downtown DC, with vanilla textures), and cannot be lowered, once raised, for a given character (loading saves with a higher value will crash the game). If you have a 2GB video card, you should be able to set it to 9, and snipe like nobody's business. There are some raiders in DC, under a bridge near a force field. IMO, the distance at which you can see them is the easiest and most obvious way to tell if you think you need uGridsToLoad higher for real game mechanics reasons.

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_1.html

Read the whole thing, but take care in the advanced section. One part that you really need to set up, is shaders. Allowing shader model 2.0 lighting, and the use of the 3.0 shaders, should noticeably increase your minimum FPS, with matching GPU utilization % increases. Make a copy of RenderInfo.txt, and compare it after running the game with the swapped files (this will make sense after reading through the guide). This will better use your GPU's power, and also allow you to adjust distant display settings higher than would otherwise provide playable framerates.

Edited July 4, 2011 by bloodfromastone

[Jeoshua]

There is a way to change it back to a lower number actually. Change the ini while the game is running, save the file, then go back to the game and type "refini". That will refresh the settings from the ini. Save the Game, then quit. When you play next, your uGridsToLoad value will be lowered again.

 

There are other methods of raising various parts of the "view distance". It's not as simple a process as in Morrowind. There is quite a lot of reduced quality LOD stuff that is drawn when things are very far away and the engine figures it can get away with it. If a building takes up 12 pixels on the screen, for example, there is no need for it to try to draw 1000 polygons when 8 will do just fine, visually.

 

Most of the things you can do to tweak visual range globally is prefixed with "uGrid". Try messing with those settings a bit.

 

uGridDistantCount measures how far out the ground mesh is even loaded, making far away hills and mountains visible at longer distances.

 

uGridDistantTreeRange measures how far out the billboards for trees will be placed... no more bald mountains.

 

uGridsToLoad measures how many cells depth are FULLY loaded. As mentioned above, this is not a great option for the most part, as it is 100% guaranteed to make you lag no matter how much higher you set it. There is, of course, a level which one will not mind the slowdown and the benefits outweigh the negatives. Note that it can make you crash farther away from spots that would normally make you crash anyways, since the cells and scripts are all loaded. If you have an unstable game, it will reveal this at longer and longer distances the higher you put uGridsToLoad.

 

OH! And despite commonly accepted wisdom, try not to mess with the buffers and the preloads. They won't help draw distance, and can seriously hurt the stability of your game. The game loads stuff in the already loaded grids as it needs them anyways, and changing these values will do nothing but clutter your memory with unneeded dross and balloon your memory usage to lag-inducing levels if you mess with them too much. The only thing it will affect is the pauses you experience from loading cells, but that only applies to cells you've been to before. So walking from Megaton to Tenpenny the first time will be unaffected, but the return trip will not require as many loading pauses. The values already set in the game pretty much allow you a lot of freedom in this respect anyways, and are pretty damned stable, so let's not shoot the golden goose on that one, eh?

Edited July 4, 2011 by Jeoshua