Just got a Radeon RX 480 8GB card, but bad FPS in Fallout 4. Need advice.

[Calzien]

Before I start let me say I'm not trying to say this is a bad card, I simply believe I need to figure out an optimal setup to make it work better.

So for awhile now I've been using a PNY GTX 780 Enthusiast's Edition card. That might not be the precise one but I'm 90% certain that's it. The other day I decided to stop by my local Fry's and grabbed the last Diamond Radeon RX 480 card they had in stock. This is the 8GB model, not the 4GB one. I've been told it's supposed to be more powerful than my 780 which is why I picked it up, that and my monitor supports FreeSync. However ever since installing it I've noticed some remarkably bad framerates in some areas of Fallout 4. I know when it comes to FPS and optimizations in certain areas Fallout 4 is the absolute worse. After spending the day trying to figure out my FPS woes and the new AMD Radeon Crimson utility I've made virtually no headway here. FPS dips down in the 30's to high 20's in areas it hovered around the mid 30's to 40's on my old card.

I've tried to replicate my ini settings back to what they were before installing a new card (I had to reset the ini files due to changing cards.) but it's had very little effect. I've tried screwing around with the settings in Radeon settings too without much luck there either. I have not changed ENBs since upgrading to the 480 so I don't particularly think it's an ENB issue but rather something I'm missing somewhere, or Fallout 4 is just much more optimized for Nvidia cards over AMD. Here's my actual system specs:

Intel i5-3570K @ 3.40GHz (Not overclocked.)
Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory

Diamond Radeon RX 480 8GB Graphics Card (Radeon Settings version 16.7.2 beta. Performance issues were the same with the previous version of the software before updating to the beta so it's NOT a beta problem either.)

LG Ultrawide Monitor (2560 x 1080 resolution with FreeSync support, hooked up via DisplayPort. I play in borderless windowed mode.)

Windows 10 Home

Vanilla ENB (Performance) by TheDespicableMind

 

Anyway, being I've been a long time user of Nvidia products and AMD's new Crimson drivers are different from their Catalyst setup are there some recommended/optimal settings to use for Fallout 4? I've tried defaulting the Fallout 4 settings to Ultra and tweaking them down from there (And I do mean some dramatic tweaking as well.) without a lot of luck. I've also checked to ensure my Fallout4Custom.ini wasn't overwriting anything important and that still hasn't changed anything. And for AMD's FreeSync do I need to play in fullscreen or will it work in any mode? I've disabled Vsync in the Fallout 4 launcher and my ENB using the ENB's FPS limiter to keep it capped at 60FPS due to oddities with physics playing over the limit.

 

EDIT: I haven't changed mods/texture packs either, other than removing one mod (Commonwealth Cuts since I never used it.) and the recent surprise update to Fallout 4 the other morning nothing has changed.

Edited July 13, 2016 by SamusKnight2K

[Govilku]

:sad: Smh whoever told you that a 8gb 480 would be better than a 780 at anything does not know there hardware. NEWER technology is always the way to go for performance from what I learned with NVIDIA cards. It's not the memory you need to worry about, it's how fast that memory works. Also the drivers and software is remarkedly better after the 600 series, With NVIDIA that is the cut off point for downgrading. To me 780 to 480 is not logical. Even 770 to 480 is a bad idea. What you SHOULD have done is 780 to 970. I don't even stutter in Fallout 4 with a bunch of mods, and hardware ambient occlusion enabled.

 

I have a 970 btw. Best bang for buck on the market

Edited July 13, 2016 by Govilku

[Govilku]

Sorry for double but the price on these GTX 480s are insane. The GTX 1070 costs 20$ more and offers more than 4x the performance, with less energy consumption.

[Calzien]

:sad: Smh whoever told you that a 8gb 480 would be better than a 780 at anything does not know there hardware. NEWER technology is always the way to go for performance from what I learned with NVIDIA cards. It's not the memory you need to worry about, it's how fast that memory works. Also the drivers and software is remarkedly better after the 600 series, With NVIDIA that is the cut off point for downgrading. To me 780 to 480 is not logical. Even 770 to 480 is a bad idea. What you SHOULD have done is 780 to 970. I don't even stutter in Fallout 4 with a bunch of mods, and hardware ambient occlusion enabled.

 

I have a 970 btw. Best bang for buck on the market

 

Actually... an 8GB RX 480 is newer technology. That card came out JUST last month on the 29th. In reports they say it's supposed to be the equivalent of a Radeon R9 390 or a Nvidia GTX 970/980 just cheaper. It's not as powerful as a 1080 (Nvidia's most recent card.) but it's close. If you had read about the card you'd find out that it actually uses a newer technology that makes the chip smaller so it produces less heat and requires less power.

 

EDIT: I think you're confusing the card makers by the way, I'm referring the Radeon RX 480, not the Nvidia GTX 480. AMD/ATI uses a different numbering system than their competitor Nvidia. Radeon belongs to AMD/ATI and GTX belongs to Nvidia. Two different card manufacturers.

Edited July 13, 2016 by SamusKnight2K

[Govilku]

 

:sad: Smh whoever told you that a 8gb 480 would be better than a 780 at anything does not know there hardware. NEWER technology is always the way to go for performance from what I learned with NVIDIA cards. It's not the memory you need to worry about, it's how fast that memory works. Also the drivers and software is remarkedly better after the 600 series, With NVIDIA that is the cut off point for downgrading. To me 780 to 480 is not logical. Even 770 to 480 is a bad idea. What you SHOULD have done is 780 to 970. I don't even stutter in Fallout 4 with a bunch of mods, and hardware ambient occlusion enabled.

 

I have a 970 btw. Best bang for buck on the market

 

Actually... an 8GB RX 480 is newer technology. That card came out JUST last month on the 29th. In reports they say it's supposed to be the equivalent of a Radeon R9 390 or a Nvidia GTX 970/980 just cheaper. It's not as powerful as a 1080 (Nvidia's most recent card.) but it's close. If you had read about the card you'd find out that it actually uses a newer technology that makes the chip smaller so it produces less heat and requires less power.

 

 

LOL im an idiot i thought *you was talking about the NVIDIA card GTX 480

Edited July 13, 2016 by Govilku

[Govilku]

But where in the game does the fps drop?

[Calzien]

But where in the game does the fps drop?

 

Primarily in areas where you'd expect the drop, like the area around Goodneighbor. I got a FPS hit here before with my 780, but after a lot of tweaking I managed to get a pretty decent FPS there. Well my framerate is horrible there again. Another place is Taffington Boathouse which I believe is due to using mods to increase the build limit for the area. Still even there my FPS never dropped into the low 20's as it does now, it was around in the 30's I would say. With this change essentially I've lost roughly 10-15 FPS by switching video cards. This is why I think I may have missed a setting or two somewhere that's conflicting with it. Now I made sure to do a full clean uninstall of my Nvidia drivers using a program called Device Driver Uninstaller (DDU over on the Guru3d forums.) before removing the card and installing the Crimson drivers so there shouldn't be remnants of my old card kicking around and mucking up the drivers. I think it's just Fallout 4 and unoptimized settings.

[Surilindur]

Have you tried limiting tessellation to 8 or 16 (override application settings, then select 8 )? Just in case they have added some GameWorks stuff in the game. Adding in 64x or more tessellation for no real reason seems to be popular with Nvidia. Bethesda was working with Nvidia on some graphical aspects, according to their pre-release info, so I would not be surprised. Also, if you use the "autodetected" profiles for games, you could try removing the profile, and then adding it manually via the "browse" option. Find Fallout4.exe and select it. The autodetected profiles had some issue with not working a while ago, but the manually selected ones should work. Other than that, you can make sure you have surface format optimisation on and all that, but it should be by default. Maybe something else that I cannot remember at the moment, too.

 

Have you tried SSAO instead of HBAO? No idea if it makes a difference, though. Assassin's Creed Rogue ran fine with HBAO on my AMD card last I tried.

 

I have an Asus version of the R9 290 myself, so I do not know how the new cards perform. But Fallout 4 definitely can stutter, my FPS drops to 30 or less too when looking at some places at certain angles. It could be the game, too. Bethesda should really consider properly overhauling their engine somehow, it is starting to show its age a little. :tongue:

 

Edit: Those automatic smileys... :facepalm:

 

Edit 2: Have you tested any other games for reference? Bethesda games are probably not the best way to tell if your graphics card works as it should. If you remember framerates or such from other games, you should try those, too, and see how they compare. It might (or might not) also take a while for the drivers to catch up, the drivers (for older cards) were still getting updates related to Fallout 4 not long ago. Also other updates.

 

Edit 3: If you try other games, you could also compare the results to reliable online ones (if you can find them). And if you test with a GameWorks title, you could remember that when comparing the results.

Edited July 13, 2016 by Contrathetix

[Calzien]

Have you tried limiting tessellation to 8 or 16 (override application settings, then select 8 )? Just in case they have added something insane GameNotWorks stuff in the game, and adding in 64x or more tessellation for no reason seems to be popular with Nvidia. Bethesda was working with Nvidia on some graphical aspects, so I would not be surprised. Also, if you use the "autodetected" profiles for games, you could try removing the profile, and then adding it manually via the "browse" option. Find Fallout4.exe and select it. The autodetected profiles had some issue with not working a while ago, but the manually selected ones should work. Other than that, you can make sure you have surface format optimisation on and all that, but it should be by default. Maybe something else that I cannot remember at the moment, too.

 

Have you tried SSAO instead of HBAO? No idea if it makes a difference, though. Assassin's Creed Rogue ran fine with HBAO on my AMD card last I tried.

 

I have an Asus version of the R9 290 myself, so I do not know how the new cards perform. But Fallout 4 definitely can stutter, my FPS drops to 30 or less too when looking at some places at certain angles. It could be the game, too. Bethesda should really consider properly overhauling their engine somehow, it is starting to show its age a little. :tongue:

 

Edit: Those automatic smileys... :facepalm:

 

I did try to reduce the tessellation by using an override and setting it to off. This really didn't seem to make any difference. As for SSAO I have it disabled in the launcher since I had to downscale some effects to achieve good FPS on the 780. Though I didn't try to remove and manually add the profile, it could be the changes aren't taking effect because of that. I did notice my weapons when I try to modify them have an almost "transparent" like effect to them which I think it an issue with the mutisampling. I did try to alter this to instead use supersampling and it didn't seem like anything I was doing made any change so this could be the problem. I'll give that a try and report back. Thanks.

[Surilindur]

Okay. And remember to also test other games, to see if your graphics card actually works as it should. And how it compares to the older one.

 

Edit: Adaptive multisampling AA is usually the best from what I have noticed. With Fallout 4, you could probably use the application AA settings, and application AF settings, I think. At least test those. ENB can also be taxing when it comes to FPS. Have you tried fullscreen mode, instead if windowed?

 

Edit 2: I should add that I have no idea how resolution affects framerate, I have been playing on the same 1680x1050 monitor for years now, starting with my old HD 5500. :P

Edited July 13, 2016 by Contrathetix