Unusual framerate drop

[ChazzK]

So, here's the deal. My roommate and I have identical rigs. The only thing different between us is our hard drives.

Intel i7 6700k 4 ghz processor

32 gig DDR4 3200Mhz ram

nVidia Geforce GTX 1070 video card, latest drivers (aug. 14th I think it was)

Windows 7 64bit

 

When I'm playing Fallout 4, I get PRETTY much constant 60 fps. I don't have very many mods (i know, so basic) besides some armors and a couple of weapons.

 

When he's playing, he also gets 60 FPS.... Until he gets out into an open area, where it drops to mid-40's, and then when actual combat starts happening can drop to 30 or even 20 or less, with the game getting noticeably choppier than even the FPS would indicate.

 

We tried disabling all the mods, running it without the script extender, basically getting everything vanilla, even setting all the graphic options to the absolute lowest settings, and this still happens.

 

Has anyone else had an experience like this? Again, what wigs me out is that we have the EXACT SAME HARDWARE.

[SharraShimada]

Is this a permanent dropdown? Or does it get back to normal after a while? Thats caused by the very poor used engine by bethesda. On some rigs, it causes fps-drops like hell, because something is not loading as fast, as the engine is expecting.

Whats the actual difference on your hard drives?

And, even two identical rigs are not the same thing. Its the thing with PCs. They produce problems, where non should be.

[ChazzK]

Looking out over the city, it goes to low 40's. Look up to the sky or down at the ground, or just turn around and stand in a corner like a bad little boy, it goes back up. Same with going inside.

Both hard drives are the same, at least where the games are installed. Only difference is that he has an SSD where Windows is installed, I have a standard HDD.

 

We did try turning the graphics down to literally the lowest settings, every one of them, and it was the exact same.

[ChazzK]

After a LOT of testing, including swapping bits of hardware, un/reinstalling, changing settings, getting boosts, adjusting sliders and .ini's and everything else, and a LOT of research, we figured it out:
THE ENGINE SUCKS.
We read about a dozen other instances of things like this, effectively-identical rigs running the game perfectly/awfully; people with better computers than us getting WORSE fps; people with weaker comps trouncing it. So basically, it seems like sometimes, some people just get shafted.
Thanks, Bethesda.

The only thing that helped at all was Shadow Boost, and that basically made the dips "not as bad"

[sopmac45]

@ ChazzK ... I am very sorry to hear that and I'm scared because my rig is practically the same that you have except that I only have 16gb of RAM ( everything else is the same ) and so far, my game is running as it should, dropping some fps where is supposed to, but mainly, running smooth ... but again, I hope it does not go south and start messing with me.

 

I have seen other players with the Nvidia 1080 having serious trouble running this game, so, it is not the kind of video card or the rig but something underneath the table that we cannot figure out .... you have problems and I do not and we have the same rig ... this is really annoying and ridiculous ... I do hope that Bethesda fix this problem.

 

Skyrim engine is much better being older than Fallout 4 ... it should not be like that .. simply ridiculous and unacceptable ....

[SharraShimada]

Just read another post, claming. day1 downloads seems to be corrupt in some way. People who downloaded the game-files on day one (or as preload), got much more problems, and the patches wont solve that.

Okay, that may be a myth, but its worth trying and re-download completly, after uninstalling everything.

[Zzyxzz]

This game is CPU heavy not GPU.

 

Reinstall FO4 completely new, without mods and without ini tweaks(custom ini tweaks like using external tools to make them)! Then try again.

[ChazzK]

The game was already reinstalled completely, twice (on two separate drives) with no mods or ui tweaks used, and still getting the same results.

 

I'm really hoping, if another Elder Scrolls or Fallout game comes out, Bethesda bites the bullet and finally develops a ground-up new engine, instead of just tweaking and cranking the same one out again and again.