Improve immersive environment/landscape in FO4 - My picks/suggestion

[spyvspyaeon]

(sorry my english notmy native language).

As well as we know Fallout 4 has its own graphic aspect. That scenery and tone of post apocalyptic environment. What is not bad but how obvious is the possibility to change and improve the landscape, Why not?? If there is something that many have experienced is the poor performance of the game in certain parts of the map, I believe that it should be the center of the city. There are too many objects and textures that your computer has to render and this can cause dropping frames as abysmal as you are in 120 or 60 and falling to a few fuzzy frames per second, and can happen even with a medium / high end PC. That's because despite the many factors that cause stress in your computer for graphic rendering, one of the most stressed is the size of the Vanilla textures? (I believe so ). I read somewhere and in several places that Bethesda did not properly optimize the textures well.

From the all workaround I tried to apply on my computer, without changing the original part (ie without installing mods), did not work, so I had to start looking for other solutions. If on the one hand lowering the configs for low did not satisfy me (much graphic quality is lost and Bethesda excuse but I have a good computer) on the other hand it seems that the mods and the community managed to circumvent the situation in a simple and epic way :).

We need to do some changes in the game settings. I strongly recommend running / running Fallout 4 in borderless window mode !! This option is available on the screen of the options just in the input (be careful when you put in the window to adjust the size of the image to the size of your screen). Personally I improved performance and I gained about 10 fps just changing it myself. !! With regard to mods. I'll describe what I have installed and why I installed it! I think it's easier this way:

Now I have a SOLID 60 FPS in anyplace ingame, with or without doing video capture or even streaming to youtube or Twitch.

Here what I did!!! Sharing if someone has the same/similar issue.

* Vivid ENB 3.0 Vivid Weathers - This mod is nothing more than the settings of the famous ENB Series (ie before installing the mod you must have installed at least two ENB Series binaries the instructions are in the mod that indicates step by step what is necessary, it is simple and fast to install). As shown in the photo beside the mod and ENB enhances the tonality of colors and makes the landscape more immersive. (attention: I recommend installing Manual.). As it is a pack with Vivid Weather, this will increase better textures for the clouds in the sky. Climate dynamics, sometimes it rains, sometimes it's sunny, sometimes cloudy. Very good, really good. Attention: The ENB Series has a menu of settings, if something at the brightness level, depth field does not please you, you can always make ingame adjustments, just press the "Shift + F12" keys. Open the command line before to lock the camera.

* Vivid Fallout - All in One - As I mentioned above the problem of optimization of textures in critical areas and not only, this mod in my case has been central and excellent. As the name says "all in one" ie is a pack of textures that has a clear objective (reduce the consumption of Vram, ie textures are optimized like never before). Not wanting to send indirect mouths to Bethesda but sending.

* GRASSLANDS - A Fallout 4 Grass Overhaul - As it has been a little more than 200 years after the first Nuclear bomb and despite the fact that there is still radiation (maybe as in the accident in Chernobyl Russia.) It makes sense that nature recovers a little. this is to enhance the planes and make the environment as realistic as possible. Ironically the textures of this grass / grass is better than the absence of it.

* Grasslands - Seasons Modular Patches - This will be a mod that will complement the mod above (this mod needs the Grassland, otherwise it will not work). Giving a good functionality of seasons and vegetation change. It has its own plants and I recommend it. It is always one more point in immersiveness and realism. Both mods are made and optimized to the max for a good gameplay experience.

* Grassy LODs - I noticed that the two mods above Grass / Grass do not add LOD files, they do not appear in the view where it should appear with their Level of Detail. Bla bla bla in other words when you look away (horizinte of the landscape) is what appears and what does not appear. The Grass / Grass was missing this mod corrects. Now you look away and you can see the grass / grass on the ground. D +!

* HN66s Moons and Planets - How about changing the Moon of the game. The nights in Fallout 4 are sometimes "scary" because it's pitch dark and despite the graphic improvement (we always get the impression that something is missing). This mod alters the texture of the Moon and gives you a glimpse of a huge moon. I recommend it, it's the one I've been using forever. The Moon currently gives some dim light and in some places with some conditions still let see shade.

* Visible Galaxy 4k and Framework - Attention: this texture it is not optimized for performance (it's a 4K texture), but if I have gained performance in the others above, then this is a must have. Of course it is 4K texture but gives a beautiful view on the Milky Way. As here we are also with Vivid Weather. The Milky Way will only be visible when the sky is clear and combined with Grassland Seasons (stations) points to those spring / summer nights.

Bottom line, these are the mods I have at the moment installed, and that have greatly improved my experience in the game, and even improving the performance of the game. I can play at 60 fps without big losses, in more critical places I can drop to a 45/50 fps, which I consider acceptable.

As always I recommend installing the mods with the Vortex Alpha or Nexus Mod Manager or any MM (except the Vivid ENB as I indicated above), so that it is easier to maintain, update or even uninstall if you do not want or work correctly on my computer .

This is a sample of the result. Good game!!

 

posted this suggestion here in my native language. https://yourmachinima.blogspot.pt/2018/04/mod-melhoria-do-ambiente-grafico-e.html

 

I hope it could help someone

[payl0ad]

 

As well as we know Fallout 4 has its own graphic aspect. That scenery and tone of post apocalyptic environment. What is not bad but how obvious is the possibility to change and improve the landscape, Why not?? If there is something that many have experienced is the poor performance of the game in certain parts of the map, I believe that it should be the center of the city. There are too many objects and textures that your computer has to render and this can cause dropping frames as abysmal as you are in 120 or 60 and falling to a few fuzzy frames per second, and can happen even with a medium / high end PC. That's because despite the many factors that cause stress in your computer for graphic rendering, one of the most stressed is the size of the Vanilla textures? (I believe so ). I read somewhere and in several places that Bethesda did not properly optimize the textures well.

 

While you're right about the downtown Boston performance part, the cause of that is not textures. Texture replacers, if installed properly (streamed from a DDS-optimized BA2 archive and in the correct DDS compression format) are practically performance neutral as long as their resolution does not change. And even then, a modern GPU does not break a sweat if it has to map 4096x4096 pixels to a surface instead of 2048x2048. It's likely using a mipmap in lower resolution anyway. What is true is that vanilla assets are extremely messy and inconsistent, which is not surprising given that there's probably a team of 10-20 people creating assets for BGS.

 

If you want to know why your frame rate craps out in that area, read this thread. You can help yourself by using this mod.

Edited April 16, 2018 by payl0ad

[AGreatWeight]

Running Fallout4 over 60fps is a bad idea, there's a reason Bethesda capped it as anything over that can cause issues with the Havok physics, and over time lead to numerous game-breaking issues.

The reason for fps drops in certain parts of the Commonwealth (particularly Downtown Boston) is due to the unoptimized nature of Bethesda games.; namely, that the game engine renders objects in their entirety, even if said objects are mostly below the ground (and therefore invisible to the player) You can see this for yourself if you open the console in-game, use the TFC function and just lower the camera into the ground, the entirety of the Commonwealth suffers from this.

[spyvspyaeon]

Thanks for your both feedback. I will look that mod. But so far I don't need. Since I've done that combination of mods my FPS increased to the max that my Graphic card can handle (I use a MSI rx 570 4gb, running on I5 3.5 Ghz k series without OC). Only with the vanilla game I have a damn serious drop framerate on Boston while the mods gave me an amazing landscape look with a solid 60fps.

 

I will dig this "If you want to know why your frame rate craps out in that area, read this thread. You can help yourself by using this mod." asap. But well here is my picks of what solved my problem

[payl0ad]

Well if you use Boston FPS Fix, you can crank up some values a little and get more fidelity AND an FPS boost.

 

Textures are, as I said, practically performance neutral. I run on a GTX980 (4GB) and I run several GBytes worth of texture replacer mods, most of them at higher resolution than vanilla. Costs me 1-5 FPS consistently in the downtown area, doesn't matter in the less densely packed areas because I hit the limiter at 60 pretty consistently there. Of course everything is archived properly, that's why it doesn't really cost anything. It starts to cost FPS if your VRAM can't hold all textures for the current scene to render (i.e. the game has to load the texture from RAM onto your video board, which takes some time and happens each frame) but the engine also seems smart enough to not let that happen, mipmapping seemingly occurs more frequently if your VRAM's full. If I use the official HD pack (which is admittedly pretty bad) and add more 4K textures, I get the blurry surface phenomenon (mipmapping) much more frequently.

[AGreatWeight]

Texture overhauls generally have a nominal affect on fps, unless you're using a lot of 4k textures, or are barely above the minimum system requirements. The mipmap issue is in almost all cases caused by the texture streaming that Bethesda decided to impliment in one of the early updates for Fallout4, ironically designed to reduce gpu overheads, but has ended up actually causing more issues for players (the amount of forum topics that have popped up about this in the last few years is testament to that)

[Transient3292]

I'm not sure if this will help anyone, but while on this subject, ive done one thing that has completely fixed my performance in fo4 and new vegas with many mods installed.

 

I went into nvidia profile inspector and set the vsync option to half refresh rate. I also turned off my fps moniter and judged performance by how smooth gameplay is in my trouble areas.

 

Ive spent a good amount of time testing with different mods and different settings. I have a mid to low end pc and play at 1080p, ( i3 4130 and a 750ti) and the game plays pretty smooth for me. I also play with a pretty high end tv, so im not sure how much your moniter will react to the half refresh rate.

 

Just thought id share, as changing this had the most drastic change in performance for me,and I haven't seen anyone mention this anywhere else.

Edited April 18, 2018 by wanderer3292

[AGreatWeight]

That's a good point made by Wanderer3292. You should make sure that any unnecessary processes aren't also running whilst you play Fallout4 (or other Bethesda games)

Things like anti-virus or anti-malware stuff, Steam overlay etc can negatively affect performance. Switch everything off that you don't isn't essential whilst playing.