FO4 gets choppy...

[Jennifur68]

I know this is a problem people have had since at least 2016 based on my research. Ok so I've been trying to sort this bug out for around a week, searching online, searching here but nothing I've tried fixes the problem. I bought FO4 in late 2016, played a little and just now got around to playing it more. Yeah I'm late to the party...

 

I'll be playing FO4 then seemingly out of the blue after maybe 30-40 minute the game either maintains 50-60 fps but is noticeably choppy or it drops to around 30fps, stays there never rising back to 60fps and is choppy. I thought maybe it was my mods, possibly my weather mod because it seemed to come on most when fog or dust storms rolled in but it still happens after I removed all my mods, uninstalled and reinstalled clean after making sure I removed everything from the FO4 folder in my Steam library. With a clean install, new game it happened during the deathclaw fight outside the museum where you meet Preston, no mods installed. I was testing to see if it was mods or FO4...I'm pretty sure its FO4 at this point.

 

I've tried editing the ini files to set the game to borderless windowed, borderless, windowed, lowered the particles from 750 to 500, turned off FO4s Vsync and let Nvidia handle it, turned off Vsync and let my ENB cap fps to 60. I tried setting shadows to 3000 in the ini, changing the texture quality from 2048 to 1024. I tried adding bUseThreadedAI=1 iNumHWThreads=4 to the ini because I remembered it helped with FONV. Basically if there was a fix I could find that people said would stop choppiness/fps cut in half I tried it with one exception...I did not uncap my frame rate and let it run wild, I know Bethesda ties things like physics to the 60fps cap. I'm at a loss as to what to do, I feel like I've run out of ideas

 

Does anyone have any suggestions I might have missed? Is there some secret handshake I need to perform with Preston or Paladin Danse? Is it just the aging game engine struggling to keep up like Mamma Murphy's drug addled brain? Should I just make peace with it and play until it pops up then reload the game for the 4000th time?

 

My PC:

Ryzen 7 1700 overclocked to 3.8ghz

16gb G.Skill TridentZ DDR4 3200mhz RAM

Asus ROG Strix X370- F Gaming motherboard

Asus ROG Strix GTX 1070

Crucial 525gb MX300 M.2 SSD boot drive

Steam installed to Western Digital Black 1tb 7200rpm hard drive

750w EVGA Supernova PSU

 

BIOS is version 5204 is current.

Nvidia drivers are up to date 436.02.

Windows 10 is fully up to date.

 

With my PC I haven't run into any game that's given me nearly the problems FO4 has...and yes I know people have been typing that in threads like this for four years. :sad:

Edited August 23, 2019 by Jennifur68

[DjinnKiller]

Seems to me that you have covered most of the bases.

My fps fluctuates wildly, from 80 fps (locked with ENB) down to 25-30ish... (RTX 2080 Ti)

But it always climbs back up in less "noisy" areas.

Don't know if this helps you, but a couple of things to try...

1. Lock fps with an ENB

Set iPresentInterval=0 in BOTH Fallout4Prefs.ini and Fallout4.ini MANUALLY.

(I'm paranoid so I also change it in Fallout4_Default.ini.

Lock fps in enblocal.ini

Launch FO4 with a mod manager, do not use the FO4 Launcher, it screws with iPresentInterval=0 in the ini's

2. Run metrics collection before you start FO4

Use HWiNFO, https://www.hwinfo.com

Start it in sensor mode and log values to a file.

You can then read and compare sensor data with Generic Log Viewer, https://www.hwinfo.com/add-ons/

Wait until the drop occurs, play for another 5-10min, then exit the game.

Check things like proc load, GPU load, VRAM load, temp (is it thermal throttling that screws with your game?) etc. in the file created by HWiNFO in the time interval just before the drop and forward.

As I said, haven't a clue if this brings you anywhere, but I would start there......

Happy hunting...

EDIT:

Since you said "about 30-40min", thermals may be a cause.

Windowed mode always drops my fps significantly, borderless or not, that is my experience on both GTX980 and RTX 2080 Ti.

The windowed borderless "fix" always makes things worse on my rigs, regardless of other settings.

Edited August 23, 2019 by DjinnKiller

[Di3sIrae]

Have you ever read something about EmptyStandByList?
I have low fps on the game with my mod setup but it doesn't drop with time... only in some places, something we all already know that happens to everyone.
I think i can't play on only borderless or only fullscreen because my resolution glitch... I have a 4k screen but play in 2560 (rig won't handle 4k + mods :p)

Just trying my cent on the issue, since if it happens with vanilla game, the problem must be something else...

[DjinnKiller]

This may help if you are low on physical memory, but in general those kind of tools are snake oil.

It's like some years ago when you could buy "memory optimizing" software. All they did was flushing the working set or some other nonsense. There is no magic when handling memory in an operating system.

 

Microsoft knows what they are doing and the memory management in Windows 10 is very efficient except for some very specialized workloads... Rule of thumb, don't mess with the memory manager, that goes for Windows, Linux, BSD, Unix, z/OS etc.....

 

Jennifur68 has 16GB of G.Skill TridentZ DDR4 3200mhz RAM, so I would advise to not fcuk around with bullshite tools like this.

 

Jennifur68 also have a SSD so thrashing is a non-issue....

Edited August 24, 2019 by DjinnKiller

[Di3sIrae]

That's fine. This seemed to help me play the game for longer without the performance going down after loading my saves multiple times. My memory in cache was growing and would never clean by itself, why windows operates this way is beyond me but since it apparentely helped me, i am passing on the information, maybe this can help others? I am never saying to people to use it, hence why i'm posting a link to google, so whoever clicks on it can read before installing anything.
I have 16gb 1600mhz Corsair and a SSD.
You say it's bullshit and all, and that's fine. Hope you can help them then.

[Jennifur68]

DjinnKiller temps haven't been an issue, I've been monitoring CPU/GPU temps. usage and memory with MSI Afterburner, my CPU never gets over 60c and my GPU never gets over 65-70c. I do have HWMonitor but I hadn't been using it since I was watching temps, memory, CPU/GPU usage in game with Afterburner. I do keep my PC clean too, I have a tempered glass side panel so about every 6 weeks when I can see the dust I open it up and blow out the dust on the fans and radiator and clean and dust off the PSU shround and other parts.

 

I think I may have stumbled onto the culprit completely by accident. Before I cleaned out my mods I copied my entire modded FO4 folder to a different drive as backup. In my original folder where I uninstalled FO4 I did not remove my ENB from the folder since I'd never really had a problem with an ENB before. With the new game I started I finally got to the point where I gave up trying to fix the choppiness and decided to maybe just start over so I wanted to try Vivid Weather instead of True Storms. I installed Vivid Weather then looked at my character and her skin looked darker than it should. I decided to turn off my ENB effects but keep the frame rate limiter on and my character looked better. Two hours later the only frame drop I experienced was generally drops like any game, I'd maybe drop 5fps before it popped back to 60fps. Saturday morning I removed the few mods I had on that new profile with Vortex then deleted my Fallout 4 folder and replaced it with the backup I had made. I switched profiles back to my original character and played all day yesterday with no choppiness at all.

 

I've got nearly two days of playable game time with the ENB effects turned off. I never thought to look at the ENB. When I came back to playing I did want to try a new ENB, I was using Vogue ENB - Realism that used SweetFX as part of its effects and I had switched to Dawn ENB and I guess thats when my choppiness started. I may try cleaning out the Dawn ENB and putting Vogue ENB - Realism back in to see if the choppiness returns with it or I may just remove the ENB and switch vsync back on in the INIs. Honestly playing without an ENB isn't a deal breaker for me, Fallout 4 still looks pretty good with godrays turned off and a weather mod. I do kinda feel dumb for not just nuking the FO4 folder from orbit before starting clean...but I never considered the ENB to be a threat.

 

If anyone is experiences choppiness with high frame rates or choppiness with drastically lowered frame rates I'd suggest these steps to see if its your ENB:

Exit FO4

Go to your FO4 folder and find the enbseries.ini

Change the setting [GLOBAL] UseEffect=true to false

Save the INI and test in game for an hour or so to see if the choppiness still persists. If its gone you know its your ENB.

Edited August 25, 2019 by Jennifur68

[DjinnKiller]

Cool that you got it sorted.

I've never had any problems with ENB, and I use ENB all the time.....strange!

But thanks for thorough explanation.

[Jennifur68]

DjinnKiller I switched out the ENBs and I'm back on the Vogue ENB - Realism again without any issues so far after a few hours. My game even survived a sand storm that would have cut my frames to 30fps with the Dawn ENB. If I had to guess what the issue was with the Dawn ENB I'd maybe think it was the almost ambient occlusion like shadows it adds to everything, but that's just a guess since I never tested it with that effect off. With using ENBs in Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas I would have never suspected it was the ENB. It really is weird that an ENB seems to be my point of failure in Fallout 4.

Edited August 25, 2019 by Jennifur68

[DjinnKiller]

Weird stuff.

I've been using PRC for a long time, but have tried a lot of different ENB's and never had problems like you describe.

Got some problems with an ENB a while ago, but that was tied to the version, think I had to roll back to 0.307 or something.

After roll back everything was working fine.

Currently using 0.355, and it has been un-problematic. Gonna have a look at the newest version soon.