Really need help with FPS.

[DragonBorn5185]

I am on a low end system, I have been trying for the past 4 to 6 hours. Searching, trying this and trying that. I have tried so many I can't remember and I think i Fried my brain(what little I have). Just give some suggestions please. Maybe someone will suggest one that will work. The only area I have problems with is in the downtown boston area, it will drop as low as 5-8 fps. I have god rays off, shadows off, graphics on medium.

 

My first upgrade will be my video, I am on a low budget and need some suggestions until I can do something. Surely even on a low end pc I should be able to get around at least 20 in the hard hit areas.

[bbiller]

Understand you're on the low end, my video is a similar state, but these specs and a few tips should help.

 

1. Get at least a 3Gb videocard, mine is an MSI Lightning 2 Radeon 6970, 4Gb or more would be better.

2. I have an AMD FX Black Edition 8150, 8 core processor (AM3+ socket, DDR3). This will run the game no problem, though for somewhat better there are above this available.

3. You will want at least 16Gb of memory, Windows can eat a third of that, so get 32Gb if you can, you'll thank me later.

4. I would advise put Fallout 4 on a separate drive away from your OS if possible and if going the 7200rpm spinning disk route, RAID 1 is a good idea (2 disks mirrored, will be slow writing, but the reads will be better and that will help those wait times). If you can go SSD, do so and RAID 1 can still helpful, smaller SSD's are a lot cheaper now so you might just dedicate a small pair to the game and NMM mod storage. My setup has NMM on the OS drive with mods stored there and Fallout 4 on a Steam game library drive.

5. Get a good monitor. If you can 27 inch with max displayport res of 2560x1440 is good, just stick to 1080p for the game. You will find that monitor works well with other games and can handle multiple resolutions easily (mine is Acer k27hul). Paid a little over $300 at the time, price has dropped since then, $239 at newegg, may find cheaper elsewhere (just checked).

6. Get a good mouse and keyboard. I can recommend Logitech G502 Hero, you can configure the other buttons if you want, but defaults are good. Great if playing Mechwarrior Online, you need the buttons on that game.

7. If you're using headphones, SoundBlaster Evo is great, even has a built in noise cancelling mic on right earcup, it can come with a long usb c chord, so cable management is important. Mine ran about $50 since I got an extra cord length just in case, but getting good headphones for less than that is almost impossible, trust me I looked. I use these for my day job constantly and they are a great help.

8. Keep textures at 2K or less unless you have a really good card with enough memory. My game is very smooth this way and things look good. I do have Bethesdas texture pack put in. Settings are around above low to about medium or a little above. Details: Anti aliasing is on FXAA (low), filtering is 12 samples, texture medium, shadow low, shadow distance medium, decals are high, lighting medium, godray's low, depth of field is standard (low), and ambient occlusion is off. Wetness and screen space reflections are checked. All of those are under the launchers advanced settings, didn't mess with the view detail page.

 

I hope that helps.

[DragonBorn5185]

Thanks for the input. I did find this,, Dynamic Performance Tuner and Load Accelerator on the nexus that helped some. And also the Boston FPS Fix, I had already had that one installed and it didn't help. removed it when I installed the tuner and it went back to like it was, so I reinstalled it and the FPS is still low, but it is much more tolerable. My biggest hindrance is my video card, I have a radeon r9 380 2gig. I did compare before I purchased and was looking to buy the 380x which is the 4gig. I messed up somewhere cuz I wound up with the 380 2gig.

[StormWolf01]

Heya DragonBorn. Not knowing the full specs of your machine is a bit of a hindrance. But I'll contest that with a decent setup on a poor specs machine, the game can run...decently.

First, let me say, your video card is NOT your biggest hindrance. My current machine is a Dell laptop with an onboard Radeon R5. That's an onboard SHARED mem vid chip...on a laptop, and my game runs "OK" on Medium. Pretty good, on low. As far as FPS goes. And so far the only thing I've done to improve FPS is get rid of fog, and a mod that changes the sneaking effects (that's actually causing a small hit, so that's a downgrade, not an upgrade).

The first laptop I was playing on, a HP Pavillion, ran this game like utter dog $%it.

 

The biggest differences between these two machines, is RAM, and OS (Operating System) and the way the Software on this machine is configured.

 

Here's what I need to know. 1) Is this machine you're playing on your daily driver, or is it a recreational machine?

2) How much Ram does it have? 3) What is the size of your hard drive, and how much free space does it have? 4) What OS is it running?

 

As far as in game mods that can help out as far as improving your FPS, I can give you a bit of advice. But first, I want to get your hardware working as effectively as possible, so that you maybe won't need to tamper with the game (possibly causing bugs, or other issues) first.

I DEFINITELY understand having to be on a budget. I'm currently on leave from work, due to a broken hand. So as far as your hardware goes, I can recommend how to get it running it's best for gaming, on the cheap.

Look foward to hearing from ya!

-Wolf

[cossayos]

The only area I have problems with is in the downtown boston area, it will drop as low as 5-8 fps. I have god rays off, shadows off, graphics on medium.

 

That's one area many of us have problems with. There are many objects to load into your GPU's memory and the low FPS issue usually goes away after the few seconds it takes to load everything into memory. If it doesn't, you probably have your settings to high to manage by your system.

[DragonBorn5185]

Heya DragonBorn. Not knowing the full specs of your machine is a bit of a hindrance. But I'll contest that with a decent setup on a poor specs machine, the game can run...decently.

First, let me say, your video card is NOT your biggest hindrance. My current machine is a Dell laptop with an onboard Radeon R5. That's an onboard SHARED mem vid chip...on a laptop, and my game runs "OK" on Medium. Pretty good, on low. As far as FPS goes. And so far the only thing I've done to improve FPS is get rid of fog, and a mod that changes the sneaking effects (that's actually causing a small hit, so that's a downgrade, not an upgrade).

The first laptop I was playing on, a HP Pavillion, ran this game like utter dog $%it.

 

The biggest differences between these two machines, is RAM, and OS (Operating System) and the way the Software on this machine is configured.

 

Here's what I need to know. 1) Is this machine you're playing on your daily driver, or is it a recreational machine?

2) How much Ram does it have? 3) What is the size of your hard drive, and how much free space does it have? 4) What OS is it running?

 

As far as in game mods that can help out as far as improving your FPS, I can give you a bit of advice. But first, I want to get your hardware working as effectively as possible, so that you maybe won't need to tamper with the game (possibly causing bugs, or other issues) first.

I DEFINITELY understand having to be on a budget. I'm currently on leave from work, due to a broken hand. So as far as your hardware goes, I can recommend how to get it running it's best for gaming, on the cheap.

Look foward to hearing from ya!

-Wolf

CPU AMD FX 8350 8Core 4gb

Memory DDR3 16gig Not sure what I am looking at on my memory. I am using CPU-Z and it show an nb frequency of around 2200 and a dram of around 660. Not sure which one matters.

GPU Radeon R9 380 2gig

Windows 7 64bit

 

My main operating system is installed on C with 36gb free of 149gb, Fallout 4 is on F and is 206gb free of 931gb.

 

This is my primary machine that I use for everything.

 

Getting that Dynamic Performance Tuner and Load Accelerator helped some along with Boston FPS Fix. I also use the

Fallout 4 Configuration Tool - By Bilago a very handy tool.

I have been looking on updating my system and wondering about going ahead and migrating to DDR4. But I have read where there is not that much of a boost between DDR4 and DDR3, if that is true then I might just stay with DDR3.

Edited October 20, 2019 by DragonBorn5185

[StormWolf01]

Heya DragonBorn - Thats actually not bad for specs, other than your master HDD is... well...tiny. But I'll get back to that.

 

I'm guessing that you've checked to see if your motherboard (mobo) can support DDR4? If it doesn't, it won't get any real noticeable upgrade from the upgraded RAM bus. It'll just run it at the highest level of DDR3 that it can support.

 

Also a common misconception is that more RAM makes your system faster, which...is sorta true. But to a larger degree, it lets your computer work harder, longer. And in the cases of vid cards like mine with shared memory, it means less of a hit when the vid card starts to drain resources.

 

Here's my recommendation. Put off the Memory purchase, and get a bigger HDD. You need more space than what it's got, for adequate page filing and system use. (God I remember the days when we thought that 146 gig was huge). That will help boost your performance of the machine overall.

You can throw a 2 tb drive in there for dirt cheap. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MTJTVF5/?coliid=I1DOYT2BRUW1SX&colid=3MO94RRHIY40Q&psc=1

if you haven't already, sign up for a free prime trial account, and save cash by not having to pay for shipping charges too.

 

Next look into free drive partitioning software. When you get the bigger drive, you want to divide it. Most likely in half, but smaller portions is ok too. Anything is bigger than what you're working with now.

You want at least two main partititions, because you're gonna want to look into setting up a Dual Boot rig. After you've partitioned it, and set up a master boot part, get a free drive cloner software. This will allow you to copy your install of windows 7 into your master part. You can clone partitions of smaller size into larger parts/drives, but not vice versa.

 

Now since you're not using win10 like I'd suspected, we have a couple of options for part #2. You can either clone your install to the second partition also, or go with an install of Win 8.1 which is a bit less memory intensive than win 7 on a barebones install. And that's what we're gonna do with part 2. Barebones. Nothing more than what's needed. This will greatly conserve on your system resources when you're running from the second OS. Windows 8.1 pro you can download free. MS doesn't care where you get it, as long as you pay for the license key. But I'd still recommend going with a reputable source, not some wild hare torrent. (which is a violation of the nexus' TOS, btw). Which, you can get on ebay for DIRT cheap. I bought my key for $3.99 and got it emailed to me the next day.

But in YOUR case, a second clone would be better, since you've already got your drivers installed. But, you're gonna want to do some uninstalling of everything that you don't need. And do some registry clean up afterwards.

After that, you want to get a startup manager. It's good to run that on both partitions, actually. But on the barebones part, you want as little as possible firing up on system boot. Especially intensive progs like defender or antivirus. (that's right, run it naked. Just remember not to go online!) On that note, I don't recommend setting up your internet connection with this partition.

 

Without all the background crap running, you'll definitely get better performance from your games. Like I said, this machine I'm on ain't all that, and unless I've got a bunch of browser tabs open, or other progs that are sucking down my memory and functions, FO4 runs decent for me on medium settings.

 

 

 

as far as in game settings, get rid of fog, there's a couple of mods that do that. Try to avoid ENB's, look into some of the mods that get rid of ambient scrap or fauna like leaves and grass. There's also some mods that can do .ini edits to help improve your game settings. On the former rig I had that I was playing on, that helped a LOT, but the game looked really drab, because I had to set my ini settings to the most drastic possible.

Also if possible, try to avoid using huge textures like 4k or 8k. That'll suck your fps.

 

[MadGax]

If you are using scrap everything or anything that strips down settlements then you may be experiencing .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5bOq_b2QXk