Poor LOD and draw distance?

[Guest deleted58191551]

I've been away from Fallout 4 for a while, after modding the game for a long time I just got tired of it and didn't even want to play anymore haha :tongue: Now I feel like giving my load order a proper try, but there's something that annoys me a little bit: LOD and draw distance. Yes I know, Fallout 4 has never been particularily pleasant to the eye, but I don't remember distant terrain looking so ugly and flat. Here are a couple of screenshots I made in the Sanctuary/Concord area. My question is: have LOD and draw distance always been so low? Because frankly, I don't remember the game looking that bad before...

 

Here's a shot of the Abernathy farm, you can see the distant terrain looks off. Grass pops in suddenly once I'm close enough.

https://ibb.co/bsMVFDJ

A view of Sanctuary Hills when coming from the Abernathy farm. Here I'm standing next to the open safe where you can find some stimpaks and ammo.

https://ibb.co/pXVVZ1k

A shot of the lake next to Sunshine Tidings.

https://ibb.co/WxGdyWm

Another shot of the same lake, taken just next to Sunshine Tidings.

https://ibb.co/QkWYpRt

A shot of Walden Pond taken from the dam. As you can see, the souvenir shop is barely rendered.

https://ibb.co/ctBc47L

The road leading to the Drumlin Diner. Notice how the diner is not even visible.

https://ibb.co/HzDDM2y

A shot of Bedford Station. The highways looked messed up when I was a bit farther away. The distant train car isn't visible, but you can see its shipment floating in the air.

https://ibb.co/SrPs47R

Here are my specs:
CPU: Intel Core i5-7300HQ @ 2.50GHz (4 CPUs)
RAM: 8GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 with Max-Q Design
VRAM: 6GB

The game is installed on an external SSD. I use the 0.6.21 version of F4SE. All graphical settings are set to Ultra except for Shadow Quality (High) and Shadow Distance (Medium, only way I found to have more stable FPS in Boston). Godrays, ambient occlusion and weapon debris are all disabled. Fade sliders are set to maximum. Distant Object Detail and Object Detail Fade are set to Ultra. I'm using ENB, but I only use it for colorimetry, all graphical effects are turned off. Even though I never touched it before, I tried setting uGridsToLoad to 7 and the game looks a bit more similar to what I remember in terms of draw distance, but there are very noticeable framerate drops that I never had back then (around Lexington for example).

What's weird is that I tried a new game with all my plugins disabled yet the result is the same, so either the game has always looked like that and I never noticed before, or I permanently broke something while working on my load order (if that's even possible). I always use test saves and characters when doing my load order, I only start a brand new game once I'm sure I won't make any more modifications.

Except for Vivid Fallout, I don't use any major visual enhancement mod...

 

EDIT: did a 100% clean reinstall to see how the vanilla game looks, and draw distance is the same as the screenshots from my modded game... So yeah, that's how things are supposed to look... I guess!

Edited November 2, 2020 by Willdo89