Low FPS and CPU/GPU utilization

[IbobarooI]

I get 35-50 fps on ultra settings, scaling up to 50+ on lowest settings, however, this can't be a hardware issue, I have an evga xc3 ultra rtx 3070 and a ryzen 9 3900x. My gpu is also only getting to 30ish % utilization. I have tried running the game without mods, a clean install of fallout 4, and tweaking individual advanced graphics settings. Any tips on how I could fix this? Is it a driver issue with the 30 series cards?

[IbobarooI]

Update: I tried unlocking the frame rate, i got a higher framerate and utilization, but as expected, it completely broke physics in the gamebryo engine. This doesn't tell me anything, but maybe someone out there will know what to make of it.

[bbiller]

Well to start off with let's get a few things out of the way:

1. There are areas of the game where even with good or excellent hardware you will get low framerate, the game was never fully optimized.

2. There are patches to fix some of those spots and with the number of bugs that have been found there are community patches for those. I am going to assume you have grabbed those and have F4SE installed and are using either the community edition of Nexus Mod Manager or Vortex. Vortex is what this site swears by now, but plenty of others including me use Nexus Mod Manager.

3. I am assuming you have the big community patch installed at least (Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch). This alone has become an absolute must have to play the game due to aforementioned bugs.

 

Now I am not certain exactly what you have checked on or not, but there are hardware combinations this game has issues with too, so that can be an issue. The resolution you want to run may be an issue. The game was designed when 1920x1080 was getting to be common and Bethesda did release a high quality texture pack and members in the community have released 2k and 4k retextures, beyond those resolutions I can't speak about as I've been away a while.

 

Things you can try:

1. See what the game does at 1080p, if the physics engine is ok then you can try upping the resolution a bit and retest. Repeat this until the physics go loopy.

2. I myself have used both an MSI Lightning 2 (3GB) and an MSI Armor RX580 (8Gb, current card) both work. I am running at 2560x1440p just so we are all on the same page. You may need to make sure the game is not trying to use any specialized physics options like Cuda has in the case of nVidia. If that option is set, try turning it off and see if that helps. Btw, I am using an FX-8150 Black Edition and 32Gb of RAM, so make sure you have at least four cores available and at the very least 16Gb of RAM in your system. If you have less than either of these there will be issues.

3. Posting the papyrus logs here may help as the game should have some info there of what may be breaking down. Those logs are a pain to go through and understand, but we can try to help. Do use spoiler tags for those logs by the way so that those who don't want to look at them don't have to wade through all that to get to other postings.

 

That's all for now and good luck.

Edited February 10, 2021 by bbiller

[xrayy]

if you use mods like scrap everything or other mods with the risk of destroying precombines then check if they include an ini overriding your game ini.

check if the following settings are not set to 0. these dx11 optimizations reduce the amount of draw calls and the risk of fps drops in dense areas even with high end hw:
bUseCombinedObjects=1
bUsePreCreatedSCOL=1

the result is that you can not scrap parts of precombines with scrap mods.

but it prevents you from destroying fo4 dx11 optimizations with a fps slow down in dense areas as the result.

[JimmyRJump]

I get 35-50 fps on ultra settings, scaling up to 50+ on lowest settings, however, this can't be a hardware issue, I have an evga xc3 ultra rtx 3070 and a ryzen 9 3900x. My gpu is also only getting to 30ish % utilization. I have tried running the game without mods, a clean install of fallout 4, and tweaking individual advanced graphics settings. Any tips on how I could fix this? Is it a driver issue with the 30 series cards?

I now have an RX 6800XT and run into the same 'problems'. FPS (frames per second) isn't the only parameter you must keep an eye on. The main issue is, for a lot of games, the frame-to-frame ratio, meaning, how much time it takes for the GPU to render the next frame/set of pixels. This is mostly an issue for 'modern' GPUs and 'older' games (which FO4 meanwhile is).

 

A GPU doesn't only need time to render an image (the FPS), it also needs time to calculate when to render the next set of images. This of course depends on how fast data is loaded into both the system RAM and the GPU RAM. Both of these loading times depend on the rate at which the GPU can get rid of its latest data and the time it takes between each specific frame to render. FPS rate is a nice thing to know, but it doesn't mean anything when too much time is needed for calculations between each frame. The latter can be perceived on-screen as micro-stutter.

 

Micro-stutter happens when the GPU can render images faster than the time to load the next set of images will allow. This ends-up in a buffer overload and the GPU will show the exact same image than before for a few nano-seconds because the GPU 'knows' fresh images are in the pipeline but aren't forthcoming and thus keeps showing the last renders it has in stock. Like I said, this is a matter of nano-seconds and the result of this temporary obstruction is the so-called (and dreaded) "Micro-Stutter".

[xrayy]

in this case it is probably not a gpu issue. it is a known limitation of dx9 (for skyrim and oblivion) and dx11 (SSE, FO4). reason is the limitation of the max amount of draw calls delivered to the gpu and limited by badly optimized DX11 and even worse DX9. the cpu and the lack of support for multithreaded draw calls is the bottleneck. if you reach the limit hw doesn't help because cpu is not able to deliver fast enough without optimization and gpu chills. that means cpu and gpu work only with 50% because cpu can not deliver fast enough with only one useable thread and gpu permanently switches between 100% and idle. it is the effect when the pipeline between cpu and gpu stalls if the draw call thread is saturated and all other threads have to wait. bethesda tried to reduce drastically the amount of draw calls with the introduced precombines to avoid this bottleneck in dense sceneries. but only dx12/vulcan and good programming solves this problem sufficiently. the same problem exists with xplane 11 and fs2020. both companies work on the DX12/vulcan solution optimized for multicore cpu. the only way to reduce this bottleneck effect in the meantime is a cpu with very high ipc.

[JimmyRJump]

in this case it is probably not a gpu issue. it is a known limitation of dx9 (for skyrim and oblivion) and dx11 (SSE, FO4). reason is the limitation of the max amount of draw calls delivered to the gpu and limited by badly optimized DX11 and even worse DX9. the cpu and the lack of support for multithreaded draw calls is the bottleneck. if you reach the limit hw doesn't help because cpu is not able to deliver fast enough without optimization and gpu chills. that means cpu and gpu work only with 50% because cpu can not deliver fast enough with only one useable thread and gpu permanently switches between 100% and idle. it is the effect when the pipeline between cpu and gpu stalls if the draw call thread is saturated and all other threads have to wait. bethesda tried to reduce drastically the amount of draw calls with the introduced precombines to avoid this bottleneck in dense sceneries. but only dx12/vulcan and good programming solves this problem sufficiently. the same problem exists with xplane 11 and fs2020. both companies work on the DX12/vulcan solution optimized for multicore cpu. the only way to reduce this bottleneck effect in the meantime is a cpu with very high ipc.

One word: bollox.

[xrayy]

 

in this case it is probably not a gpu issue. it is a known limitation of dx9 (for skyrim and oblivion) and dx11 (SSE, FO4). reason is the limitation of the max amount of draw calls delivered to the gpu and limited by badly optimized DX11 and even worse DX9. the cpu and the lack of support for multithreaded draw calls is the bottleneck. if you reach the limit hw doesn't help because cpu is not able to deliver fast enough without optimization and gpu chills. that means cpu and gpu work only with 50% because cpu can not deliver fast enough with only one useable thread and gpu permanently switches between 100% and idle. it is the effect when the pipeline between cpu and gpu stalls if the draw call thread is saturated and all other threads have to wait. bethesda tried to reduce drastically the amount of draw calls with the introduced precombines to avoid this bottleneck in dense sceneries. but only dx12/vulcan and good programming solves this problem sufficiently. the same problem exists with xplane 11 and fs2020. both companies work on the DX12/vulcan solution optimized for multicore cpu. the only way to reduce this bottleneck effect in the meantime is a cpu with very high ipc.

One word: bollox.

 

can you explain what is bollox ? thanks. this is a well known problem with fo4 and other open world games. just google 'fo4 draw calls'. an explaining source here (one of many). please ask first if you do not understand. thanks. this is the explanation of the described topic problem.

 

i made a test (with enb draw call counter) with a mod which destroys precombines in a dense area so draw call raised from 10000 to 34000. the result was a fps drop from 55 fps to 18 fps, stutter included with a 2080 ti. further test showed dx11 fo4 draw call limit is around 15000, varying slightly with cpu ipc (cpu=bottleneck) but not with the amount of cpu threads if you have already at least 8 available. more cores just lower cpu utilization. higher draw call values mean you will encounter fps drops and stutter even with the fastest gpu and regardless of using a cpu with 8, 16 or 32 threads.

[romalight]

Hello. Try to install more ram memory to your PC and also try to play the game at a window, less than 1600 x something. One more thing i can think now, is while playing the game at a window, use a program to check the temperature of graphics card. That's all. Thanks.

 

Don't forget to defrag your hard disk, often.

[silvia95guy]

I know I'm late to the party as far as responses go, but I had been running into the same issues recently when I started FO4 back up, granted my hardware is older, (R2700 & 1070ti with 32GB RAM), but the low system utilization is the same as you, with the GPU never more than 40% utilization, with the CPU around the same. (Usually hovers around 25-30%) I used HWinfo and found that I wasn't utilizing CPU cores efficiently. I read other people's "fixes" to .ini files to tell the game to use more threads, but it didn't seem to do anything. What has is...

 

This mod has helped in the condensed areas,

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/46403

 

I did OC my CPU to help with data transfer to the GPU, I also went into Task Manager, in the "Details" tab and selected Fallout4.exe, right click, and set priority to high. Then selected "Set Affinity", which shows options for which CPU threads to use. Having priority set to high, you need to uncheck at least the first two threads for system resources, then you can leave the rest checked. Having 16 CPU threads, I used Ryzen Master to show me which Cores are my quickest, then set the CPU threads accordingly. I have the game set to utilize 5 cores out of the eight, (My #eight button is broken lol). The game still has it's moments, but the FPS drops and stutters are less apparent, and miles better than it was before. One thing to note, Task Manager does not save the CPU threads you checked/unchecked, so this is something that you have to do every time you boot up the game.

 

I also uncapped the FPS in the falloutprefs.ini, then went into Nvidia control panel, and went to "manage 3d settings", then selected "program settings" to add FO4 to the list. Then set the Max Frame Rate to 60FPS, power management "prefer Max performance", and Vertical Sync to "Adaptive", which I'm still messing around with.

Edited August 31, 2021 by silvia95guy