Odd lighting/Ugly shadows

[Oculi]

So I've been playing for a while an noticed how my game looks different compared to videos I've seen of this game where it has cleaner shadows and better lighting with more depth to how the ambient occlusion looks around things. Comparing to what I have I noticed Im seeing the game just look awful even on Ultra settings.

So I tried messing around with nvidia control panel and nothing, I tired just having nvidia experience optimize it on it's own but still looks bad and even tried it with the custom config mod manager on nexus with no luck. Am I doing something wrong or what.

My specs:
RTX 4090
i9-13900k
64 GB ram
3840x2160 240 Hz

[insert food here]

Yeah the shadows and other lighting effects and textures are not great. They were not even very amazing in late 2018 when the game launched. The graphics are functional but nothing to write home about.

I have everything on ultra as well. There are places on the map that look ok imo but others that look fairly average to terrible. Shadows are ok but not great even on ultra. They always tend to look pixelated no matter what you do.

Just be aware if you have uncapped frames and are trying to get 240 FPS for your 240hz screen, you will get control issues when inside interior locations. The game engine does odd things if you go over about 170 FPS. I have mine capped to 140 FPS for my 144 Hz monitor and get no issues at all.

[Oculi]

Ah thanks for clearing that up for me.

[Mooman]

Creation engine is weird as ultra isn't always the best setting.

Here is an old FO4 guide NVIDIA put out with some info that could work with 76. Take note of the shadow section.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/fallout-4-graphics-performance-and-tweaking-guide/

The other thing to note is that editing the ini file you can adjust much more than the game UI offers.

[splinterz]

In Nvidia panel the antialiasing-transparency helps foliage, 4090 could probably crank it to 8x. But yea world lighting is rough, shadows get real pixelated if not maxed

[insert food here]

Originally posted by splinterz:

In Nvidia panel the antialiasing-transparency helps foliage, 4090 could probably crank it to 8x. But yea world lighting is rough, shadows get real pixelated if not maxed

I have AA transparency set to 8x on my 4070 Ti. Still hitting my 140 FPS cap @1440p with no issues. No need for a 4090 to make use of it. This game is well over 5 years old now afterall. I'm certain i had that cranked to 8x on my older GPUs as well with no real performance impact either.

Another thing i forgot to say it that Anisotropic filtering has never worked for me on any PC i have had regardless of whatever setting i have it set to in the ini. Forcing it to 16x in NVCP fixed it for me and made the game look so much better. Night and day difference.

[Optical Optimus]

Originally posted by insert food here:

Originally posted by splinterz:

In Nvidia panel the antialiasing-transparency helps foliage, 4090 could probably crank it to 8x. But yea world lighting is rough, shadows get real pixelated if not maxed

I have AA transparency set to 8x on my 4070 Ti. Still hitting my 140 FPS cap @1440p with no issues. No need for a 4090 to make use of it. This game is well over 5 years old now afterall. I'm certain i had that cranked to 8x on my older GPUs as well with no real performance impact either.

Another thing i forgot to say it that Anisotropic filtering has never worked for me on any PC i have had regardless of whatever setting i have it set to in the ini. Forcing it to 16x in NVCP fixed it for me and made the game look so much better. Night and day difference.

did u change iPresentInterval=1 to =0 in the prefs.ini?

[decree]

FO76 uses the ancient creation engine, bethesda used it in many older games, it has always the same features quirks and bugs, it can look amazing from afar and in videos, but inspects closer can look real bad... thats why i was sceptical with starfield using an iteration of this creation engine, some quirks and weaknesses always carry over, or bugs.

I did accept it does not look like in the videos and went with my settings rather to a low resource eating version, game running good is more important over the looks for me.
A 4090 is sure in every aspect overkill for this creation engine. No settings in the world can make this engine look good when you are at close objects interacting or even building, can not hide it.