Fallout 4 ini tweaks

[smoky mcpot]

Fallout 4 is stuttering and lagging for me quite badly at times and i think i should be getting a better performance with my computer.

Here are my specs
Graphics Card: ASUS 12GB GTX Titan X
Processor: i7 Eight Core Extreme i7-5960X
Memory: 16GB CRUCIAL DDR4 2133MHz (2 x 8GB)

I play the game at 3840x2160 res and have all settings at ultra or max and can play other games like the witcher 3 at max settings with very few dips in performance so i decided to add some of the skyrim ini tweaks to the fallout4.ini file like this

[General]
sLanguage=en
uGridsToLoad=7
uExterior Cell Buffer=64
bDisableAllGore=0
bPreemptivelyUnloadCells=1
iPreloadSizeLimit=8388608000 ( 8 gb of my 16 gb ram )
iNumHWThreads=8

So is it safe to do this and are the values even corect because on the nexus page where i got the tweaks the author has been banned and people are reporting that the values are wrong?

[Qnomei]

Never edit the uGridsToLoad value, same with uExteriorCellBuffer. EVER. It messes up quest triggers (sets them off from farther away) and severely decreases performance.

Whoever posted that was trying to make people crash their game.

Try this fix: https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/discussions/0/496881136898870103/

It's a DXGI that improves the frame pacing by taking advantage of Windows 10 features. It also improves texture caching.

Also use this launcher from the nexus to tweak your ini files:

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/102/?

[smoky mcpot]

Originally posted by Qnomei:

Never edit the uGridsToLoad value, same with uExteriorCellBuffer. EVER. It messes up quest triggers (sets them off from farther away) and severely decreases performance.

Whoever posted that was trying to make people crash their game.

Ok what about PreloadSizeLimit and iNumHWThreads?

[Aries the Grinning]

Originally posted by smoky mcpot:

Originally posted by Qnomei:

Never edit the uGridsToLoad value, same with uExteriorCellBuffer. EVER. It messes up quest triggers (sets them off from farther away) and severely decreases performance.

Whoever posted that was trying to make people crash their game.

Ok what about PreloadSizeLimit and iNumHWThreads?

Those are placebo, don't think they matter too much in this game... What you could check if you've got busecombinedobjects=0, if so, switch it back to 1... it causes the game to use a crapton of resources.

[Qnomei]

Originally posted by smoky mcpot:

Originally posted by Qnomei:

Never edit the uGridsToLoad value, same with uExteriorCellBuffer. EVER. It messes up quest triggers (sets them off from farther away) and severely decreases performance.

Whoever posted that was trying to make people crash their game.

Ok what about PreloadSizeLimit and iNumHWThreads?

Those ones are fine, though I'm not sure they make much of a difference.

[Yhwach]

Originally posted by Qnomei:

Originally posted by smoky mcpot:

Ok what about PreloadSizeLimit and iNumHWThreads?

Those ones are fine, though I'm not sure they make much of a difference.

The uGridsToLoad do NOT mess with quest triggers unless you go haywire, with the OP's Nvidia Titan X you can go stable up to 9, at 12 you're prone to crashes.

Originally posted by smoky mcpot:

Originally posted by Qnomei:

Never edit the uGridsToLoad value, same with uExteriorCellBuffer. EVER. It messes up quest triggers (sets them off from farther away) and severely decreases performance.

Whoever posted that was trying to make people crash their game.

Ok what about PreloadSizeLimit and iNumHWThreads?

iPreloadSizeLimit is how much data is loaded before aproaching a cell, doesn't do much besides making load times a bit shorter
iNumHWThreads are your CPU Cores total, including logical cores

[Trehek]

Originally posted by Qnomei:

Never edit the uGridsToLoad value. EVER. It messes up quest triggers (sets them off from farther away) and severely decreases performance.

Whoever posted that was trying to make people crash their game.

This.

Increasing uGridsToLoad was a big fad in Skyrim when people discovered it can increase draw distance, but that's not all it does. It also affects script loading distance, and increasing that causes all sorts of issues with events, as well as crashing. Stamping out the habit of people messing with uGrids was very difficult until DynDoLOD was released as a properly working alternative for increased view distance. Now, people who weren't with Skyrim long enough to know about these problems and only played during the fad are trying to mess with Fallout 4's ugrids.

Don't do it. It's a bad idea.

Increasing the cell buffer is a good idea, on the other hand. Preloading cells into the buffer can help with objects being loaded in tremendously, especially for players who don't have SSD. I've been playing with Cell Buffer = 64 (and a proportionately increased ipreloadsizelimit) without problems and it helped a LOT with my object pop-in.

Another good thing to tweak are the texture load distances:
bForceUpdateDiffuseOnly=0 -- (default is 1)
iTextureUpgradeDistance1=2400 -- (default is 1200)
iTextureUpgradeDistance0=1200 -- (default is 600)
iTextureDegradeDistance1=3000 -- (default is 1500)
iTextureDegradeDistance0=1600 -- (default is 800)

Using double values like above, or even triple values like I use, can also reduce the texture load, increase average texture sharpness and reduce texture pop-in because the game doesn't run into detail switching distances quite as easily.

The third big thing is shadows. They are badly optimized in the game, and static shadow distances means either poor general quality or the occasional poor fps. I very highly recommend the Shadow Boost mod to remedy this issue and get good quality together with more stable fps using dynamic shadow quality:

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1822/?

[smoky mcpot]

Ok i get it DON'T mess with uGridsToLoad even though i didn't see any problems using this setting in skyrim i will set it back to 5 but PreloadSizeLimt is set to 250MB as standard and i have incresed that to 8GB half of my 16 gb. Is that the limit or can i increse that to 16 gb?
And iNumHWThreads is the amount of cores the game will use right? Is it ok to put this at 8?

[smoky mcpot]

Originally posted by Trehek:

Originally posted by Qnomei:

Never edit the uGridsToLoad value. EVER. It messes up quest triggers (sets them off from farther away) and severely decreases performance.

Whoever posted that was trying to make people crash their game.

This.

Increasing uGridsToLoad was a big fad in Skyrim when people discovered it can increase draw distance, but that's not all it does. It also affects script loading distance, and increasing that causes all sorts of issues with events, as well as crashing. Stamping out the habit of people messing with uGrids was very difficult until DynDoLOD was released as a properly working alternative for increased view distance. Now, people who weren't with Skyrim long enough to know about these problems and only played during the fad are trying to mess with Fallout 4's ugrids.

Don't do it. It's a bad idea.

Increasing the cell buffer is a good idea, on the other hand. Preloading cells into the buffer can help with objects being loaded in tremendously, especially for players who don't have SSD. I've been playing with Cell Buffer = 64 (and a proportionately increased ipreloadsizelimit) without problems and it helped a LOT with my object pop-in.

Another good thing to tweak are the texture load distances:
bForceUpdateDiffuseOnly=0 -- (default is 1)
iTextureUpgradeDistance1=2400 -- (default is 1200)
iTextureUpgradeDistance0=1200 -- (default is 600)
iTextureDegradeDistance1=3000 -- (default is 1500)
iTextureDegradeDistance0=1600 -- (default is 800)

Using double values like above, or even triple values like I use, can also reduce the texture load, increase average texture sharpness and reduce texture pop-in because the game doesn't run into detail switching distances quite as easily.

The third big thing is shadows. They are badly optimized in the game, and static shadow distances means either poor general quality or the occasional poor fps. I very highly recommend the Shadow Boost mod to remedy this issue and get good quality together with more stable fps using dynamic shadow quality:

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1822/?

Another good thing to tweak are the texture load distances:
bForceUpdateDiffuseOnly=0 -- (default is 1)
iTextureUpgradeDistance1=2400 -- (default is 1200)
iTextureUpgradeDistance0=1200 -- (default is 600)
iTextureDegradeDistance1=3000 -- (default is 1500)
iTextureDegradeDistance0=1600 -- (default is 800)

I don't have any of these settings in my ini files where do i put them?

[Trehek]

There's no point in setting the preload memory size that high. 8GB is already overkill. You could halve that and still easily set the cell buffer to 128 and enjoy faster loading times due to cells remaining in memory.

Easy way to tell how high it's safe to set iNumHWThreads is to open up the Windows Task Manager, go to the Performance tab and look at how many boxes are displayed in the CPU Usage History. Some people have been saying that a value higher than 4 doesn't work in Fallout 4, but I'm not sure I buy that. It did help in Skyrim. I've been playing with 8, and if nothing else I can confirm that it's safe to use.

[Trehek]

Originally posted by smoky mcpot:

Another good thing to tweak are the texture load distances:
bForceUpdateDiffuseOnly=0 -- (default is 1)
iTextureUpgradeDistance1=2400 -- (default is 1200)
iTextureUpgradeDistance0=1200 -- (default is 600)
iTextureDegradeDistance1=3000 -- (default is 1500)
iTextureDegradeDistance0=1600 -- (default is 800)

I don't have any of these settings in my ini files where do i put them?

General section of Fallout4.ini

[smoky mcpot]

Originally posted by Trehek:

Originally posted by smoky mcpot:

Another good thing to tweak are the texture load distances:
bForceUpdateDiffuseOnly=0 -- (default is 1)
iTextureUpgradeDistance1=2400 -- (default is 1200)
iTextureUpgradeDistance0=1200 -- (default is 600)
iTextureDegradeDistance1=3000 -- (default is 1500)
iTextureDegradeDistance0=1600 -- (default is 800)

I don't have any of these settings in my ini files where do i put them?

General section of Fallout4.ini

Ok i'll try it thank's

[smoky mcpot]

What about setting the ini file to read only is that necessary?

[Trehek]

Originally posted by smoky mcpot:

What about setting the ini file to read only is that necessary?

Nah. Just backup your configs if you're worried.

[Trehek]

Hmm, I did some follow-up on the ugrids thing, and a few experienced modders whom I asked about ugrids were of the opinion that in Fallout 4 it's no longer an unstable option to tweak. However, it will cause a severe performance hit especially in the downtown area. I'd still be careful with it overall.

[KilledJoy]

TL;DR??