what is hurting my FPS?

[Operander]

Had my cousin family share me into his Steam, and let me download FO4. LOVE IT! Issue though that might stop me from buying it myself... I have a GTX 950 2Gb, with an AMD A4-7300 APU clocked at 3.8 Ghz, and 8 GB of system RAM. Game automatically sets to 'Ultra' preset graphics options, but I get 24-39 FPS.
Even on lowest settings possible!

What the fudge is happening here???

[Flippy]

2 gb is last gen video card. Turn everything off and it should run better. I think 4 gb is minimum recommended?

It is mostly to do with textures. Thats most of the games memory even on the hard drive. When downloading a DLC most of it is textures.

So a 2 gb card is using those 2 gb to load textures and run them smoothly for the player. Each single texture like clothing the player is wearing or grass or a bullet is between .5 mb and 5 mb...

I should say that there is room for improvement somehwere in this game or the cards drivers, because the game isnt loading textures very well, maybe for console frame rates is most likely. Which pisses me off. :)

[Bongo]

If you get the same fps on low and ultra it can indicates a cpu bottleneck. Check your cpu usage whilst playing and if it's mostly 100% usage then it's your cpu causing it. I would set god rays to low and shadow distance to medium anyway, as these are the most demading settings and will tax the gtx950 heavily.

[Ibadgrammar]

Originally posted by Ross:

Had my cousin family share me into his Steam, and let me download FO4. LOVE IT! Issue though that might stop me from buying it myself... I have a GTX 950 2Gb, with an AMD A4-7300 APU clocked at 3.8 Ghz, and 8 GB of system RAM. Game automatically sets to 'Ultra' preset graphics options, but I get 24-39 FPS.
Even on lowest settings possible!

What the fudge is happening here???

becuese Bethesda lazy axxss use new game engine

[Neutralize]

Originally posted by Bongo:

If you get the same fps on low and ultra it can indicates a cpu bottleneck. Check your cpu usage whilst playing and if it's mostly 100% usage then it's your cpu causing it. I would set god rays to low and shadow distance to medium anyway, as these are the most demading settings and will tax the gtx950 heavily.

This. The game is notoriously heavy on CPU and also even RAM speed (yes, speed).
http://wccftech.com/fallout-4-performance-heavily-influenced-by-ram-speed-according-to-report/

Aside from using the aforementioned settings that Bongo suggested, I would also make sure you have Ambient Occlusion OFF as it can be taxing at times, as well as the debris feature. Yes, your shadows will look a bit crappier without AO, but you're talking probably a good 5-7 or more fps most times with HBAO+.

Tweak your .ini's in My Documents > Games > Fallout 4. In both Fallout4.ini and Fallou4Prefs.ini you want to disable "iPresentInterval=1" by changing the 1 to a 0. This will disable the game's proprietary V-Sync/Framecap. You may also want to change iDirShadowSplits to a 2 instead of a 3. 2 costs less performance, and imo, makes for starker, more realistic shadows anyways. I think a Shadow Quality setting of "High" or lower will automatically set this.
Make sure you set these files to "Read Only" after tweaking them, or some settings like iPresentInterval will be reset when launching the game. However, also be mindful you will have to set prefs off "Read Only" if you want to tweak some of your options in-game and have them save the next time you fire up the game.

From there, I would make sure that you have the latest Nvidia drivers, properly cleaned with DDU and installed fresh, and then go into Nvidia's control panel and turn on Adaptive V-Sync instead of using the game's. Other settings to try or use are:
"Power Management Mode- Prefer Maximum Performance"
"Shader Cache - On"
"Threaded Optimization - On"
"Triple Buffering - On"
and maybe
"Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames - 1"

Some people get massive performance difference or stutter varying from playing Fullscreen or Borderless. Try one and then the other to see which runs better for you.

If you are not apprehensive to using mods- I would suggest above all else you get the performance mod "Shadow Boost" from Fallout 4 Nexus. This mod dynamically scales shadow distances to keep you within your fps parameters that you can set in the mod's configuration file. It's very easy to install and use, and really that is the major fps killer of this game, aside from the heavy smoke. Especially in urban environments, where half the time you won't even see the full distance of shadows being rendered. I consider it a "must have". The only crux to this is that it will stop working whenever Fallout 4 updates, and you will have to wait for the mod author to update, just like with Fallout 4 Scrip Extender. He's usually very quick about updating for version changes, though.

Hope these suggestions help and you can get a more fluid experience, but truthfully, the game engine is also just a major hardware hog and still not the epitome of optimized or expertly crafted.

[Urah]

Originally posted by Neutralize:

Originally posted by Bongo:

If you get the same fps on low and ultra it can indicates a cpu bottleneck. Check your cpu usage whilst playing and if it's mostly 100% usage then it's your cpu causing it. I would set god rays to low and shadow distance to medium anyway, as these are the most demading settings and will tax the gtx950 heavily.

This. The game is notoriously heavy on CPU and also even RAM speed (yes, speed).
http://wccftech.com/fallout-4-performance-heavily-influenced-by-ram-speed-according-to-report/

Aside from using the aforementioned settings that Bongo suggested, I would also make sure you have Ambient Occlusion OFF as it can be taxing at times, as well as the debris feature.

Tweak your .ini's in My Documents > Games > Fallout 4. In both Fallout4.ini and Fallou4Prefs.ini you want to disable "iPresentInterval=1" by changing the 1 to a 0. This will disable the game's proprietary V-Sync/Framecap. You may also want to change iDirShadowSplits to a 2 instead of a 3. 2 costs less performance, and imo, makes for starker, more realistic shadows anyways. I think a Shadow Quality setting of "High" or lower will automatically set this.

From there, I would make sure that you have the latest Nvidia drivers, properly cleaned with DDU and installed fresh, and then go into Nvidia's control panel and turn on Adaptive V-Sync instead of using the game's. Other settings to try or use are:
"Power Management Mode- Prefer Maximum Performance"
"Shader Cache - On"
"Threaded Optimization - On"
"Triple Buffering - On"
and maybe
"Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames - 1"

Some people get massive performance difference or stutter varying from playing Fullscreen or Borderless. Try one and then the other to see which runs better for you.

If you are not apprehensive to using mods- I would suggest above all else you get the performance mod "Shadow Boost" from Fallout 4 Nexus. This mod dynamically scales shadow distances to keep you within your fps parameters that you can set in the mod's configuration file. It's very easy to install and use, and really that is the major fps killer of this game, aside from the heavy smoke. Especially in urban environments, where half the time you won't even see the full distance of shadows being rendered. I consider it a "must have".

Hope these suggestions help and you can get a more fluid experience, but truthfully, the game engine is also just a major hardware hog and still not the epitome of optimized or expertly crafted.

Thanks for this. +Rep for you.

[Neutralize]

Happy to, man. Just make sure you catch that part I added about "Read Only"! And good luck to anyone trying to make the game run better. :)

[Operander]

Thanks! Running at consistent 40 fps, though I may have the bottleneck mentioned. I'll snag an APU with good integrated graphics to help handle the textures. Thanks guys! If this ends up working ill shell out the sixty bucks for the best fallout game yet. Also Automatron.

[IndiaSummerz]

Originally posted by Bongo:

If you get the same fps on low and ultra it can indicates a cpu bottleneck. Check your cpu usage whilst playing and if it's mostly 100% usage then it's your cpu causing it. I would set god rays to low and shadow distance to medium anyway, as these are the most demading settings and will tax the gtx950 heavily.

FYI, you can have CPU limit with 20% as well. Things are a bit different with multicore systems.

[Operander]

It's the bottlenecking. My CPU is at 100% most of the time.

[H.Honor]

godrays and shadow might hurt your fps ~