Anybody able to comfortably run shadow distance on Ultra?

[Wu]

I can max FO4 out completely, but if I don't put shadow distance on medium my FPS fluctuates from 43 - 56.

My rig:

GTX 1080 8GB
i7 4790k 4.1GHz
8GB RAM

It's crazy that not even a 1080 can run this option on max, and maintain a smooth 60 FPS.

[Starkregen]

The game engine is as old as today s teenagers, it cant handle shadows and it ll never be able to.

[Phoenix VII]

It's good that you're able to play it with shadow distance on medium. Shadow Distance is a major FPS killer in this game.

[Wu]

Originally posted by Phoenix VII:

It's good that you're able to play it with shadow distance on medium. Shadow Distance is a major FPS killer in this game.

I always thought it was god rays, until I did some digging and found out it was the shadow distance. Oh well, game still looks decent with it on medium.

[Bansheebutt]

The God rays certainly don't help, but that's something a 1080 should be better with, unlike the shadows.

It's not even really the draw distance itself, it's just the engine handles it so ineffeciently.

[Defektiv]

Yes, everything on Ultra including view distances. I throttle my frames at 91 and generally run 80-91, with the hard dips from heavy scenes and True Storms weather occasionally hitting the low 70s.

[Wu]

Originally posted by Defektiv:

Yes, everything on Ultra including view distances. I throttle my frames at 91 and generally run 80-91, with the hard dips from heavy scenes and True Storms weather occasionally hitting the low 70s.

What's your rig? I don't believe it. Lol

[chaseydog]

Originally posted by Nevermind:

I can max FO4 out completely, but if I don't put shadow distance on medium my FPS fluctuates from 43 - 56.

My rig:

GTX 1080 8GB
i7 4790k 4.1GHz
8GB RAM

It's crazy that not even a 1080 can run this option on max, and maintain a smooth 60 FPS.

I thought that shadow distance, at least the way Bethsada implemented it, is more CPU than GPU defendant. Can't remember were I read that though so take it with a grain of salt.

[sblantipodi]

GTX980 Ti SLI, running 4K completely maxed out except god rays to medium, shadow distance on ULTRA at rock solid 60FPS.

[Hobo Misanthropus]

Originally posted by sblantipodi:

GTX980 Ti SLI, running 4K completely maxed out except god rays to medium, shadow distance on ULTRA at rock solid 60FPS.

Depends on where you're at. I'd love to see you show me this 60FPS in the middle of Downtown Boston, especially around Fanuiel Hall at around 7PM in game. Until then, I'm calling you a liar, because the Drawcalls for shadows don't care what GPU you have. The bottleneck is happening as the GPU and CPU upload data to each-other, and if anything, SLI is going to slow this process down.

The issue isn't really engine related either. This is a hardware/Driver bottleneck with modern Graphics cards. Fallout 4 is attempting to draw dynamic shadows that change with the light source about ever 5 seconds. Once you reach a certain threshold of draw calls, the data piles up beind the compute bottleneck, and that's when you get latency (FPS drop).

This is why as a GTX970 user, I can run Ultra Shadows at 40FPS (Lowest) High Shadows at 42FPS (Lowest) and Medium Shadows at 82FPS (Lowest). The latency curve starts at around 6000, and caps out at around 8000 regardless of your hardware.

I can have literally 50 enemies on screen, 20 mininuke explosions and 12 Vertibirds firing miniguns, and still get 40+FPS with Ultra Shadows, because the GPU and CPU are waiting on something else. If it was a GPU or CPU bottleneck, the Performance would continue to degrade in a linear fashion as more intensive things happen on screen.

[Wu]

Originally posted by sblantipodi:

GTX980 Ti SLI, running 4K completely maxed out except god rays to medium, shadow distance on ULTRA at rock solid 60FPS.

God rays is nothing, it's shadow distance that is the issue.

[sblantipodi]

Originally posted by Hobo Misanthropus:

Originally posted by sblantipodi:

GTX980 Ti SLI, running 4K completely maxed out except god rays to medium, shadow distance on ULTRA at rock solid 60FPS.

Depends on where you're at. I'd love to see you show me this 60FPS in the middle of Downtown Boston, especially around Fanuiel Hall at around 7PM in game. Until then, I'm calling you a liar, because the Drawcalls for shadows don't care what GPU you have. The bottleneck is happening as the GPU and CPU upload data to each-other, and if anything, SLI is going to slow this process down.

call me what you want, I played 110 hours on this game, the only area where I have seen 50FPS was on a particular room in the institute and in the main town of far harbour.
in any case we are talking about 50FPS. probably in the point you are saying I will see 50FPS or even 40FPS I don't know but I can assure you that the point whre I have seen something less than 60FPS is so rare that I don't recall them.

[sblantipodi]

Originally posted by Nevermind:

Originally posted by sblantipodi:

GTX980 Ti SLI, running 4K completely maxed out except god rays to medium, shadow distance on ULTRA at rock solid 60FPS.

God rays is nothing, it's shadow distance that is the issue.

god rays impact performance without visible quality improvements,
shadow distance improve graphics so I like to set it ULTRA ;)

[Hobo Misanthropus]

Originally posted by sblantipodi:

Originally posted by Hobo Misanthropus:

Depends on where you're at. I'd love to see you show me this 60FPS in the middle of Downtown Boston, especially around Fanuiel Hall at around 7PM in game. Until then, I'm calling you a liar, because the Drawcalls for shadows don't care what GPU you have. The bottleneck is happening as the GPU and CPU upload data to each-other, and if anything, SLI is going to slow this process down.

call me what you want, I played 110 hours on this game, the only area where I have seen 50FPS was on a particular room in the institute and in the main town of far harbour.
in any case we are talking about 50FPS. probably in the point you are saying I will see 50FPS or even 40FPS I don't know but I can assure you that the point whre I have seen something less than 60FPS is so rare that I don't recall them.

This is a lot more reasonable. Dropping below 60 is rare even for my Mid-Range rig. With 980TI (Even just one) you should be seeing drops to ~50 less than 1% of the time, in very specific areas. But they will happen because Fallout 4 is DX11 and thus doesn't support Async compute.

I think my WORST FPS drops are on top of Skyskrapers, in the early evening/morning (When shadows are at their longest) when looking at certain angles. It's very weird. If I'm lookint at a 45degree angle, I might drop to 40FPS, but if I look at a 48degree angle, it'll go back up to 60+.

Ultra Shadows do make the game look a lot better. I set my shadows to Custom Medium++ in the INI. Medium is set to 3000Distance (Same as consoles) and it looks ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ horrible. 7000, which is my setting, removes most of the large performance hits (As long as I stay at 50+ in areas where combat might happen, I'm fine) while also making the shadows distant enough to give a sense of depth to the world visually.

[sblantipodi]

Originally posted by Hobo Misanthropus:

Originally posted by sblantipodi:

call me what you want, I played 110 hours on this game, the only area where I have seen 50FPS was on a particular room in the institute and in the main town of far harbour.
in any case we are talking about 50FPS. probably in the point you are saying I will see 50FPS or even 40FPS I don't know but I can assure you that the point whre I have seen something less than 60FPS is so rare that I don't recall them.

This is a lot more reasonable. Dropping below 60 is rare even for my Mid-Range rig. With 980TI (Even just one) you should be seeing drops to ~50 less than 1% of the time, in very specific areas. But they will happen because Fallout 4 is DX11 and thus doesn't support Async compute.

I think my WORST FPS drops are on top of Skyskrapers, in the early evening/morning (When shadows are at their longest) when looking at certain angles. It's very weird. If I'm lookint at a 45degree angle, I might drop to 40FPS, but if I look at a 48degree angle, it'll go back up to 60+.

ok this areas are so rare that it don't worth to lower settings.
I'm really sensible to 50FPS so generally I notice when games goes down from 60FPS and I hate when it happen, so I try to have 60FPS all the time but in fallout dips are way too rare to care.
SLI scaling is pretty good too.

[MaximumEffort]

Oh my, someone bought in to the 1080 hype.
Its fairly common knowledge it can't run games at max setting past 2k

Also, fo that GPU, which you got way overpriced (gratz on that) you have a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ CPU and RAM! Money well wasted!