Fallout 4 on Good Systems?

[DoubleYouAll]

Okay I am going to make this short and sweet, I have looked every where for help with this problem and to no luck. My PC Specs:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 2700x stock speed @ 4.2 Ghz
Mobo: MSI X570
GPU: AMD RX 5700 XT (gigabyte OC version)
32 GB 3200 Mhz of Ram
and a 750 watt PSU
This issue has honestly made me want to pull my hair out. I have a pretty extensive mod list (75 active mods) and this issue persists even with the vanilla game. I play at 1080p, and game settings do not matter I get these issues no matter what setting is where/active. So the issue is when playing in random areas, like just in between marked locations I can get a steady 80 fps, I have VSYNC disabled and use either RTSS to limit my fps, or the ENB I use, which is the Vogue ENB. Anyways the actual issue is when in random areas of the game, i get 80 fps with GPU utilization sitting anywhere from 70-99% and CPU utilization never goes above 50% (which is normal for my GPU and CPU on any game). But when I go to places like College Square for example my GPU utilization goes to 30-40% utilization and my CPU goes to 20% causing my fps to tank to like 30-50 fps. This also sometimes happens in bigger interior cells, like the subway stations. Its like my computer just stops trying, and this only happens within in this game. Does anyone have any advice, please my computer should not being having an issue like this with a five year old game.

[DoubleYouAll]

Originally posted by grimus:

How to Configure AMD Radeon™ Settings to Get an Optimal Gaming Experience: https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/dh-012

Best capped at 60 FPS. Ditch the High Res Pack. Some city centre areas will tax the GPU pretty good.

Me, I use a lot of textures/mesh mods (2K and a few 4K) and have God rays and shadows set to med. or high. City will drop me to 35-50 in some areas.

I have my AMD settings set up pretty nicely especially for this game, unless you have any that you have changed. but I will try ditching the High res pack, I do not use god rays because they make the ENB I use look really washed out. so I leave them off.
Edit: I switch off the High res pack and if it did anything it made the fps and utilization problems worse... don't understand that lol

[hawkeye]

The short answer - there's not much you can do.

Long answer -

The real reason is due to the game, your mods and the hardware.

The game processes an area around the player determined by the ugrids setting in the ini. So when the setting is on 3 it draws a 3x3 grid and also looks at events going on in the grid.

In the country doing this doesn't require much cpu, but in built-up areas the load is a lot higher. So fps drops in boston from 100+ to 60+.

Secondly, mods have a detrimental effect on performance. Scripts run slowly which slows things down. And the more mods and objects that they introduce slows things down. Scrapping too, because it breaks objects that have been pre-combined in the vanilla game for improved gpu performance. The vanilla game uses the same body types, the same faces, the same clothes etc for speed.

So modding = heavy performance reduction. It increases the load on the cpu but it also makes the processing a lot more inefficient.

Hardware has an impact too. The single-thread speed of a cpu is the primary determinant of game performance. The number of cpu threads helps but a higher number has diminishing return.

A 2700x has a low single-thread speed. It's about the same as an 8 year old intel i7. So more or less it's holding up the works. Faster, fewer cores is what the game needs for optimum performance.

I think the reason why cpu usage is low is because it is waiting for other things to complete before it can continue e.g. a slow script is holding things up or the cpu is searching for objects to load (instead of 6 esp's, 200 esp's to scan.)

Ram speed also has an impact. More or less the cpu has to be able to get at data in memory and process it quickly. But I doubt that you'll ever get high fps with a lot of mods, even with best cpus. A 3600 won't be much better than a 2700X I think. But there are few FO4 benchmarks on the web for modded systems so I don't really know.

A good gpu helps as it doesn't add further delays to the processing.

ENB's can add to load. I only ever used them for fps limiting, sharpening and dof removal.

Don't run any other apps whilst playing.

My experience is that the game runs smoothly even at low fps. Smooth at low fps usually means cpu too slow.

There are various ini tweaks with might or might not work. But what they are doing, as far as I can tell, is just turning off some parts of the game's processing engine. For example, the noborders tweak.

There is a performance monitor which is ex-Skyrim. Don't know if it can help.

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1762

[DoubleYouAll]

Originally posted by hawkeye:

The short answer - there's not much you can do.

Long answer -

The real reason is due to the game, your mods and the hardware.

The game processes an area around the player determined by the ugrids setting in the ini. So when the setting is on 3 it draws a 3x3 grid and also looks at events going on in the grid.

In the country doing this doesn't require much cpu, but in built-up areas the load is a lot higher. So fps drops in boston from 100+ to 60+.

Secondly, mods have a detrimental effect on performance. Scripts run slowly which slows things down. And the more mods and objects that they introduce slows things down. Scrapping too, because it breaks objects that have been pre-combined in the vanilla game for improved gpu performance. The vanilla game uses the same body types, the same faces, the same clothes etc for speed.

So modding = heavy performance reduction. It increases the load on the cpu but it also makes the processing a lot more inefficient.

Hardware has an impact too. The single-thread speed of a cpu is the primary determinant of game performance. The number of cpu threads helps but a higher number has diminishing return.

A 2700x has a low single-thread speed. It's about the same as an 8 year old intel i7. So more or less it's holding up the works. Faster, fewer cores is what the game needs for optimum performance.

I think the reason why cpu usage is low is because it is waiting for other things to complete before it can continue e.g. a slow script is holding things up or the cpu is searching for objects to load (instead of 6 esp's, 200 esp's to scan.)

Ram speed also has an impact. More or less the cpu has to be able to get at data in memory and process it quickly. But I doubt that you'll ever get high fps with a lot of mods, even with best cpus. A 3600 won't be much better than a 2700X I think. But there are few FO4 benchmarks on the web for modded systems so I don't really know.

A good gpu helps as it doesn't add further delays to the processing.

ENB's can add to load. I only ever used them for fps limiting, sharpening and dof removal.

Don't run any other apps whilst playing.

My experience is that the game runs smoothly even at low fps. Smooth at low fps usually means cpu too slow.

There are various ini tweaks with might or might not work. But what they are doing, as far as I can tell, is just turning off some parts of the game's processing engine. For example, the noborders tweak.

There is a performance monitor which is ex-Skyrim. Don't know if it can help.

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1762

Most of what you are saying is true, but what doesn't make sense to me is I can run RDR2 at high settings, with the fps capped at 80 fps and I hardly ever dip below that, the only time I do is entering town/cities, and whenever I break hard on my horse (I think that is a Rockstar problem though, they haven't worked out all the problems yet). And in Modern Warfare, I max the settings out and I never drop below 80 fps. both of these games are much more demanding cpu and gpu wise than fallout 4, yet fallout 4 is the only game I have these issues. Like I said in my original comment, its like my computer stops trying.
Just an update, since I posted this I have been using higher/ more optimized texture mods, like Vivid Fallout, kind of forcing my system to work harder and it has helped alleviate some of the issue. I went from 30-50 fps in College Square to 55-65 fps. Just by adding higher resolution textures, not the high res pack I have that disabled.

[deidian]

Usually the most performance affecting setting in F4 is shadows. Especially shadow distance, though shadow quality has a hit too. Try decreasing first both a see how it goes.
God rays are intensive for the GPU too, so test with and without them.

Originally posted by hawkeye:

Secondly, mods have a detrimental effect on performance. Scripts run slowly which slows things down. And the more mods and objects that they introduce slows things down. Scrapping too, because it breaks objects that have been pre-combined in the vanilla game for improved gpu performance. The vanilla game uses the same body types, the same faces, the same clothes etc for speed.

So modding = heavy performance reduction. It increases the load on the cpu but it also makes the processing a lot more inefficient.

Hardware has an impact too. The single-thread speed of a cpu is the primary determinant of game performance. The number of cpu threads helps but a higher number has diminishing return.

A 2700x has a low single-thread speed. It's about the same as an 8 year old intel i7. So more or less it's holding up the works. Faster, fewer cores is what the game needs for optimum performance.

I think the reason why cpu usage is low is because it is waiting for other things to complete before it can continue e.g. a slow script is holding things up or the cpu is searching for objects to load (instead of 6 esp's, 200 esp's to scan.)

Other things are well said but this two things:

Mods related to performance is a lottery. In reality depends on what the mod does the performance changes it can made, they can even increase performance in certain areas, no matter how you look at it. Mod performance always related to what the mod does, good or bad. More ESP to load means nothing: you can have a little higher in the order of nanoseconds of increased lookup time in searching something in them. Computer algorithms when it comes to seek data in an index are pretty damn advanced and optimized to work with big datasets. Another things is what an ESP points to. If you install a mod with big as hell textures, naturally the texture lookup will resolve as fast as any other thing, but copying a big texture around memories in the computer will take more time...but this is related to the 1st, it depends on what the mod does.

In F4 the script engine will never slow down the game engine. This is because they updated it in a way that scripts have a limited time per frame to run: once the allocated time is over all scripts are put on pause till they get more time allocated in the next frame. That's why for example when fast traveling to a big settlement crops and other things may take some seconds to load while you can already move and do stuff: the scripts that handle the settlement stuff are being paused to not slow down the entire game processing, so the script execution spans over a big time frame in scenarios when there's a lot of script running at a time.
Add a lot of script mods and you get the same result: the stuff that is handled with scripts will be delayed if too much scripting.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by DOUBLEYOUALL8:

Most of what you are saying is true, but what doesn't make sense to me is I can run RDR2 at high settings, with the fps capped at 80 fps and I hardly ever dip below that, the only time I do is entering town/cities, and whenever I break hard on my horse (I think that is a Rockstar problem though, they haven't worked out all the problems yet). And in Modern Warfare, I max the settings out and I never drop below 80 fps. both of these games are much more demanding cpu and gpu wise than fallout 4, yet fallout 4 is the only game I have these issues. Like I said in my original comment, its like my computer stops trying.
Just an update, since I posted this I have been using higher/ more optimized texture mods, like Vivid Fallout, kind of forcing my system to work harder and it has helped alleviate some of the issue. I went from 30-50 fps in College Square to 55-65 fps. Just by adding higher resolution textures, not the high res pack I have that disabled.

Different games using different engines. You FPS in other games means nothing when they are not on the same engine.

The game engine aint meant to run above 60 FPS, not because of graphical crap, but because of scripting and the way the engine processes scripting. Scripting is processed when you change frames and when you force the FPS too high you end up forcing the frame rate to run faster than scripting has time to finish running. Then eventually at some point your scripting is going to break.

Originally posted by deidian:

Add a lot of script mods and you get the same result: the stuff that is handled with scripts will be delayed if too much scripting.

Some mods allow you to increase multthreading to process more scripting at a time. Sim Settlements and IDEKs Logistics are some of those.

The problem is multithreading was still something most developers avoided when the game was made (released 2015.) Plus you have the issue of the game having to remain console compatible.

TLDR: Play with 60 FPS max like you are supposed to.

[Spec_Ops_Ape]

Another way to increase GPU workload is to enable VSR (virtual super resolution) in Radeon settings and then increase in-game resolution to 1440/2160p.

[deidian]

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

The problem is multithreading was still something most developers avoided when the game was made (released 2015.) Plus you have the issue of the game having to remain console compatible.

This is a DX11 trouble, not only developers decision...they could try to overcome the limit imposed by the API, but they would have to work for doing it and no guarantee of success. DX11 supports multithreading, but processes all Draw calls in the same thread, so any DX11 game will have a thread that will handle most of the load: the thread that is running all Draw calls.
That's why Intel processors usually hit higher framerates in DX11 games: ultimately the FPS ceiling is set by that thread that handles most of the load.

[Out Of Bubblegum]

Just my experience. I upgraded to a 5700 XT and a Ryzen 3600. I have the silly HD textures pack and a 3440x1440 monitor. I have everything set to max. I get a solid 60FPS. Even in downtown. The only place I have seen it drop is right near Goodneighbor. It drops to 40-50FPS.

[Wygos]

AMD

[Ceejay]

What you need to do is run the game vanilla without mods, then you will see if the mods are making the massive impact.

Your cpu should be fine. my old system ran this at 60fps with an fx 8350, whose single core performance falls well short of the 2700x, this is also including multiple mods at 1080p but without the hd pack.

As people say you should limit your fps to 60fps, you could be causing some of your issues due to your fps being set too high. So it could be your are running a script designed to run at 60 causing that script to finish too fast, which could have a knock on effect on another script etc,

The engine issue is due to background scripts on top of mods, things just happen and you will get random drops for no apparent reason.

For instance I recently around cit, I dropped to 1fps, totally unplayable. I barely got the menu up saved, reloaded, I was back at 60fps again, and it did not drop again.

[Comestibles]

Originally posted by DOUBLEYOUALL8:

Okay I am going to make this short and sweet, I have looked every where for help with this problem and to no luck. My PC Specs:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 2700x stock speed @ 4.2 Ghz
Mobo: MSI X570
GPU: AMD RX 5700 XT (gigabyte OC version)
32 GB 3200 Mhz of Ram
and a 750 watt PSU
This issue has honestly made me want to pull my hair out. I have a pretty extensive mod list (75 active mods) and this issue persists even with the vanilla game. I play at 1080p, and game settings do not matter I get these issues no matter what setting is where/active. So the issue is when playing in random areas, like just in between marked locations I can get a steady 80 fps, I have VSYNC disabled and use either RTSS to limit my fps, or the ENB I use, which is the Vogue ENB. Anyways the actual issue is when in random areas of the game, i get 80 fps with GPU utilization sitting anywhere from 70-99% and CPU utilization never goes above 50% (which is normal for my GPU and CPU on any game). But when I go to places like College Square for example my GPU utilization goes to 30-40% utilization and my CPU goes to 20% causing my fps to tank to like 30-50 fps. This also sometimes happens in bigger interior cells, like the subway stations. Its like my computer just stops trying, and this only happens within in this game. Does anyone have any advice, please my computer should not being having an issue like this with a five year old game.

Turn godrays COMPLETELY OFF.

[Comestibles]

Originally posted by Wygos:

AMD

[Incunabulum]

Originally posted by DOUBLEYOUALL8:

Okay I am going to make this short and sweet, I have looked every where for help with this problem and to no luck. My PC Specs:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 2700x stock speed @ 4.2 Ghz
Mobo: MSI X570
GPU: AMD RX 5700 XT (gigabyte OC version)
32 GB 3200 Mhz of Ram
and a 750 watt PSU
This issue has honestly made me want to pull my hair out. I have a pretty extensive mod list (75 active mods) and this issue persists even with the vanilla game. I play at 1080p, and game settings do not matter I get these issues no matter what setting is where/active. So the issue is when playing in random areas, like just in between marked locations I can get a steady 80 fps, I have VSYNC disabled and use either RTSS to limit my fps, or the ENB I use, which is the Vogue ENB. Anyways the actual issue is when in random areas of the game, i get 80 fps with GPU utilization sitting anywhere from 70-99% and CPU utilization never goes above 50% (which is normal for my GPU and CPU on any game). But when I go to places like College Square for example my GPU utilization goes to 30-40% utilization and my CPU goes to 20% causing my fps to tank to like 30-50 fps. This also sometimes happens in bigger interior cells, like the subway stations. Its like my computer just stops trying, and this only happens within in this game. Does anyone have any advice, please my computer should not being having an issue like this with a five year old game.

This long paragraph and at no point do you ever just state the problem you want help with.

Is it low framerate? That's half the game and half AMD - they don't put a lot of effort into their drivers *and* this is a 3 year old game. Even Nvidia has stopped support and Bethesda certainly isn't working on driver issues.

[DoubleYouAll]

I THINK I FOUND A SOLUTION!: okay so basically the issue, at least with me, the game was creating an artificial CPU bottleneck. My CPU was "bottlenecking" even though NONE of my cores were going over 80% (yes I know it still could bottleneck with that). So, My GPU was slowing down for whatever reason and that in turn slowed down my CPU. Now the only solution that I could find, is set the game to ultra, just hit the ultra button on the launch screen, but before you hit play, turn shadow quality to high, and shadow distance to medium. The game just sucks with shadows. This for whatever reason stressed my CPU more and now my GPU doesn't slow down. if this continues to happen try downloading texture mods, like Vivid Fallout. I'm going to do some more testing, so I'll be back with a couple updates.

[Bored Peon]

No idea why you were not using ultra to begin with your machine was plenty enough to handle that.