Do you dare use my Fallout 4 ini? (Shadows and Draw Distance Tweaking Guide)

I went through and tinkered with the ini a bit, all other settings are default ultra. Basically I increased object draw distance, and shadow quality by a considerable amount. I would only recommend applying this modification if you have at least a 980 or you might see some really rough dips in city areas. just take this and replace the coresponding settings in the Fallout4Prefs.ini which should be located in your documents. Unfortunately Fallout 4 isn't friendly with changing the render distance of high detail shadows HOWEVER it is friendly with increasing the detail of distant shadows.

I am running a 1500mhz 980ti at 1080p it runs mostly 50-60fps with occassional dips in city areas to 40 fps it is overall smooth, your milage may vary. Should be able to crank this all the way to the limits of the engine once the game is more optimized.

Here is what I changed:

For Shadow Quality
fShadowBiasScale=4.0000
iShadowMapResolution=8196

For Render Distance
fTreeLoadDistance=100000.0000
fBlockMaximumDistance=400000.0000
fBlockLevel2Distance=160000.0000
fBlockLevel1Distance=130000.0000
fBlockLevel0Distance=90000.0000

ONLY USE THE FOLLOWING SETTING IF YOU HAVE OVERKILL HARDWARE EXPECT FPS LOSSES OF 10 OR MORE OVERCLOCKED FLAGSHIPS OR MULTICARD SOLITIONS HIGHLY RECCOMENDED
For mid range mesh, lighting, npc rendering
uGridsToLoad=8

I really saw no need to screw with anything else, Bethesda did a pretty good job with settings this time around.

If you have specific questions feel free to ask.

Side note: If you don't like using fast travel and like using power armor I really reccomend this mod since fusion cores were configued with fast travel in mind:
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/325/?

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I've used the Fallout 4 Tweaker (initially I was doing it manually) but I was opposite and reduced the Shadow draw distance to medium. Forced the res to 3440 x1440 and the FOV to 90 for 1st/3rd person. V-Sync off for FO4 in the nVidia CP and then use Afterburner to limit FPS to 75 so it doesn't ping pong too much from high to low.

Oh and turned off AA as at that res I don't really notice it that much.

Makes sense, From what I understand this game is crushing most hardware at the moment due to lack of optimization. Once the game is able to better utilize the gpu I think these settings would even work on a 390/970 which at that point i'll probably be jacking them up higher.

For you guys going in there tweaking yourself DO NOT SET THESE SETTINGS ABOVE ULTRA:
fShadowDistance=20000.0000
fDirShadowDistance=20000.0000
(these are the ultra values)
it will cause weird shadow glitching that you may not notice until you forget which setting you changed so I figured I might warn you guys.

my 1200Mhz 780 would pass out and die then, especially at triple the res

The only real issue would be city areas, honestly in the countryside and smaller settlements it should do just fine. you're more than welcome to try and let me know how it goes?

I will this weekend, absolutely

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awesome, would be great to know if lack of my gpu utilization is due to it not knowing what to do with all the power or it just doesnt scale to the gpu well in general, because if it scales better on lower tier gpus this setup should work for high/mid cards as well.

I did notice some odd behavior this morning as I usually have Afterburner with the FPS logging and where it was a solid 75fps (capped) I was also 109% power and 99% GPU utilization. In the city though where there were fps dips to as low as 40 fps the GPU usage was also dipping so it may be, as you mention just down to optimization of the rendering. Not just the GPU running out of legs.

Alright so after getting blown up by a mine...

My results were:
When walking around out in the "woods" FPS was generally 30 unless the grass super thick then it dropped to 20

Walking around Diamond City (I had to walk there from concord because I hadn't discovered it yet) I was getting ~35 FPS

Walking on just a road with no grass in front of me ~40FPS

Staring directly at the ground only got me 48 FPS

Mind you this is at 5760x1080 ULTRA (like you had it)

VRAM usage was 2960 MB (pretty much all of it)

@SoulFallen can we get before/after pics?

i'll do a couple tomorrow.

it's probably shadows... you can try setting the bias to 2 and the shadowmap to 6144

about 5 FPS gained everywhere by doing that

VRAM usage down to ~2600MB

yeah, you might want to stick with the default ultra shadows which is a bias of 1 and map of 4096

I think went a bit too far with the medium shadows as the world was looking a bit flat so I'll try some of those settings above. FPS was staying high though even in the city but I can live with a lower average fps for a better look.

@ottowolfgang
This was done without uGrids
Here are the before and afters. All modified settings were toggled at once (Ultra vs. modded Ultra), it makes a much bigger difference in game. For the best comparison i suggest opening each in a seperate tab and switching back and forth.
Before:

After:

Before:

After

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

I emphasize that you really need to play with these settings to get a feel for the improvement.

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Alright, this is for the truly insane and will make the biggest difference, but could also likely crash and burn your pc with the current state of graphics card drivers for this game.
THIS SETTING MAY CAUSE INSTABILITY AND UNEXPECTED NPC INTERACTIONS/GLITCHES (I only know this because it's exactly how it works in Skyrim, I have yet to test this in Fallout but it's the same engine)

In order to make meshes load in sooner change this setting uGridsToLoad
DO NOT BY ANY MEANS GO OVER 10 THE LOWER THE MORE STABLE YOUR GAME WILL BE

I cannot emphasize enough this will rape your hardware requires 4gb VRAM at 1080p

Default Ultra: uGridsToLoad=5

uGridsToLoad=8

uGridsToLoad=5

uGridsToLoad=8

uGridsToLoad=5

uGridsToLoad=8

uGridsToLoad=5

uGridsToLoad=8

1 Like

could you show me the spot on map?