[PCGH.de] Fallout 4 Benchmark

[4K_shmoorK]

Everyone do this. I followed his recommendation for 1.90 TAA Sharpening and wow does it make a huge difference. I don't know how I ever tolerated it before with just regular TAA. Ignorance was bliss?

Really? I will have to try this then. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[Paul98]

The whole game ready driver thing barely adds fps usually. On both sides. It's more marketing than anything imo. Usually the fps jumps come later with patches and updates with some driver updates fixing major fps issues.

You must have missed the couple posts before I had mentioned how much of a boost the new driver gave to my FPS.

 

[werepossum]

Going to have to try the new drivers and that sharpening trick - I hate all the haze. Thanks for the heads-up.

Haven't benched FPS yet but visually it's smooth as butter with an MSI R9 390 Gaming, 8GB RAM (1600 IIRC), and a 2500K at stock 3.3 MHz. Everything is at maximum, even god rays and shadows, and even when I was being swarmed by a dozen raiders at the Corvega factory there were no noticeable glitches, stutters or slow-downs. May have to crank detail down and CPU clocks up in the larger cities, but so far so good.

 

[Udgnim]

I'm going to stick with playing with God Rays at Ultra and 8X Tessellation

High God Rays have some dithering. Don't know if it's an artifact specific to AMD.

difference between Ultra 8X and Ultra 64X seems to be the Ultra 64X has slightly more bloom to it

 

[railven]

Holy crap, that first screen shot. Woof! As if the image was being decompressed on the fly.

 

[Silverforce11]

I'm going to stick with playing with God Rays at Ultra and 8X Tessellation

difference between Ultra 8X and Ultra 64X seems to be the Ultra 64X has slightly more bloom to it

That's gold. Little extra bloom for massive performance drop.. ew.

AMD's new drivers for Fallout 4:

http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/fallout_4_-_amd_vs_nvidia_performance_review/10

Looks like they pulled a Witcher 3 optimization, where they defaulted to x32 than x64 tessellation on HairWorks (which the devs later patched to x32 as well, including sliders). The 980Ti is suffering more with its x64 default. 😵

 

[boozzer]

https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/3s60zw/godrays_not_disabling/ haha forcing the setting that certain people don't want 🙂

is this true that you can't turn off god rays?

 

[Udgnim]

https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/3s60zw/godrays_not_disabling/ haha forcing the setting that certain people don't want 🙂

is this true that you can't turn off god rays?

if initially using the Ultra preset and then trying to manually turn off God Rays, it will go back to Low

I was able to disable God Rays by using the Low preset. game looks like a more colorful Fallout 3 / New Vegas with God Rays disabled.

 

[MajinCry]

I want to know what framerates the high-end guys get when you disable NVidia's implementation of Godrays, which falls back to some generic version.

In Fallout4.ini, change bNvGodraysEnable=1 to bNvGodraysEnable=0. See if there's any boost.

 

[Azix]

I want to know what framerates the high-end guys get when you disable NVidia's implementation of Godrays, which falls back to some generic version.

In Fallout4.ini, change bNvGodraysEnable=1 to bNvGodraysEnable=0. See if there's any boost.

there's actually another implementation?

I turned god rays to low because high was too sharp looking for me. The same thing I had noticed in pictures of ultra.

 

[Paul98]

I find I think it looks best with god rays off

 

[Face2Face]

Everyone do this. I followed his recommendation for 1.90 TAA Sharpening and wow does it make a huge difference. I don't know how I ever tolerated it before with just regular TAA. Ignorance was bliss?

+1

The textures from a distance look much better :thumbsup:

Rocks are no longer blurry.

 

[Udgnim]

I swear, it's the draw calls. If we were on Mantle/Vulkan/D3D11, it'd be smooth sailing, sans NVidia's performance-killing parts.

yeah it's draw calls that's tanking FPS

people focus on God Rays but if you're an AMD user, I think High or Ultra shadow distance is the biggest performance hog due to draw calls

Medium shadow distance ~4.86K draw calls

High shadow distance ~10.8K draw calls

Ultra shadow distance ~10.8K draw calls

 

[hawtdawg]

I want to know what framerates the high-end guys get when you disable NVidia's implementation of Godrays, which falls back to some generic version.

In Fallout4.ini, change bNvGodraysEnable=1 to bNvGodraysEnable=0. See if there's any boost.

tried it. I get 96fps locked with everything maxed unless im in cities, then it can dip into the low 70's. Turning off Godrays didn't make a difference. I think shadows are the main bottleneck in city areas.

 

[RussianSensation]

yeah it's draw calls that's tanking FPS

people focus on God Rays but if you're an AMD user, I think High or Ultra shadow distance is the biggest performance hog due to draw calls

Medium shadow distance ~4.86K draw calls

High shadow distance ~10.8K draw calls

Ultra shadow distance ~10.8K draw calls

Crazy part is you have to use a micro-scope and still screenshots to tell the difference in shadow quality but FPS tanked from 60 to 38.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Anyone playing at 4K currently? Curious what is required to run this at such a high resolution.

 

[Azix]

yeah it's draw calls that's tanking FPS

people focus on God Rays but if you're an AMD user, I think High or Ultra shadow distance is the biggest performance hog due to draw calls

Medium shadow distance ~4.86K draw calls

High shadow distance ~10.8K draw calls

Ultra shadow distance ~10.8K draw calls

Shadows by themselves tank performance in some games. A good way to increase performance in the past was to reduce shadow quality.

Those draw calls are not too high are they?

 

[Headfoot]

Shadows by themselves tank performance in some games. A good way to increase performance in the past was to reduce shadow quality.

Those draw calls are not too high are they?

Depends on what you mean by "too high." Too high as in above average for late 2015 games? Not sure on that.

But to me, it seems to be too high of draw calls because it is making draw calls for things which are visually 100% occluded or affect maybe a pixel. To be fair, you can turn it down to medium, drop calls in half and get no visual difference in most cases with a worst case of a small visual difference when you can tell. Worth the trade off to me

Also that sharpening guide for TAA -- Wow what a difference. I'm going to have to do that. My eyes are opened now

 

[4K_shmoorK]

Anyone playing at 4K currently? Curious what is required to run this at such a high resolution.

To achieve at or near 60 FPS in heavily populated/dense areas you will need to drop shadows, godrays and possibly textures to High on a 980 Ti @ 1550 core/3750 mem. Interiors will always be at or over 60 FPS for the most part.

I guess there is a difference between running the game and achieving at least 60 FPS. All settings max'd, I will see frames dip down into the low 40s in the city at 4K and between 50 and 60 out in the wilderness. Again, interiors are fine.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Maybe I'll try it. See what happens

 

[MajinCry]

there's actually another implementation?

I turned god rays to low because high was too sharp looking for me. The same thing I had noticed in pictures of ultra.

Aye, I think so. I set it to 0, and still have god rays. Don't look as nice, but I've got tessellation set to 2x. To disable god rays, you have to disable volumetric lighting; they're terms for the same thing.

For those that ain't horribly CPU limited like myself, I'm interested in seeing how that setting acts upon the framerate.


The sad part about all this, is that Boris Vorontsov has god rays that look far better than the NVidia's implementation, whilst also having a negligible impact on the framerate; Oblivion/New Vegas/Skyrim's ENB series being the proof o' that claim.

 

[MajinCry]

Shadows by themselves tank performance in some games. A good way to increase performance in the past was to reduce shadow quality.

Those draw calls are not too high are they?

For reference, in the densest part of Riverwood, with shadow distance @ 8000 + tripled wilderness & enemy spawns + parallax maps (adds at least one extra draw call for every object in the scene), I was getting 3.5k draw calls.

I think this is an exceptional case of lazy artists that didn't combine textures into atlases; all their previous games were a complete train-wreck in that regard. Some meshes had combined textures, others didn't, with no continuity in regards to what was combined, and what wasn't.

For example, the body is made up of several meshes: The torso + limbs = 1 mesh, the hands = 1 mesh, the feet = 1 mesh and the head = 1 mesh, for a total of four meshes. The torso, however, shares the same texture as the feet, whilst the hands have their own.

And rather than combine all the facial texture overlays into one texture (seriously, it ain't hard), Facegen keeps them separate. Each scar overlay has it's own texture, each tattoo, each dirt overlay, etc.

*RantRantRantRant*

 

[MajinCry]

Crazy part is you have to use a micro-scope and still screenshots to tell the difference in shadow quality but FPS tanked from 60 to 38.

That only holds true for the scenes with heavy fog. Once you enter, say, a city...Then the medium shadow distance is horrible; you can see the shadows fade in.

High's shadow distance is insane, though. It's 13,000. 8,000 is the sweet spot, as ya won't notice any shadows popping in further than that, at 1280x1024 at least.

For some dumb reason, Bethesda removed the bDrawShadows option from Fallout 4, that was present in Skyrim. In Skyrim, you could disable shadows entirely, if your CPU was a bit lacking. In Fallout 4? Nada.

 

[Paul98]

Can you adjust the actual distance of Med and High shadows in the config somewhere? High is stupid far, Med is stupid close.

 

[Udgnim]

Can you adjust the actual distance of Med and High shadows in the config somewhere? High is stupid far, Med is stupid close.

it's in Fallout4Prefs.ini

you'll find it in C:\Users\WINDOWS USER PROFILE\Documents\my games\Fallout4

Medium is 3,000
High is 14,000
Ultra is 20,000

you're looking to change

fDirShadowDistance=7500.0000
fShadowDistance=7500.0000