X99a i7 4.5 gHz 6 core hyper threaded
16gb quad channel 3200 ram
12gb Titan x sli
moderate ssd

I've tried everything.
Changing resolution doesn't help.
Nvidia control panel tweaks tried many combinations that helped somewhat.
Ini tweaks and set ini to read only to ensure settings stick.
Game streaming off
Game settings set to maximize 4K performance.
Lowered tessellation worked a lot***
Game is not consistent in when fps drop, mostly it can however be generalized to proximity to fog, non sky lighting like light bulbs, Something still bites the fps even with drawing distance down that might have been overlooked in distance control.
Sometimes fps drops as said before are totally inconsistent happening about 15% of the time -happen randomly causing 80 fps drops from 120-130 to 40-45. It seems like maybe a fundamental game engine issue. Really a bummer because I love fallout and my machine SHOULD eat this game for breakfast.
Anyone else run at 4K or have a Titan sli setup that experience this issue?
Or anyone have any suggestions?
Is this a directx issue perhaps?

I also have volumetric lighting disabled but the ini only can disable the volumetric lighting for outdoors.

So what, it's still perfectly okay at 40fps. Heck, that's more than most of us are getting.

Turn godrays to medium or lower.

That's not really helping.

Do you actually have SLI working and it's scaling?

Godrays have a huge impact on performance, and it seems to be an exponentially decreasing performance hit. Turn them down, and shadows as well. I'm surprised that you can run this game at 4K at any playable frame rate to be honest. Just to maintain 60 FPS on my 980 Ti, I need to have godrays and shadows at high instead of ultra and play at 720p. If I play at 1440p, I get 30 FPS when using scoped weapons.

God rays is disabled. It should be noted that in my experimentation that less isn't always more and some settings run faster using different rendering technologies. Cpu usage on both cards is fully utilized and each card renders every other frame. It looks awesome but if you use Merle weapons having frame drops stagger your movements is terribly frustrating. I made great sacrifices to get a good rig and I can't speak for other people's performance issues but when 85% of the time is 120fps drops to 40 it makes me wonder what is up.

Yes the tessellation has scaling issues that have possibly been overlooked with gfx cards

You have too much money for this Wasteland.

Why would you tell a guy who paid 1000 dollars for his video card that 40fps is good enough? For shame.

He's playing at 4k! Honestly I don't think that's too bad.

What SLI bits are you using that you found worked? I've not been able to utilize my second 980 Ti yet.

What is a "Merle weapon"?

And what about shadows?

What about the shadow distance quality. That eats FPS like the God Rays.

I believe there is a mod that adjusts the shadow distance based on your FPS target if it get below that it will downgrade the shadow distance and then boost it back up when exceed the FPS target. I think it is called Shadow Boost.

I'm able to run God Rays up to High and Ultra on my R9 280x without any performance impact. The visual difference between High and Ultra is minimal. I don't think God Rays really has the performance impact that people think it does. Well atleast when the INI config files have bNVGodRays set to 0 but volumetric lighting to 1 (god rays still work with volumetric lighting)

It's not unusual for my R9 280x and FX 8350 8-core 4.0gHz to push 45-60 fps on a combination of Medium to Ultra settings. Shadow distance absolutely murders performance, I find a setting between 3000 and 6000 (in the INI) which is roughly between low and medium gives the most stable frame rate in all areas including the geometry flooded city cells.

It's been benchmarked before that 4k resolution murders performance, yeah it's a cool feature but can't you just use a DSR that's somewhere between 4k and 1080p? Less performance hit but still nice and crisp with TAA on.

Also don't worry about blur filters and anti-aliasing, they have minimal frame rate hit on cards higher than the GTX 6xx generation on both the green and red sides of the fence, Bokeh Depth of Field does hurt it a little but I leave it on mostly.

With your hardware the frame rate should be higher, but this is a day one/beta patched Bethesda release... Skyrim took over a year to achieve maximum performance on my hardware.

Also FYI, don't let the game run over 60 fps... it messes with the physics since game-time and frame-time are tied to one another.

With your INI tweaks, you did force the PresentInterval to 0 and force disabled V-Sync in the drivers correct?

Oh right and SLI/CrossfireX doesn't work properly yet. DX10/11 is notorious for having problems with scaling on multi-gpu hardware, so badly in fact that the vendors have to supply specific profiles and patches to their drivers to support the games instead of DX itself. Let's all hope DX12 and Khronos Vulkan comes soon... I'm tired of not using my second R9 280x.


If you're really worried about God Rays, you can fiddle with them in the console while playing the game. Just hit the '~' key and type "gr info" to get the information for your current settings.

"gr off" turns off God Rays while "gr on" turns them on. "gr quality #" changes the quality level in real-time, use 0 for off, 1 for low, 2 for medium 3 for high and 4 for ultra.
"gr grid #" changes the resolution of the effect. I didn't really notice much change with this but I have read on reddit that some people lost a lot of performance when changing this from 32 to 128, I didn't lose any and didn't see any visible change... you can also use "gr scale 1.0" where changing 1.0 to a higher or smaller decimal value will scale the effect or down. I find playing with "gr scale 0.5" keeps a nice level of quality without glaring too much.

Volumetric lighting = godrays. bNvGodrays, iVolumetricLightingQuality and bVolumetricLightingEnable are the three settings affected by the Godrays setting in the settings panel.

Same scene at 1440p (frame cap disabled for testing) with a 980 Ti:

bNvGodrays=0

iVolumetricLightingQuality=0

bVolumetricLightingEnable=0

87 FPS.

bNvGodrays=0

iVolumetricLightingQuality=0

bVolumetricLightingEnable=1

bNvGodrays=1

iVolumetricLightingQuality=1

bVolumetricLightingEnable=1

52 FPS

bNvGodrays=1

iVolumetricLightingQuality=3

bVolumetricLightingEnable=1

37 FPS.

Good to see you breaking it down as a problem for yourself. I can't really help much further since your issue isn't re-productible on my system, sorry :c

Honestly I find that 4K innately doesn't hinder performance at all. The complexity of the geometry innately doesn't seem to be the issue as the same place doesn't cause a fps drop consistently. I'll try some of your suggestions that I haven't tried yet. Like you said the game does not have proprietary sli utilization but using the hardware a proprietary sli alternating frame rate software enables a solution that I have found more often than not delivers great performance by th numbers. I don't use ati products but I do appreciate that they offer tessellation scaling. It really seems to be smoke/fog effects indoors more than anything. Unfortunately indoor smoke/fog cannot be altered as of yet. God rays seem to use volumetric lighting so I avoid them. Tile based lighting seems okay but like I said indoors are an 80 fps hit and some random inconsistent large fps drops that seems like a fundamental issue.

It's not just what you paid but what it cost you by the way lol

(same as above)

Shadow quality: Ultra:

37 FPS

Shadow quality: High:

45 FPS

Shadow quality: Medium:

45 FPS

Shadow quality: Low:

53 FPS

Shadow quality reset to Ultra.

Shadow distance: Ultra:

37 FPS

Shadow distance: High:

37 FPS

Shadow distance: Medium:

39 FPS

Shadow distance: Medium & Shadow Quality: Low:

56 FPS

This is a "problem" on every system. The thing is that it clearly is showing you how much additional render time volumetric lighting adds to the render time of a scene. It would be nice if Bethesda could optimize these areas a little better than what they are.

The reason you're not able to duplicate the issue is because you're most likely checking this in an area that's easy on the volumetric lighting calculations, so there's little impact when you're testing it. Try testing at the footbridge in Sanctuary that heads to Vault 111. Look along the creek toward where all the trees are. That's where I tested this as a plentiful number of trees tend to send the frame time into outer space.

I average 55 fps pretty much everywhere (I use the AMD Frame Control feature to lock the FPS to no higher than 60 to remove V-Sync input delay and frame drops) It only dips for me in the city cells where there's a lot of geometry being used in shadow rendering, when you throw in a few dynamic shadow casting lights it bogs down to around 52 sometimes 48 but the game remains playable for me. I try to remain constantly aware of the performance as I like to help contribute to bug reports wherever I can.

Volumetric Lighting in rad storms and in the city is really taxing when I unlocked the frame rate I was dropping from 140 fps down to 70 at High settings for Volumetric Lighting. I use those as a basis for my performance since the fog doesn't stop the geometry in the background being processed and sometimes even rendered, making it great for benchmarking my settings. Also using the weather console command and setting the weather to the FXNuclear one, shows the Volumetric Lighting in spades while outdoors. Indoors the only issue I have with Volumetric Lighting is the weird cut-out square at the end of the caster's range. It's hard to describe but if you look in the same direction as the external sun/moonlight is casting through windows indoors, and it's considerably darker inside, if you look along the caster's vector you can see this really obvious and jarring cut-out. I've noticed that this doesn't seem to appear on some other GPU set ups, including AMD cards of the upper tier variety.

Computers aren't this simple. You cant just throw in 2 GTX Titans and expect the game to perform perfectly. There's a reason people say GTX Titan's are "A waste of money" and its not because they don't perform well. Sometimes CPUs bottleneck. Sometimes its GPUs, sometimes its RAM, sometimes it can even be a hard drive. But sometimes, the game manages to bottleneck itself and this usually happens before 2 GTX Titans bottleneck. As others have said, 45FPS in 4K gaming is extremely good. They're not just complaining because there's isn't as good, you're trying to get a computer to do something it just won't do. And that is get a game like Fallout to run as well as other games. It's not Bethesda's fault, but a game like Fallout just can't keep up with other games in terms of optimization. Just cause you can run Witcher 3 in 4K does not mean you can run Fallout 4 in 4K, even if it does look prettier. I know this is an extremely unhelpful post, but I suggest you enjoy the game, instead of spend all this time and energy trying to make your PC do something PCs aren't going to do. I've only seen like 3 gameplays of 60FPS, 4K gaming and they didn't show 60FPS in every part of the game. You're so much better off just waiting for Nvidia/Bethesda to release updates here and there, you'll be playing 60FPS in a year or so when its better optimized.

I average 62 FPS pretty much everywhere. But this isn't an issue about pretty much everywhere, it's an issue at specific places and/or in specific conditions where the optimization is seriously lacking. The issue is specifically with the massive performance hit caused by enabling godrays. No single setting should be sending frame rates from 87 to 37 in any circumstance.

I'd still like to know how you got SLI to work.

Actually it makes sense for a single setting to be doing that. Just the same as Tessellation in some games murders performance, or Anti Aliasing in others... it depends on the implementation and the way the designers use said implementation. Remember that Fallout 4 is now using a deferred renderer, the game's processing becomes more expensive as you increase the resolution exponentially, as opposed to previous rendering methods. The memory use is much higher too, Volumetric Lighting is a post-processing filter that is applied to the framebuffer and has its own independant resolution and scaling and for good reason... early 'god rays' in titles as far back as 1998 have been the cause of a lot of graphical bugs and even crashes, especially in modern day technology because we're depth testing and colour blending millions if not billions of pixels in a single frame... and in Fallout 4 a single frame takes 16.6ms of real time (or more if you're getting less than 60 fps) So in 16.6ms the GPU shader programs that developers wrote at NVIDIA, are testing depth buffers and the various 'colour' buffers for the deferred renderer, in order to apply lighting that has volume in the game world. This is expensive for the same reason volumetric fog has been expensive since the 1990s, it takes a lot of time to process all this data...