Sorry for long post, the beginning is probably skippable.


So, I'm not sure if it's the game's poor optimization or nah. I've seen posts with other people having almost identical problems, but never found a solution. I've tried so [censored] many things now, and have been spending the last 3 hours fiddling and tweaking all kinds of things to fix the problems, but no fix yet. I'll just explain the problems to begin with.


- I have perfectly fine FPS pretty much all the time. Always had smooth gameplay, but for some reason there's always been some stuttering. To begin with, it was barely a problem. It was this ocassional short stuttering that happened every few seconds, and I learned to live with it. Now I'm 25 hours in, and it's literally unplayable. Constant stuttering and insane lag spikes. As usual, it runs perfectly fine when everything has loaded, but I suspect that when the map cells in the distance are loading in, I get major lag spikes. It was pretty much non-existant to begin with, but for some reason it got unplayable about 24-25 hours in.


- The other thing is loading screens. They literally take 10 minutes now. They were nice and short to begin with, but now they last about 10 minutes. It's almost as if the performance gets worse the further into the game I get. People say the loading screens are tied to the FPS, but I refuse that's really the case here, as the loading screen tips and 3D models are working perfectly fine, and the loading symbol in the bottom-right corner is acting smoothly.


I am actually typing all this on my phone, as I am now watching a slideshow of my character attempting to ride the Vertibird to the Brotherhood of Steel blimp. It's so bad that it actually freezes for seconds, sometimes to a minute or two, and then goes back to smooth gameplay for one single second, and then back to a slideshow for another minute. So far I've been flying for half an hour, and I've only been through two lines of dialogue, not really close to the blimp. It's also like this after I've fast travelled. Slideshow for a minute or two, and then goes back to lag spiking every few seconds.


All of this is just purely [censored], really. I know my computer can handle it - it runs it perfectly fine. But the further into the game I get, the more terrible the lag and stuttering gets. It was running so perfect the first 24 hours, but it almost seems like it broke at the 24 hour mark. It's gotten unplayable. Any tips?


Already tried:

- running borderless fullscreen

- ENBoost

- optimized in GeForce Experience

- everything set to the lowest in settings

- reduced the shadows even further

- fiddled around with the FPS cap things

- tweaked in NVIDIA Control Panel

- few other minor things


Nothing has really worked.

First off do not use GeForce Experience to optimize the game. Also I suggest not to limit tweaking the settings in Nvidia and it is usually best to let the game manage it.

Please run dxdiag.exe and post the full report in spoiler tags. We might see something that can help you.

If the issue was getting longer with loading screens it might be a sign that your character game save might be getting bloated. Are you using the auto game save feature.

Does your machine even meet the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1543742-fallout-4-pc-support-please-read/?
Your performance sounds like what I got when I tried it on an old vid card with only 1 GB of vram, which is well below minimum spec, btw.

A DXDiag in spoiler tags might also be useful.

All the Experience optimization did was change the distance of object, item and actor fading, so it didn't make a big difference. The tweaking I did in the Control Panel was simply to set the power thing to 'prefer maximum performance' or whatever the option was called. Left the rest alone. I do indeed use the autosaving feature. I guess I'll disable it. It's not useful for me anyways, as I quicksave after combat and loading screens.

According to a site, it just barely doesn't meet the minimum requirements. Now, before you come at me, saying it's 100% the reason, just don't bother, please. I am most certain this is not the only reason I am having performance issues. As I said, I had butter smooth framerates to begin with, the real issues only came on later on into the game. For example, when I was in Vault 111 in the beginning of the game, I had no issues at all. I only had the minor camera stuttering/lag that I also have in Skyrim, which I've heard is some engine bug that can be fixed by tweaking, and I did get it fixed in F4 as well. But yeah as I said, the whole lag spiking and all that suddenly started around the 24 hour mark of playtime. Suddenly I got major lag spikes that sometimes turned everything into a slideshow. When I went back to Vault 111 to get the Cryolator, it was a pure slideshow for me, whereas it was butter smooth when I was there in the beginning of the game. Same thing with Sanctuary.

When I got the game, I wasn't expecting to run it at full settings with amazing FPS. I'm a huge Fallout fan, and I needed to play Fallout 4. So far I've been loving it, and playing it an insane amount in two days, even with the performance issues. I'm not trying to fix the low FPS issue, 'cause I know that's due to my specs, I'm just trying to fix the odd sudden lag spiking and stuttering, that's causing my constant 35-45, sometimes 50, FPS to disappear, leaving me with a slideshow instead.

Here's the DXDiag: (can't seem to find the spoiler button on this forum, please help never mind, just did the tags manually)

Make sure ur game is using nvidia graphic instead of Intel. We have seen alot of postings on system with switchable graphics. Do a search, there r threads on how to do it.

Oh, and by the way, another odd thing is that usually if I stay in an area for a while (about 10 minutes or so) the lag spikes completely disappear, and it goes back to the way it was when I originally started the game, where I had a constant good FPS with ocassional minor stuttering. The reason I think this is odd, is because usually when my computer can't run a game, it'll be a constant FPS drop caused by too many things on the screen or so. It wouldn't matter how long I stay in an area, the lag would be constant anyway. But in this case, the lag completely disappears if I wait long enough. but as soon as I enter another 'world cell' it comes back. Looking at the sky, or some other thing, which would usually cause the FPS to skyrocket again, doesn't change a thing either.

Yeah, already did that in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

Increase ur virtual memory(paging file) may help too. Monitor ur gpu temperature there may be throttling as ur system overheat since u mentioned it happened after long hour of playing...

I've fiddled with the paging files now. I'll just log off now and come back on tomorrow and see if anything's magically fixed itself. I don't think it's overheating, since I'm quite sure it was already lagging when I got on this morning.

By the way, I tried making a new save, and it was all laggy as well. The loading screen that took me to the opening cinematic took about 12 minutes to finish. The cinematic ran just fine, but whenever I pressed a button, it got all choppy and laggy. When I eventually got to the character customization, I just gave up. It was lagging so bad, I couldn't even turn his head.

The long loading times can be alleviated to a certain degree by using SSD for your games, at the moment your system is using 5400rpm HDD's (standard for laptops but SSDs becoming more common) andt because you have a laptop system, it may not be practical or possible (depending on your budget) to upgrade the machine. You'd have to check with the manufacturers website.

I would also strongly recommend upgrading your systems ram capacity, in the dxdiag info you supplied, it indicates 8GB and although this game is written primarily for current gen consoles that have 8GB capacity, the PC version will run smoother with more ram than that eg. 16GB (because ram is sold in 4, 8 or 16GB sizes).

The http://ark.intel.com/products/78929/Intel-Core-i5-4210H-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-3_50-GHz processor in your laptop is only 2 physical cores with 4 threads (hyperthreading) this game has been coded with up to 8 core processors in mind because current gen consoles have AMD's 8 core SOC so it stands to reason as to why the game is getting laggy the more you play through it.

All in all, I'm actually surprised that your laptop can cope with the game so far because you state that when you started playing it, it was smooth enough for you.

Have you tried disabling unnecessary background apps from running whilst gaming? like messenger and facebook etc.? that always helps free up ram and reduce page file thrashing which apart from prematurely shortening the life of your hardware will put your system to be slow as a snail in performance.

Also check your harddisk, do a diskscan to make sure there are no bad sectors. Even when playing on normal HD, it should not take such a long time to load. One way to test is to copy the whole FO4 folder to another location. If it takes a long time to transfer 25gb, probably your harddisk is having problem. Check S.M.A.R.T status of your harddisk.

Also check your RAM usage. What are the processes or services hogging the RAM. Are there any unwanted or unnecessary processes or services running. If system does not have enough physical RAM also of paging will occur.

I also agree with trying to limit what processes are running in the background. I suggest doing a clean boot into windows using msconfig.

Yeah, I already have close to no applications running in the background. All I have is Skype and Fallout 4.

I've noticed that 'System and compressed memory' is hogging up all memory and disk according to the Task Manager. I believe it's some Windows 10 thing, and some say it's a good thing, but I still feel like it's slowing down my computer.

I'll try moving the game to another location.

Yeah, that surprised me as well. I thought it was kinda odd when I first started my first save and actually got good frames. Obviously I was expecting terrible graphics and mediocre performance, as my computer barely fits the minimum requirements. But I have this thing where I just don't care about the graphics if it's a game I really want to play. I'm a huge Fallout fan, so I just had to get Fallout 4, regardless of the graphics or performance. And it was running quite great to begin with, but then just, all of the sudden, got unplayable. I'm used to tweaking the settings a lot in games, as there's some newer games that I want to play, but my computer might not handle too well. I always mess around a lot with settings, and try to find performance fixes and all of that. It often works out.

System and compressed memory is normal, its Windows 10 new way of handling memory management. Windows search index may take up alot of disk activity. You can try to disable that. Windows superfetch service can be disabled. Under schedule task there is a job that does disk optimization when system is idle. That can be disable as well. All these affect ur disk...

Sooo, I just tested PAYDAY 2 as well, to see if the problem persisted there. It did. Was trying to load a heist, and as in Fallout 4, I get a loading screen before the actual loading screen. The screen goes all black, with the loading icon in the corner, and then after a while, the actual loading screen begins, which takes about 7 minutes or so.

I'm watching my Task Manager right now, and it's saying the disk usage is 100% which is weird. I'm only running Chrome and Steam right now, and neither of those are causing it. The weird thing is that it says 100% disk usage, even though the program hogging the most, is only using up 0,4MB. Sometimes 'System and compressed memory' goes up and hogs 30MB, and the disk usage goes all red. Pretty sure 1MB wouldn't be the whole disk, which seems to be the case here, as it says 100% usage as soon as the system applications reach 1MB combined.

This is all weird. When I got this laptop a few weeks ago, I did feel like it was a bit slower than my old one in some ways. The specs are much better, and it runs games at much higher settings with even better FPS, but I still feel like it's slower. As soon as I start a download or installation, the computer gets practically unusable. It starts lagging so much that every action takes many seconds to load. It's so weird, 'cause it's much much better than my old laptop, and it could easily install and download multiple things at once, while I was still able to use the computer.

This is all pissing me off. I should probably go to a tech forum, as it's starting to stray further and further away from Fallout 4 now.

Not sure if the MS article is related to your case https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3083595

You can check the youtube about a few solutions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhhDtOHaOrY

Have you used a disk utility to check health of drive?

Dude, you are my god. I love you.

I did all of the things from the video and the MSI thing as well. It is butter smooth now. The startup took only a few seconds, the loading screen took just about a minute, and when I got in-game, it was butter smooth. Whereas the vertibird ride to the Brotherhood of Steel blimp literally was a slideshow for me before, it was butter smooth with absolutely no lag at all during the whole ride. This is amazing. It's running even better than it was to begin with.

I love you so [censored] much.