My specs are as follows.

AMD FX 9590, Liquid cooled
R9 280x Graphics Card
8GB Corsair Vengeance Ram
SSD

Inside and in certain areas I get a smooth 60 FPS but outside in built up areas (Cities, Corvega plant) I get drops in FPS to around the 40 FPS mark, sometimes as low as 30 FPS

The problem is that when these drops happen it feels like the game is literally running at 10 FPS, massive lag happens, unplayable at some points.

I have lowered all the graphical settings to their minimum (Besides resolution) and am playing windowed/border less mode and I've even lowered and completely removed shadows from the game via the ini. file and yet still nothing helps.

From what I understand my specs (besides the graphics card and that's only just below) are recommended standard, So I can't for the life of me figure out what the issue is

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Welcome to the club

[censored], really?

Frame rate drops are going to happen in a game like this with every NPC on a script.

What can help is to clamp the frame rates because that masks the drops. There are a few programs that will let you do this, like Riva Tuner or MSI Afterburner. Now, this will sound weird to you, but clamping the frame rates to something like 48 is probably the best setting. The game is still smooth, you won't notice the drops or notice them as much, and you will eliminate the micro stutter issues if your having them. I have been clamping Bethesda games to 48 for years and my games are butter smooth.

The problem is actually that those 2 areas are just not optimized properly. This was an issue in the witcher 3 when it came out. Cities had massive fps drops. Now cities have stable fps without the need to lower graphics settings. Has nothing to do with clamping your fps.

it is a good idea to set ipresentinterval=1 to 0 in your falloutprefs.ini file in your fallout4 folder in your my documents folder (I'm sure you already did this) and then set your fps limit to 60. Also if you have vsync on, turn on triple buffering. I have a nvidia card so I did the above ini modification and turned v sync to adaptive (half refresh rate) sInce my monitor is 120hz. Corvega and diamond city are still terrible but only bethesda can make it better. Hope we get a patch soon.

"Clamp the fps to 48" and you're a moderator...shaking my damn head.

It's not NPC scripting.

I have manually disabled every visual effect I could find, shadow res set to 8, sao completely off, specular desired to 75 (instead of 7500) etc etc

There is still a massive fps drop in corvega plant. Funny thing is, it only happens when you look at or near flourescent lighting fixtures. If I turn away from them my fps shoots to 60 (the limit I set). If I look towards the 4 hanging lights on the left from the top entrance, I get 20 fps. If I go around the left corner and look at the flourescent light on a stand, I get 40 fps.

Obviously there is some massive bug associated with these kinds of lighting fixtures.

EDIT:

Turns out it's not the lights, Its the stairs under them. The only oddity I noticed is a catwalk beam clipping into the wall and constantly disappearing and reappearing. Looking at it causes my fps to drop drastically.

AMD has released a driver for FO4. 15.11.1 Beta.

I've found the performance has increased very well on my system.

I have the same GPU and RAM on an OC'd I7 950 (4.2Ghz) and though I too see FPS drop into the 40's there is no lag associated with it.

As I said elsewhere if I was not looking at the numbers I wouldn't even know they had dropped.

I know, having just acquired this 280x they have issues. (Google it.) I have had to use MSI Afterburner to set up my own fan profile otherwise I get terrible artifacting. These cards are well known for this. I even went as far as to flash the BIOS from 1070/1600 clocks to 1000/1500. I saw a FPS drop obviously and the Artifacting was less but still present. So I flashed it back to default and continue to use MSI Afterburner with a pretty aggressive fan profile. For every degree the temp goes up, the fan speed goes up 1%. So 50C is 50% fan speed. It's been working pretty well.

I'm wondering if yours may be getting hot though not artifacting but dropping the FPS instead.

Worth a look.

P.S.

Oh yeah, as jasper1979 referred to, I'm using the 15.11.1 Beta drivers as well.

Why do you deny that a game that hasn't even received a real patch yet might have optimization issues? The game is amazing otherwise, just fix the glaringly obvious issues.

Where did I deny it may have issues?

I simply stated I shared similar hardware and FPS but there was no lag associated with the FPS drop.....on the same GPU...

Example A: I enter building, it runs 60fps flawlessly no matter where I go. Good stuff, right? I get around to the basemant, second floor, anywhere, and say for instance there's an Mk. Turret? Once I destroy the turret, the fire/smoking wreck that is left behind chugs me down to 40fps when I look directly at it. Now, when the turret was active, I could look at it fine, have an insane firefight around it with no slowdown, but the smoking wreckage left behind is a problem...there's just a few things that need to be fixed and the game will be perfect. It's definitely lag and it's definitely noticeable

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1543988-a-data-vault-of-tweaks-and-fixes-for-the-pc-version/

I actually replaced my AMD card with a EVGA (Nvidia) one and I dl the G-Force Experience. I let it optimize the game, based on the discussion points listed on the Nvidia website, which are also listed in this thread under Number 2. My game runs extremely well. I am actually totally surprised, since I had nothing but headaches with that PC before I replaced the graphics card (the new one also got 4 gigs of RAM, oh and I was also able to finally shut up stupid Cortana that came with Win 10 and was a resource horder!).

edited Oh, and what CCNA suggested is a valid option to try and help. edited

Maybe the difference between OP and me is it's as simple as my 4.2Ghz OC on my CPU. It may be something else but I'm not having the same issues (noticeable lag, as I do get the drops.) on the same GPU so it leads me to believe there is something else going on here.

removed again

Ok, cut it out the both of you. It's not helping anyone if you start having a pissing contest. It's also interfering with my dinner plans

Enjoy your dinner. It just serves no purpose to tell people "it's not lag" and "you can't really see it so stop complaining!" I'm sorry that your eyes can't tell the difference but mine can. Anyway, done with this thread.

And again...where did I state that? All I did was say "I" do not see the lag associated with the FPS drops. Trust me, I have experienced this and it has nothing to do with my eyes. Skyrim did it all the time on my 5870. Yet, FOR ME Fallout 4 seems to handle the drops better...again....FOR ME!

Please "stop putting word in mouth", k?

Hey guys.

Have you looked in the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1543988-a-data-vault-of-tweaks-and-fixes-for-the-pc-version/ thread?

Might be something in there to help.

If I could post links here, I would link my Youtube files that show this problem. And why it can't be anything other than a application and/or driver problem.

Just keep turning down settings until you get something that works for you. Lower your resolution as well.

Well, I can play this game without any performance issues. Don't know what being a moderator has to do with suggesting what has worked for me and many others. And, clamping frame rates is one of the better ways to have stable performance on these games. Not everyone needs to, I sure don't on this particular game. I have just had to on Skyrim and Fallout 3/NV.

So you disable all the graphics eye candy the only thing you have left is CPU load.

However that being said, lights have always had issues in these games. Here is something to try and I have no idea if it will work in this game, but it did work with past Fallout games with light heavy cells. If you are not using the controller, disable it and the vibration in game settings. I know it sounds weird, but in New Vegas I could not walk through the Thorn with these options enabled (it has a lot of light sources not necessarily lights themselves but light sources that create shadows. I did the Corvega battle the other night and it was smooth and stable in there for me. I have the controller and vibration disabled.

970 and an i7 having the same issue too

To ensure that the game is CPU capped, he should be playing at the lowest resolution possible -- 640x480 if possible.

WELL my pc is around the minimum required

Normally in days gone past I would never attempt to play any game with only minimum specs but well times change..

Strangely the auto options setting sets it all to medium. But even low setting produces shockingly bad stuttering.

I tried a lot of the tweaks, some made game crash on startup everytime like

trying to use 800x450 unwindowed, and windowed is just too freaking small.

But overall the tweaks made a huge improvement to my stock game setup stuttering!

How do i tell my min in game FPS is anyway?

To get things even smoother where's my money most efficiently spent?

current setup:

i5-2320 3GHz

8GB ram

GTX 560 Ti

win7pro

running at monitor native 1920 x 1080

latest nvidia driver V359.00

Would more ram do anything or do i need to spend big bucks on a $300 GPU LIKE A 960GTX or R9 380?

And yes don't be alarmed that's what they cost in AU!