Hey guys,

I'm really getting a bit frustrated over here and I hope somebody can help me. I'm experiencing massive FPS-drops (as low as 18 FPS) in some urban areas especially if enemys are around for example the police station where you first meet the Brotherhood. Indoors and in the woods the game runs with smooth 60 FPS on high settings. Of course i tried lowering my settings and even tried some of the reddit workarounds but nothing seems to help much. The game suggested to play on high.

My specs:

AMD Phenom™ II X6 1055T

AMD R9 270X OC 2GB

8GB Ram

I know that especially my CPU is not the fastest but I should be able to play the game right? When i look at my CPU/GPU usage during the FPS-drops my GPU is at 50% and my CPU at around 80%.

Ideas appreciated!

Your CPU is actually below minimum requirement. Fallout 4 seems to be extremely CPU dependent, (which, it being a 64bit open-world physics heavy game makes sense). Best steps you can take until the performance is patched up a little (especially on AMD CPUs) are closing all background tasks and freeing up as much processor time as possible. Long term though you're looking at an upgrade if you want to play such a resource-heavy game, that's just not a particularly good processor.

I7 4930k 4.6 it still happens to me in cities so I don't know maybe my CPU isent as tough as I thought or Bethesda might come out with a patch

I'm having the same issue, with FPS as high as 60 (capped) for a couple seconds but then as low as 11 in Ultra, 22 in custom Medium, fluctuating like crazy, usually when in combat and/or staring at the sun or large buildings (Godrays set on low). I have an FX-8350, I tried overclocking it with no noticable difference. The game made my settings Medium to begin with, suprisingly, as I thought I had a pretty decent PC.

32GB RAM, overkill for gaming I know, but I do a lot of Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere etc.

FX-8350, 8-core, 4.0 GHz, overclocked to 4.4 and 4.7 with no noticeable difference, but didn't do in depth testing.

AMD Radeon HD 7950 3GB, tried overclocking as well, no difference I could tell other than crashing, might not be doing it right.

Samsung SSD 840 PRO

Thanks for all your help. I know that i'll have to upgrade my cpu sometimes soon but for now i'll see if overclocking will help.

Still strange that the FPS only drops in urban areas but otherwise i can play with 60FPS :/

Hey!! Make a test please,

Set you shadow distance to MEDIUM and go the urban area and tell me if you still have a absurd fps drop!

There are a lot of REDDIT post about this issue, it DOES NOT MATTER IF IS A TOP GEAR MACHINE. We all are having this problem.

The only thing that worked for me was tweaking shadow distance, they are not optimized in urban areas.

I have the same issue, huge fps drops that dont recover back to normal, ive tried every possible low - ultra option, turned settings on and off without success.

i7 3770k 3.5ghz
16gb ram
Amd 7970 ghz edition 3gb

My settings are detected as ultra. There is definitely an issue with the game itself, Ive been looking for a fix to this issue since the game released without any luck at all, definitly returning the game for a full refund, its unplayable.

I can confirm that shadow distance messes up in certain areas and setting Shadow Distance to medium fixes it.

For me the settings I listed down below changed the game from more or less unplayable to very enjoyable.

The settings I changed was those I show below rest set to standard Ultra settings:

Shadow Quality: Medium
Shadow Distance: Medium

Godrays Quality: Low

Rest is set on ultra and the game runs very smooth for me now. So if you have FPS problems do these changes.

As a side note if you run a AMD GFX card like me go in and force tesselation to 8x or 16x in you Catalyst drivers.

After these changes the game runs more or less at a solid 55-60 fps for me some bad areas it might drop a little bit down tot 45-49 but its just certian areas in the Finance Districte and Corvega factory.

So if you have fps issues try these settings.

My system as a reference:

AMD FX-8350 @ 4.2

16gb ram

ATI R9 280 3gb

Windows 10 64-bit

I think you can even let SHADOW QUALITY in High Settings, as far as i know until now: Shadow Distance and Godrays are the ones causing perfomance problems!

I have just the same problem. when the shadow distanse is on high or ultra my gpu usage drops and is not fully utulised. so the only fix for now is to set the shadow vieuw distance to a akward low setting...

i7 2600k @ 4.4ghz

asus strix 980ti

16gb ram

game on a ssd

Shadow distance worked for me, smooth 60 fps every where, I also noticed there was a background program hogging resources called Java update scheduler, I turned that off, its been perfect ever since.

Shadow distance is what brings my pc utterly to it's knees in urban areas, 1st cpu core hits 80% usage. I thought I'd got the game running well till I actually got into the city...

I have a similar problem, only the frame drops are constant. In cities I get around 15fps and below 10 in combat, whereas ouside of cities its around 30fps and 20 in combat. I've done everything, literally everything I can think of. Updated drives, made sure my CPU and GPU wern't exceeding 50C, turned off VSync, Godrays, Graphics to low, render distance and view distance to low, every concievable graphics setting to as low as it possibly can yet it still runs terribly. Any help would be appreciated.

PC Specs

i5 4690K

8GB Corsair Vengance RAM

120GB SSD (Installed on)

1Tb HDD

MSI 7917 MoBo

GeForce GTX 970

Win 10 Home 64bit