I have no idea what happened. Since release I've been playing this game on Ultra/Max settings with FXAA (low) Antialiasing and 8x Aisotropic filtering and I've had very minimal performance issues - minor slow down when lots of action is going on in the open world, not anything game breaking. I've made no driver changes / hardware changes / windows update changes / malware contamination...etc. since the last time I played the game (and it was running fine).

Today when I opened fallout the launcher re-adjusted all my settings back to low quality as if it was the first time I installed the game. After manually changing everything back and reopening the game it took forever to load and the game framerate was so low that the game was unplayable.

THIS MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. What changed overnight that suddenly my compyuter can't handle something that was running perfectly fine in the last 24 hours? After exiting the game and reopening it, the launcher again autodetected all my settings back to low. Something is clearly corrupted.

To be safe, I played a little MGSV (all max settings) just to make sure nothing was wrong. Game runs flawlessly. This has to be a hidden update issue.

I've had such a crap day. I get to play a few hours late at night before going to bed and starting the same crappy routine all over again. I don't need to be using that limited time uninstalling / reinstalling the game or drivers over and over trying to troubleshoot a problem caused by developers who get paid a lot more than I do to apparently just svck ass at their job.

ASUS Laptop Win 8.1

I7-4700 HQ 2.4 GHZ

Gerforce 870M

16 GB RAM

OS and Games installed on 256GB Solid State

After trying again the game is running fine using my old settings (ultra with minor tweaks to filtering). The launcher still auto-detects every-time I run the game. I'm still annoyed and I still think for the money these people make they could do a lot better.

Most likely, it is defaulted back to the integrated Intel chipset. I can't say why, but it would fit the symptoms.

I think you're right. I originally figured that's why the launcher auto-detects me at super low settings. No way of telling why it decided to reset everything on each run all of a sudden though.

Well.. disable your integrated graphics in BIOS.