I tried turning god rays off in the launcher menu, but due to poor game design the god rays mess with the graphics and they turn themselves back on almost immediately. I then tried to edit the ini files and set the files to "read only" only for the game to untick "read only" and re-enable the broken graphics feature. It's the same story with depth of field as well, in that it is being re-enabled after i have disabled it.

Not sure what else to do.

I have no idea what "God Rays" are.

Well you could turn it off in the Ini and set it to read only so it doesn't change on you again. I would recommend however that you use - http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/102/?- It is a tool that lets you easily configure in game settings and graphic settings, it then saves it to the ini and puts it as read only.

It is one of the lighting features on the PC version, but it is a fps killer for some system.

That's exactly what i said i did.

I'll check out that config tool. Thanks.

Didn't read the read only part, i am sorry. Also whenever you enter the launcher and edit something else there it will turn godrays and depth of field back on, it is really annoying.

Have you changed the setting in both the steam folder and under my games? Mine stay put as they are. I have turned off godrays and depth of field as well.

You could try turn them off via console, and then use the refreshini in console to make'em stick.

you can use the console to turn them off , open console , type "gr off " there is a space between gr and off , and as always dont type the " marks

You know those big religious scenes in movies where the clouds part and beams of sunlight shine down on the world?

Or when you walk into an old dusty barn in the afternoon or something and the sunlight is shining through the cracks in the wall almost like lasers, but bigger and not as high tech?

That's the basic idea.

Here's an in game example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdTobIV2sZ8

Thank you! I learned something new.

Bethesda's settings work a little oddly:

1.) If you enter the options menu during gameplay and change anything, your settings will reset to defaults in the .INI.

2.) If your Windows User Account does not have full Administrator Access (which is Elevated Admin Account, not standard Admin Account), and you install the game to a protected directory, you may not be allowed to edit files. User Accounts are automatically protected unless you manually set it to the lowest settings. Even then, certain paths may still be protected.

3.) Be sure you're editing the .INIs in your Documents directory, not the game installation directory.

4.) Be sure your Steam account is not set to automatically update anything, as this means that Steam may automatically be restoring your .INIs every time you launch the game.

It could be any combination of the above factors. In short, if you're safe about online activity and have good 3rd-party antivirus, follow these steps to create an http://www.tweakandtrick.com/2014/07/enable-administrator-windows.html. Disable UAC completely after that. Never install games to Program Files or Program Files(x86). Just create your own folders in your installation drive's root.

After those steps, you should be good to go.

I turned them off just by lowering all graphics on start up to default low and bumping everything back up but god rays. ( Default low turns them off )

Setting God Rays to High and Shadows to Medium should sort things out on high-end rigs.

The performance gain from lowering God Rays from Ultra to High is immense for very little difference, visually.

Shadows are just completely broken the way they're implemented. First, Ultra creates absolutely NO visual difference from High, and the difference between High and Medium is night and day in both performance (waaay up) and visual quality (waaay down).

Running Vsync OFF to test the actual impact around Faneuil Hall, on an:

i7-4790K, 4.0 GHz

GTX 980 ti, 6 GB DDR5 VRAM

16 GB G.Skill Gaming RAM

Samsung EVO SSD

With Shadows at Ultra, I got a minimum of 9 FPS. Frickin' -- 9 frames per second. On an eVGA GTX 980 ti. That was: "NINE" (9).

With Shadows at High, it jumped all the frickin' way up to 15-18 FPS

With Shadows at Medium -- 62 FPS. 62 frames per second. Minimum.

So, lowering shadows to medium should ensure higher-end rigs perfectly smooth gameplay across the board. Medium rigs should see drastic improvement.

Low end rigs...you're playing a Bethesda title, whaddya want?

Well if someone is on PC I see no reason to not use the Shadow Boost mod:
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1822/?

It dynamically changes the shadow draw distance to achieve your target fps, Min/Max draw distances and the change speeds are customizable as well. I can't play without it, I have an r9 390 which is similar in power to a 970, I set mine to draw between 5500 and 8500.

The God Ray technology that Bethesda uses in Fallout 4 is one of the Nvidia's workshop features which notoriously run terribe on not only AMD cards (Thanks Bethesda :sigh ) but also on Nvidia cards.

Well there is something wrong with the shadows, i think it puts to much of a strain on the CPU aswell as the GPU.

I tried it, but there are times at sunrise/sunset that you'll notice distant shadows suddenly vanish, leaving super-bright LoD buildings, etc. It's way to jarring for me. Plus, though Medium shadows draw in noticeably and create some very odd scenes at times, the game still looks great and runs smoothly in all areas. Bethesda simply needs to fix High vs. Ultra. Not sure why shadows suddenly start gobbling up so much performance. They're better looking than Skyrim -- no question -- but they're still not that amazingly detailed.

The crazy, massive plummet of FPS in only certain areas means the way the game is calculating shadows is likely far more intensive than it needs to be at longer ranges. Mid- to short-range details need to be pulled in a lot.


All of the previous Beth games have used CPU shadows. It's something that I always found perplexing, and I can only assume it's a hard-coded limitation with the Gamebryo engine. Still, regardless of whether they're processed CPU or GPU this time around, they have not been optimized above the Medium Setting. Looks like one of the devs literally picked a range at random for High, tacked on some settings based upon a "best guess!", then arbitrarily upped the range "a bit more!" for Ultra.

What should have been done is separate settings and individual LoD for shadows, just like everything else in the game. Individual detail levels with separate culling ranges. What it does now is take the same settings as Medium and just "stretch" them to cover a wider area. Obviously, this will drown a processor in exponentially greater calculations with exponentially diminishing returns, visually. Lazy.