Hi everyone I need some assistance and possibly an explaination as to why im experience these issues. I bought Fallout 4 on pre-order knowing that later on I would need to get a new video card in order to run it. Considering I had only a GT 420 video card which is extremely low end. Though it runs Fallout 3 / NV and Skyrim really well.
Having the game in my possesion I got impatient and decided to check out how it would run on my low end card. To my surprize running the game on complete low settings allowed the game to start up (no crashes, no freezes). The game was working well and looked okay for something I expected to not even run. When too much was happening on the screen the FPS would drop as expected. But the game still worked and never crashed and the resolution options were of a wide range.
I then decided okay, its time to finally get a newer card, one that is above the minimum requirement, So I can at the least increase the texture quaility and improve the FPS. I purchased a Nvidia GeForce GT 740 as i was not able to afford the desirable 900 series. But figured its a step up from what I currently am using that was able to at the least bit run Fallout 4. First off Fallout 4 was unable to identify this new card, where as the first card it was able to scan it and set all settings accordingly.
Here is where all the problems started. Immediantely after installing the video card and updating the drivers and launching Fallout 4. I noticed the resolution options were limited to only two settings. Two settings of which were not sit to scale with the resolution of my screen. Using one of these options in windowed mode worked okay. But I do not wish to run in windowed mode. Playing the game in full screen in the higher resolution out of the two options would make the game full screen but push some of the graphics such as the start up screen and some of the background HUD graphics to the right of the screen. I also experienced stutter which didnt occur on my low end 420 card. Also the UI for the dialogue wheel was incredibly small and unreadable for options that were already selected which go darker.
This whole experience leads me to beleive the game was optimized for console use at a fixed graphic settings with a fixed GPU. I have never experienced issues like this with any other game or any other Bethesda game. If anyone can provide me help for a solution that would be great. I have taken a look in the INI file and played around with the resolution scaling there but haven't found a result that would solve all my problems.
For it seems the only way to play the game is in windowed mode, which also shows the UI dialogue options as being really small. Funny how the resolution was perfect on a lower end card, but on a newer one everything is out of whack. I should have listened to those Steam reviews before pre-ordering the game. I didnt expect the negative reviews to be true. I'm disappointed with my purchase and I ordered physically in advance.
FYI: I'm a mod developer so this is even more disappointing for me. (developed mods such as Realistic Impacts for Skyrim and many others for Fallout3 / NV)
Specs: i7 -2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz - Windows 7 - 8GB RAM.