Possibly a controversial idea, but I'm more interested in what FO4 will look like on a low end PC.
I love the polished promo clips running at full res (or the fixed res of consoles) but this is most likely not going to be my experience in the near future.
I'm sitting just above minimum spec (i5-2500, 8gb Ram, GTX 680 2gb, 1080) and do not have funds to boost hardware performance this side of Christmas.

My purchase desicion really lies on what would be a good comparison as I realise I will need to turn down some settings.
Machine happily runs Skyrim with high def pack, struggled through FONV (but that was largely due to save game issues rather than graphics)???

And seriously, why does my text reverse and type backwards after hitting return!??

http://bethesda.net/#en/events/game/prepare-for-the-future-fallout-4-important-release-info/2015/10/08/35

Because you copy and pasted thats why it eats your words

Well there are plenty of us modder's that can figure out how to change up the graphics but until the game is out its also just speculation.

See we can literally open up the textures and just replace them with single shaded solid colors if we have to for those that just want to play, doing that would make it look like mindcraft though I have no idea how much that would help cause the game isn't even in our hands yet and I'm not a software engineer...I'm a traditional artist and I didn't go back to school for software going back to see about medicine.

I speculate that changing the textures, shaders, particles, and stuff I yet know about should help immensely though.

Perhaps a month after its release, in fact we don't actually need the Creation Kit to start reducing the strain of graphics on a persons system.

PS

I forgot about shadows those have been tied to the CPU in the past, hopefully reducing shadows in the INI file should help FPS like in the past games.

?I know what the minimum and recommended specs are.
ceps muminim eht evoba tsuj gnittis sThat's why I said I wa?
^^ The reverse typing strikes again

That's why I said I was sitting just above the minimum spec.

I'm torn between pre-ordering (very little gaming to look forward to during the festive season) or waiting it out to see if someone throws up some YouTube footage of lower spec play.

I don't have an issue with lowering texture res and turning off some of the bells and whistles with regards to AA and Bloom effects if it keeps the game going at a reasonable pace (I managed to get through Morrowind on minimum graphic settings and about 12 frames per sec back at its launch )
I'm more concerned about the effect lower spec will have with the in-game editor (the housing editor is one of the features I'm looking forward to the most) and load times between areas.

????

I would think minimum specs on a PC to run the game would look equal to console.

I’m surprised that the recommended requirements are so high, I got my machine at the beginning of the year and those specs are my machine except I have 16G RAM. It’s no gaming rig but it was the best I could get without blowing my budget, It is almost impossible now to keep up, until I read the requirements today I was confident that I could run the game on high graphics settings.

This is directed at Gamefever. Sorry I apparently cannot quote.

What you are describing will not work. Two things have changed. Particle based rendering and Dynamic Volumetric Lighting. The specular maps for reflections and lighting are baked into the textures. The lighting and shadows are being run on the fly in the game. That is what Todd meant by dynamic lighting. Also explains the reasoning behind no pausing in game. The fact that you cannot just hit VATS and pause or go into inventory and pause also put a lot of pressure on the cpu and gpu.

And the one thing I have not seen anyone mention is base building. Depending on how much you use this it could increase the gpu and cpu load immensely.

What they've done is narrowed down the range of setups this game will run on quite a lot, a few years back games would be able to run on computer setups many years' difference (even bad/old computers could run the games, just with disabling most settings). Fallout 4 has a range of around four years (550 Ti = 2011/i5 2300 = 2011), and even this is for only the best components (i5s up/550 Tis up).

That's not quite true.

The witcher 3 on the PS4 is at 1920x1080 (30fps) high settings (tweaked and optimized for that particalar system only)

The same goes for the XBOX 1 (tweaked according to the circumstances to jump up to 1080p from 900p (1600x900))

Minimum requirements has nothing to do with Full HD resolutions and high settings. !!!

It's way way below that.

--------

In my opinion minimum req are for:

Running the game at low setitings and (or) low resolutions at 30fps. So the game is just playbale, and doesn't crash to desktop.

Serious gaming should always be made with the recommended requirements in mind. (So, the closer to the rec req the better)

At least you should be higher than the minimum settings. !!!

Don't get crazy. Your comp. may not reach the full rec. req, but your are near the 75% mark of those rec req.

I realy don't thing you will encounter any problems playing that game at 1080p if you lower some graphic settings.

...or you lower the resolution to 900p. Then you will be OK.

probably not, consoles are framerate locked and at 1080p. It'll look more like high with some setting on medium if its anything like their last games. Check out screen shots of their games on low vs how they looked on 360 and you'll see a huge difference.

Ignore my self-pitying post, I got my graphic cards mixed up I’ve got a 970 not a 780 (I feel like a bit of a d1ck head now) it also means that the recommended specs are not excessively high.

Yeah, I'd placed my rig about half way between minimum and recommended.
rate takes too much of a hit.emarf eht fi hcton a noituloser ehtI'll probably knock back.
^^ any suggestions why this happens (not cut & paste) would be greatly received

I'll probably kick the resolution down a notch (not on a 4k screen anyways ) and keep the AA to minimum.

Guess I'm just getting?? to the point where I seriously have to think about upgrading the PC or going back to consoles for a while.

I wonder if a developer releasing 'Minimum spec' footage would drive away sales (people realising their machine definitely can't handle the game) or drive it up a bit (people seeing a reasonable compromise).?

Depends on if Bethesda is using the absolute minimum specs or the tolerable minimum specs. There will be lots of players that will play the game and not meet the minimum specs.

And of course there's the problem that pc's are not created equally. Even pc's with exactly the same specs, built by the same person have the probability of not running a game exactly the same. I Don't meet the maximum requirements for Skyrim.. yet, I can run it on the ultra, all modded up with high res textures at 60fps. I should totally be able to run Witcher 1 with that same system.. but I can't, even on the lowest settings possible, my computer will only run witcher 1 at 18fps. It makes no sense but pc's are strange beasts.

^ this i know people that play world of tanks at 12fps so yeah..........its hard too judge what they mean buy min spec could be game will not start too playable just only if you like under 24fps gaming lol

I would imagine minimum specs will play acceptably well. Bethesda, or any other company for that matter, doesn't want bad press and too many complaints so are likely to hedge a little to insure that anyone who meets the reqs will have a good experience.

Of course, there is the possibility that Bethesda just picked their minimum specs from CPUs and video cards that came out 3 or 4 years ago.

Unfortunately, in my experience, MEDIUM settings on PC are what is equal to consoles. So minimum specs, i.e. LOW settings on PC will look worse than consoles.

That's correct. The Creation Engine is running an entirely new lighting and material system with Fallout 4, so those things will not tweak the same way as in previous games.

I played Fallout 3 on maximum low back in the day, in the dark era where I had a series of terrible PCs.

The thing that I remember the most is that everything is very muddy. All the textures are way lower quality obviously, and there weren't any fancy lighting effects to hide their ugliness. Looking at some screenshots of Skyrim on low its reminding me a lot of the muddy Capital Wasteland that I experienced in my first few months of Fallout 3. I would also expect a long loading time at every turn.

But that was playing Fallout 3 on maximum low on a machine that was a few notches below min. spec, whereas your machine seems to be more powerful in relative comparison to what I had back then. Since we don't have the game in our grubby little mitts we have no way of knowing just how well it will run, but Fallout 3 was playable on a Geforce 7300 back in the day. If I had to guess I would say that you'd be able to pull 30 FPS on medium, maybe dipping down to 20 or so in some areas.

I'll be getting a first hand look at Fallout 4 with low settings too!

Sometimes that's how it goes.

I played Fallout 3 on absolutely lowest settings back at launch too. I had a computer die on me and had to use an old one, as I didn't have money to build another for several months. Fallout 3 was super ugly, but it all kind of worked with the post-apocalyptic feel, and I loved it to bits anyway.