Part of the joy of playing on PC is being able to run in whatever resolution you want. Especially if you’re one of those people who like taking really, really pretty screenshots. 10 FPS? That’s 10 gorgeous screenshots per second in some people’s books.
If you’re not obsessed with going into 200 FPS town, and you want to squeeze as many apocalyptic textures as possible into one screen, downscaling is the way to go. Fortunately, it’s really easy to do in Fallout 4.
Basically, downscaling is when you render a game at a resolution that’s greater than what your monitor can normally display and then your GPU rescales it to fit within your screen. As 1440p and 4K gaming has become more viable, it’s started to become more popular.
Most people have ridiculously powerful CPUs and GPUs, but they don’t necessarily have a 4K monitor or thereabouts (particularly if you’re a fan of the 120hz/144hz gaming monitors, which can be astronomically expensive beyond the 23″-24″ models).
Fortunately, that’s where downscaling comes into play. Traditionally you’d need to create custom resolutions in the control panel for your driver software, and then you’d open up the game of your choice to see whether it would run the game at that resolution.
In Fallout 4, however, you can simply edit the Fallout4Prefs.ini file. Gabi, who was responsible for showing users how to uncap the frame rate and tweak the FOV in Fallout 4, has put in a further note on how people can enjoy Bethesda’s latest RPG in greater resolutions.
Downscaling is also possible on AMD cards. One other solution is to simply edit the Fallout4Prefs.ini located in C:Users[name]DocumentsMy GamesFallout4 along with the same file name located in where you installed steam then open steamappscommonFallout 4Fallout4 (or if you didn’t use the default installation location, simply go to where you installed Fallout 4 then open the Fallout 4 folder within that): Then change the below values to the highest values your pc can handle.
iSize W=YYYY
iSize H=XXXX
You’ll note that these are the same settings you would have tweaked to enable ultra-wide widescreen support. The trick with downscaling, however, is to make sure that you don’t bugger up the ratio. “In other words if you have a 16:9 monitor which is most people, you want your value of YYYY divided by XXXX to equal 1.78,” Gabi wrote.
Custom resolutions that you might want to try on 16:9 monitors, which I’ve had some success with on my personal rig in the past in other games, include: 3680×2070, 3600×2026, 3200×1800, as well as the staples of 3840×2160 (4K) and 2560×1440 (1440p).
Those using the GeForce Experience middleware for NVIDIA cards can also just use the in-built DSR slider, if you want to go down that route. It’s more helpful to be able to do it manually, however, particularly in a future with DX12 where multi-GPU setups with AMD and NVIDIA cards are perfectly valid.
What are your favourite Fallout 4 screenshots so far?
Comments
20 responses to “Downscaling In Fallout 4 Is As Easy As Editing One File”
Maybe if I set my res to 3840×2160 my game will run at the right speed.
Why not just don’t unlock the frame and let it be locked at 60 fps?
Because thats not the product that was promised.
https://twitter.com/bethesda/status/613008088824741888
So you would rather pump Your resolution to 4k so that your game runs on 60 fps instead of just letting the game lock it at 60 fps because it was not what was promised( not even a promise just a Tweet by a rep)?
I don’t understand.
No, I wasn’t being serious with the original post. The game feels like garbage atm so I will just wait for a patch.
If bethesda don’t fix it i’m sure some modders will. Ive already been quite put off by the terrible new dialog system. I cant stand the Yes/No/Sarcastic model from mass effect, I liked having dialogue trees where I could see what I was actually about to say.
Agreed that the chat is weird but I’m sort of glad it was something new? I mean after so many hundred hours of the same thing it feels fresh.
I really doubt modders can fix that. Not for the next 6 months to 1 year
they’ll more than likely create a mod which shows you what the dialogue will be instead of just ‘sarcastic’ etc
let’s hope they release the CK quick smart.
Yeah that’s why it’s gonna take a longer time. They have to find the actual text and rip it out and mod it in. I’m expecting at least 6 months.
I missed out on recruiting the robot butler because of the simplistic dialogue thingo. Now all he does is hang around outside my house >.
Oh dear god they haven’t have they?
Is this another “choose a line and listen in horror as the voice actor says something completely opposite to what you were thinking” deal?
EDIT: Just read up on it….. They’ve Dragon Aged it! Dialogue wheels and heal everything stimpacks…. WHY?? Why would you “Dragon Age” it?
It feels very much fallout lite in some areas, skills and perks have also been dumbed down. You now need to meet level requirements before being able to for example unlock the next rank of lockpicking where as before you could get skills to 100 at level 4 if you wanted to.
See I bought the hype on DA:I, caved and bought…
Resisted on Fallout 4 and feeling justified…. Resisting the hype…
Fallout 4 is more fallout than DA:I is dragon age though :p
Its just not as fallout as it once was.
I was having this conversation with Cymelion yesterday.
There’s technically ‘two’ series of Fallout games now. There’s ‘East Coast’ and ‘West Coast’ Fallout games.
East Coast = 3 and 4 (Bethesda)
West Coast = 1, 2 and New Vegas (Obsidian and Interplay).
When taken as a sequel to 3, Fallout 4 isn’t so bad, when you ONLY take it as a sequel to 3. Some things have been dumbed down, such as healing and dialogue is a bit on the nose, as the wheel really, really, sucks. But overall, it’s an effective sequel to 3.
But as a sequel to New Vegas, which enhanced so many mechanics of FO3, it blows chunks. Not being able to craft ammo, not being able to have the ‘weird wasteland’ option, not being able to do many, many things, it feels like a genuine step backwards to be honest, so don’t take it as a step backwards and simply hope they’ll let Obsidian once again do a sequel to ‘their’ series (hell, even I consider NV the ‘real’ FO3, as it’s a direct sequel more or less to FO2).
It’s time for a 320×240 comeback!
PLEASE DO THIS
Would love to but will have to relegate to someone who has the game, sorry 😛
320×240 wouldn’t look too bad. It’d match the resolution of the textures.
Sorry Fallout 4, I like you a lot but them textures…
Oh yeah. A New Games With CGA Graphics series would be great fun.
fuck yeah!
this does’t seem to work. the game just crashes if I try to set a resolution higher than native.