Part and parcel of a Bethesda game is going under the hood and tweaking with everything in sight. And surprise: Fallout 4’s no different. If you’re playing on PC, it’s almost mandatory to muck about with the game’s .ini files. Hell, you had to do it with Fallout 3 if you wanted to get the game to stop crashing on Windows 7.
Of course, that’s not necessary with Fallout 4. But if you want lots of nice things, including an unlocked frame rate, adjustable FOV, no mouse acceleration, ultra widescreen support and the ability to skip the intro video … then you might want to read on.
It’s a list of tricks contained in this fantastic how-to from Gabi in the Fallout 4 Guides section on Steam. Some people might complain that a lot of these options should have been included in the menus — and they probably will one day — but for now, this is the easiest method.
Before you start, you’ll need to find the directory where you installed Fallout 4 and the directory where Fallout 4’s base .ini files are located. The former can usually be found in your default Steam folder, unless you chose something else at launch, while the latter is typically in the DocumentsMy Games folder under the user name you logged into Windows with.
Once you’ve located the Fallout4.ini and Fallout4Prefs.ini files, you’ll be able to change the FOV by adjusting the following settings:
fDefaultWorldFOV=XX
fDefault1stPersonFOV=XX
Alternatively, you can fire up the console and change the FOV on the fly with the “fov xx” command — where XX is your desired number — although you have to re-enter the change every time you start the game in order for it to take effect. If you can’t open the developer console already, this guide from Joseph has the information you need.
In Fallout4.ini, you can remove mouse acceleration by scrolling to the [Controls] section and adding the following line:
bMouseAcceleration=0
In the Fallout4Prefs file, changing the line iPresentInterval=1 so it reads 0 instead of 1 will unlock your FPS. Gabi notes that it will also help some users who are finding their FPS is capped at 30 instead of 60, although they recommend forcing V-sync on in the NVIDIA or Catalyst Control Panel settings to avoid the issues that plagued Skyrim when the FPS ran rampant.
Furthermore, if you want to start the game without watching the intro video you can do that by deleting the GameIntro_V3_B.bk2 file from the DataVideo folder in the base Fallout 4 install directory (typically located under your Steamapps folder).
Lastly, if you want to add support for custom resolutions — for those playing on 21:9 monitors — Gabi recommends tweaking the following settings:
bTopMostWindow=1
bMaximizeWindow=1
bBorderless=1
bFull Screen=0
iSize H=XXXX
iSize W=YYYYWhere XXXX is whatever your horizontal resolution is aand YYYY is whatever your vertical resolution is.
It’s an excellent guide and if you can spare a minute please go to the page on Steam and give it a nice thumbs up (or even a message of support). The Fallout experience, and experience of any Bethesda game, is greatly improved through tweaks and guides offered by players like Gabi, and they deserve at least a little recognition for their efforts.
Comments
11 responses to “This Guide Shows You How To Uncap The FPS, Tweak The FOV And More In Fallout 4”
2015 and these options aren’t standard built in ones.
This does not bode well.
Bugs I can handle. We all knew this was a Bethesda game.
But locked FOV, locked 30fps, and mouse acceleration with no option to even turn it off? This is complete bullshit.
Well there are ‘options’ to fix all of that… Just not the in the sense that should be, you know, the absolute base standard in basically every PC release these days :p
EDIT: silly me I went to read the full steam thread and it seems to have a bug where some people have the game locked at 30 and some at 60.
No 21:9 and locked FPS, glad I didn’t preorder this.
Careful Fallout 4, you might end up on my “bargin bin” list.
Why is there still not enough love for 21:9, I will never go back to normal screens for games after getting an ultrawide, when are developers going to catch on
Took me from the midnight launch until about 3am messing with the ini files in the PC version this morning to get above 20 fps on my system… Thankfully it’s now running at 60fps and with higher settings than I’d originally been using.
The issues were largely caused by settings mentioned in this guide being forced on with no method of turning them off outside of manually editing the game’s settings files. It’s unfortunate that a lot of people simply won’t know how to do that themselves, and even with guides like this still might not be comfortable doing so.
ahh gamebryo we meet again.
of course i complained in the bug article about 21:9 before seeing this one *sigh*
i got 21:9 working last night easy enough, but has anyone else who has done so got shaded boxes taking up around 80% of the screen? It seems related to shadows/lighting as i often dissappears when outside/a well lit area, but i didnt dig around long enough last night to sort and just tried to ignore it
This is weird. I haven’t tweaked any settings in the .ini files and as soon as I booted the game, it can run at 144fps and I can’t feel any mouse acceleration whatsoever. The input matches other FPS games I play with raw input enabled.. Can anyone else chime in?
In a Bethesda game? On launch?
That’s bloody astonishing, honestly.