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[Vikarion]

I updated my drivers before DLing FO4, and I haven't had any problems, aside from one freeze when I quicksaved/quickloaded about 50 times in a half-hour in roughly the same spot.

I don't think it's just having a high-end computer that screws things up. Mine's about as high-end as you can get before water-cooling and SLI (don't need SLI, have one of the latest Nvidia cards), and I've had no problems.

I expect Bethesda will be pushing out a patch to solve for those issues soon, though. I have to say that I mostly like the UI, though. Don't really get the hate.

[Silas Vitalia]

I have no problems with the visuals. Hell, I still think FO3 and NV holds up just fine visually, vanilla. They're actually fantastic examples of how it's not what your engine is capable of that matters, but what you do with it. Wandering the wastelands have always been a fantastic experience because of the design style and art they've used rather than polygon count and texture resolution. I'll never complain about higher quality in those things, but nor are they the be-all and end-all of visual quality.

I feel like we played different games! I personally think most Bethesda games are just sort of brown and grey smears that have an overall 'washed out' look to them? If that makes sense? I think I might like something more in the 'Rage' direction for color palette.  I mean that came out in 2011 and still looks better than fallout 4 to me?  I think people like these games because of the freedom to take your time and explore all the nooks and crannies and different adventures and super customization, not for the visuals?

But all this Fallout talk makes me want to buy it RIGHT NOW. HALLLP.

[Mizhara]

I don't know why Rage never appealed to me. I think it's a problem with that supertexture thingy they did with that engine. It gives the same feeling Doom did, that every item is just a giant bit of plastic with paint on it. A gun never looked like it was made out of different parts, just one big thing with a texture on it.

There's no doubt FO4 and Skyrim etc are extremely dated when it comes to the engine, and it certainly shows. My argument isn't that games like Rage and things they do in the CryEngine etc aren't technically far superior to FO4. I'm just saying Bethesda etc do so much more with their limited engine in terms of design, style and so on than Id has ever done with their stuff and that bridges the gap quite well.

There's certainly subjective arguments to be made on things like color palettes and so on (I'm certainly going to get the mod that removes the sepia filter on FO4), but as open world games go I've never really seen anything that can compare to the Fallout games in visual excellence. It's all about the style and design over technical superiority.

Oh, and Rage doesn't get anywhere near counting as an open world game. That damn thing was so railed and limited in where you could go and what you could do, it wasn't even funny.

If you want fantastic visuals for a setting, without just open-world games counting though, nothing will beat Metro: Last Light. They knocked that one out of the fucking park and it's post-apocalyptica to boot.

[Silas Vitalia]

I don't know why Rage never appealed to me. I think it's a problem with that supertexture thingy they did with that engine. It gives the same feeling Doom did, that every item is just a giant bit of plastic with paint on it. A gun never looked like it was made out of different parts, just one big thing with a texture on it.

There's no doubt FO4 and Skyrim etc are extremely dated when it comes to the engine, and it certainly shows. My argument isn't that games like Rage and things they do in the CryEngine etc aren't technically far superior to FO4. I'm just saying Bethesda etc do so much more with their limited engine in terms of design, style and so on than Id has ever done with their stuff and that bridges the gap quite well.

There's certainly subjective arguments to be made on things like color palettes and so on (I'm certainly going to get the mod that removes the sepia filter on FO4), but as open world games go I've never really seen anything that can compare to the Fallout games in visual excellence. It's all about the style and design over technical superiority.

Oh, and Rage doesn't get anywhere near counting as an open world game. That damn thing was so railed and limited in where you could go and what you could do, it wasn't even funny.

If you want fantastic visuals for a setting, without just open-world games counting though, nothing will beat Metro: Last Light. They knocked that one out of the fucking park and it's post-apocalyptica to boot.

Yup. Definitely not including RAGE in near the same game category as Fallout.  Rage did do a bit much of the 'hard' outline veering into Borderlands territory, you're right about the gun things. 

Hmm.

[Samira Kernher]

Maybe it's because I don't have a great computer but...

The day of 'bad graphics' is IMO long behind us. There's not a single new game that comes out that I don't go 'wow' when I look at it. Maybe they have different levels of quality? If they do, I don't notice it at all. Skyrim, Dragon Age Inquisition, Fallout 4, all of it looks pretty fucking amazing to me.

If anything I'd rather devs stop trying to push the bar. The differences are essentially invisible to me but come with horrible hardware requirements. Skyrim and Fallout 4 both look more or less the same to me, yet I can run the first on max graphics and the latter only on mediumish.

[Mizhara]

I don't know if I agree. While graphics aren't everything, they certainly do matter. Back when UT2K4 came out, I couldn't imagine how they could possibly make better looking games. We never needed better graphics than that, or Unreal 2 or Half Life or Duke Nukem 3D or Doom or... see where I'm going with this?

I can most certainly see quite a bit of difference between generations of games and individual releases etc, and improved visuals do partly rely on improved graphics technologies. You may not see much difference on a lower end machine, but when you're building computers with 980ti's and so on the differences become very apparent and affects the enjoyment of the game. Might as well stick with consoles if these things don't matter.

Where I'll make a concession is in regards to optimization and making these graphics intense things optional. Include sufficiently low requirement options that people can play on low-end hardware. Just don't stop pushing the envelope for those of us who do have hardware that can rock maxed settings on most games. We spend this much money exactly because we see the difference and enjoy it.

[Mizhara]

User reviews are tanking, by the way. No Fallout game has been this low rated on Steam, ever. Probably partly because they changed the formula and didn't do anything really innovative, probably quite a big part because of the consoletarded UI. Hype got too real.

[Lyn Farel]

It's only natural that graphics get better and better. When you suddenly have graphic cards with twice more graphic memory, you usually tend to use textures twice the size... And so on, grossly simplified.

But that's just the tech aspect of it. It's important, and can add a lot of shininess, but the most fundamental part is the art direction and production value (or, mimetism, cinematics, screenplay, all the little things that make it stand out).

[Mizhara]

art direction

Is exactly what I feel Bethesda (and to a slightly lesser degree Obsidian) nailed so well in FO3 and NV, raising what is technically lesser visual performance to an excellent visual experience. It's the same with FO4, which is quite demonstrably a lesser technical visual experience but quite well done when it comes to art direction and such.

FO4 has -really- surpassed Skyrim though, Samira. There's been a lot of moments in my slightly shy of eight hours of gameplay where I've stopped and just admired the views. There was this one bit where the sun was barely piercing the fog I was in, coming down the side of this ravine and I just had to stop and go third person view and stare for a bit. It was gorgeous.

Again, technically a lesser engine, but damn if Bethesda doesn't know how to use it.

... for visuals. Their actual coding and such is fucking atrocious. I've started a counter of how many cars I see suddenly start bouncing near the edge of the active cell.

[Samira Kernher]

FO4 has lower graphics for me than Skyrim did. The optimization is really bad. Like, textures on everything but my own character are as blurry as Vampire the Masquerade or something, since even though I have textures on Ultra the game just... can't process them well? Loading a small room first thing will get everything at high res, but as soon as I load a new area, especially the open world, the textures get shot.

[Gottii]

My quick take

Main complaint: Graphics chuggy.  Should be smoother than this.

Game overall:  If you like Fallout, you will like this game.  It's a straight line in progression, making incremental improvements.  Nothing revolutionary or awe-inspiring (that was Witcher 3 for me this year) but still fun and enjoyable so far.  Doesnt really disappoint but doesnt really blow me away either.  B+ effort

[Mizhara]

Main complaint: Graphics chuggy.  Should be smoother than this.

Unlock the framerate and set a new v-sync in Nvidia control panel or whatever you use.

FO4 has lower graphics for me than Skyrim did. The optimization is really bad. Like, textures on everything but my own character are as blurry as Vampire the Masquerade or something, since even though I have textures on Ultra the game just... can't process them well? Loading a small room first thing will get everything at high res, but as soon as I load a new area, especially the open world, the textures get shot.

Get a new PC.

[Samira Kernher]

Get a new PC.

Wouldn't that be nice?

I could run Battlefront 3 with max full graphics and no FPS loss. Same with Dragon Age Inquisition. Fallout 4 is the only recent game I'm experiencing any issues with.

Just did a canyourunit test. My video card only has half the video RAM but is otherwise fine (Geforce GTX 650 Ti Boost). Seems my issue is the CPU. I have an Intel Core i3-2100 @ 3.10GHz, which is apparently not enough.

[Samira Kernher]

Think I figured out my issue though. Apparently trying to run the game with Ultra textures is what causes it to fail to render any texture above the lowest. Going with High textures seems to allow it to load everything with decent res.

So I'll just stop trying to cherry pick stuff and just run with the recommended settings, since apparently those are the best for me.

*Edit* That or it has something to do with alt-tabbing, since all the textures died again the moment I alt-tabbed to post this. Bethesda games hate alt-tabbing.

Okay, none of that helped. Still getting issues. Less of them, but still getting them. Sigh.

[spoiler][/spoiler]


https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/3sb7c7/this_is_why_the_textures_look_low_res_some_kind/

Other people having the issue. Assumption seems to be an LoD bug rather than actual computer capability.

[Lyn Farel]

Keep in mind that running textures at max res can be really intensive on medium or low end graphic cards (650 Ti is medium range, starting level for gaming) since they won't always have the required graphic memory to store them.

Just as an example, going from a generic high to ultra setting might up your textures from 1024x1024 on average to twice more (2048), which will eat up 4 times more graphic memory.

The GPU power is another matter that will mostly play on the ability to display everything, from resource intensive rendering to post treatment.

The CPU itself, while often secondary, when too old or low end, can cause issues too, especially when it comes to physical engines, pathfind, and especially AI calculations, roughly.

Of course though, as you say there is always the bug possibility, especially with Bethesda...


EDIT : Are some random of your textures flickering like crazy between low res / high res? It's often indicative to graphic memory overload. Also on your screenshot, the tires are clearly low res. The people on reddit that speak about mipmapping clearly don't know what mipmapping is for (it prevents the textures to get blurry when seen at a very low angle, especially important for ground textures most of the time).