Gadgetory

welcome back to harem box today it's finally time to tackle fallout 76 on PC again that I think is fair to say has disappointed a number of Fallout fans and it's not just because the game is a technical disaster on both PC and consoles but the game itself just hasn't lived up to the fallout name judging by harsh reviews from critics and even harsher reviews from gamers personally I'm a big Fallout fan and this multiplayer only title is absolutely not what I wanted from the next for that game especially after fallout 4 what does it add disappointing but in any case there still seems to be a core fan base for for that there's currently playing and enjoying this game which is good news because you really want other players in the game world if you are going to jump in and give it a try anyway this video isn't really about whether fallout 76 is a good game it's about how the game runs on PC and whether there is anything you guys can do to get the game running better so as you stand for these videos we've benchmarked almost every setting in the game to give you the full breakdown of how each graphics option impacts performance and what the differences are in visual quality to get the usual housekeeping out of the way we've benchmarked this game on our core i7 8700 K test rig overclocked to 4.9 gigahertz with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory and for this game we were only able to use an NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2080 for testing the reason for this is it's very difficult to keep repeatable benchmark runs in a multiplayer title like for that 76 in fact the game basically does everything possible to make sure you can't do anything consistently so it took much longer to benchmark this game than most others even something like a battlefield 5 multiplayer is easy to benchmark the flat 76 so this severely limited the amount of graphics cards that were able to test now usual graphics comparisons there are several reasons for this firstly every setting in the game with the exception of the fade sliders requires a full restart of the game to apply and not just a quit to the main menu a full-blown restart and then on top of that each time you load the game you were sent into a different game world which thanks to the dynamic weather and time of day system could be in completely different conditions - the last time you for testing we like the in-game conditions to be as similar as possible so this required a lot of quitting and reloading the game to get into a world with the same time of day and weather but it's worse than that because once you're in the game there's not a lot of scope for positioning a benchmark run long story short ends up committing suicide hundreds of times so I could restart each benchmark at the same spawn point and sometimes my suicide attempts would fail yeah benchmarking this game wasn't a lot of fun we just no doubt why steep doesn't even want to touch it for a big GPU benchmark after roaming around West Virginia to find the most intensive areas of the game actually settled on a benchmark run just outside vault 76 which is basically where you start the game with expansive views this is one of the more stressful areas in the game along with several other mountaintops that stretched the game's draw distance so how does for that 76 run well to be frank like a steaming path of dog turns I specifically waited a couple of weeks to test for that 76 because I wanted to give Bethesda a reasonable amount of time to fix the early technical issues that would know to help crop up I mean this is a pathetic game using the creation engine they were always going to be a load of problems at launch but as the game runs right now using version 10.1 or 14 it's pretty much a joke apparently there are more patches in the works but seriously this is not a game that runs well and it's not a game that looks good either so before I get into the graphics comparison let's look at all the problems with this game's performance and presentation to begin with the latest patch fixed the long-running issue with the creation engine that tied physics to framerate previously when you uncapped your framerate in these games in-game physics would run faster and for a multiplayer title this would mean some players moving faster than others depending on each player's performance for Fallout 76 they initially kept everyone to 64 FPS and forced vsync on to prevent this being exploited but with version 10.1 dot 14 that framerate limit has been removed and physics are no longer tied directly to framerate so you can play at 100 FPS without essentially cheating now you might be thinking that's a major step forward for Bethesda finally there fixed an issue with their engine that's been around for 10 years or more I mean it's pathetic taken them this long but whatever progress is progress however the game still does not have a vsync toggle so by default you will be kept to your monitors refresh rate if you want to disable vsync you have to edit the full hat 76 press dot ini' file and add in I present interval equals 0 yep you actually have to edit an any file to get this basic feature in the game but wait it's worse than that the game does not run well at high frame rates on our ITX 2080 test system the game was consistently smooth running at 60 FPS with vsync on but as soon as I turned vsync off and start running the game it's a 70 to 80 fps it's remarkably choppy the game is smooth below 60fps but there's something about breaking the 60 FPS barrier that this game does not like did you think that was the only issue with flat 76 is performance well let me tell you about how the game runs in general using an RT X 2080 at 4k using the ultra preset I was getting around 60 fps in the more intensive areas up to maybe 80 fps in the best areas but as low as 40 to 50 fps in others so performance is a little better than shadow of the Tomb Raider but around the same markers battlefield 5 and hitman 2 just comparing it to some recent other titles so on face value that puts fallout 76 around the same mark as other triple-a releases of 2018 a little less intensive than the top-end titles and a little more intensive than others but oh my god have you actually seen how this came looks this is not a good looking game that's being extremely generous I'd say most aspects of this game look like complete garbage Steve says I'm not allowed to swear on the channel there's a word that starts with s and means fecal matter that comes to mind we're looking at this game's graphics the lighting system is perhaps the most advanced aspect in that you can get some nice bloom and God rays and the game is a lot more vibrant then fallout 4 which makes exploring the world more pleasant but basically nothing else about the graphics have been upgraded since fallout 4 a game that came out in 2015 and at the time looked pretty bad it's been three years since fallout 4 and we're at the point where the graphics are perhaps 5 to 6 years behind what we've come to expect from modern games the issues are plentiful the folder system in this game is decidedly last generation and considering most of the game world is filled with trees and grass it's hard not to notice even worse than that at just the general object structures items and everything else it feels that the game world we're looking at low geometry models that lack detail most of which are reused from fallout 4 and often with low-quality textures the material system in particular is not up to scratch where modern games are emulating the reflective properties of dirt metals rocks and so on for their lighting system in Fallout 76 basically every element looks flat and again last generation the shadow system is awful I'll get into that more in a moment as is the water simulation plus you get typical Bethesda animations which are janky to say the least even the map which is basically just a 2d image performs like rubbish when it shouldn't and that's without mentioning the suite of technical issues with quests and keyboard controls on PC particularly for menus that are like the person that mapped these out has never played a PC game ever before when you pair this level of visual fidelity with performance akin to a flagship triple-a title in 2018 it's really hard to swallow a game like battlefield 5 has expansive open areas similar to parts of the fallout seventy-six map yeah it runs better than 476 for the most part and looks at least a generation better in the graphics department I also think of an open-world game like Far Cry 5 or even watchdogs 2 from 2016 and for that 76 is so far behind these titles at a similar performance level it's almost funny so the question then becomes can we fix this game to deliver decent enough performance that matches the visual quality that were actually getting and once again this is we have full hat 76 disappoints because not only are there very few graphics settings a bunch of them barely do anything for performance and visual quality here you can see the game's presets roughly side by side in our benchmark run and honestly there's not a lot of difference between ultra high and medium the biggest changes come in subtle tweaks to the lighting system including shadow quality plus a few small differences to draw distance it's really only when you get to the low preset that you get obvious reductions to shadow quality and draw distance and this plays out when looking at the performance difference between the 4 presets in one of the most intensive areas in 476 if you want to improve performance in these air dropping from ultra to high only sees a 4% boost to average frame rates while moving to medium you'll get about 10% more frames only when you get to low do you see a jump of 25% and that's with basically every setting except texture quality set to its lowest value like with hitman 2 this sort of scaling is gonna hurt those with lower end GPUs attempting to gain more performance if you're hovering around 30fps for example a 25% jump moving from ultra to low isn't gonna get you above 40 FPS even if you account for a generous 40 percent jump as lower end cards tend to benefit more from lower end settings for that 76 still isn't one of those games that scales well for those with budget systems the best games for scaling tend to have at least a 50 percent performance improvement from their highest to lowest presets even Assassin's Creed Odyssey which we criticized for being poorly optimized delivers a 70 percent performance uplift moving from its ultra high to low preset giving lower end gamers a chance to enjoy the title I'll be it with poor visuals moving into the individual settings first up we have texture quality which is straightforward and remains on ultra for all four presets this is really only a setting I'd recommend changing if you are hitting vram limits because there is a loss to quality moving from ultra to high and especially to medium then when you use the low setting texture quality is very poor and it's only using the low setting that you'll see significant 5% boost to performance the other three settings don't impact performance significantly on cards with plenty of memory water quality is an interesting one because I couldn't really spot many differences between the three modes looking at the rivers in fallout 76 it's a bit hard to tell with the differences to the lighting system in each shot but yeah almost no changes if anything I'd say the higher settings have slightly better screen space reflections but we're not looking at a significant difference in terms of performance there is a bit to be gained from reducing quality to either medium or low relative to high the quality of the water in this game isn't great to begin with so honestly turning this down to low to get around a 4% improvement to performance in water heavy areas it's probably going to be worth I'd also consider using medium if you can spot a difference lighting quality is one of the more demanding settings in the game and visually was hard to get some comparison shots that really show the differences again due to the dynamic time of day system the game uses so these shots aren't fantastic showing the differences but basically it boils down to the level of volumetric lighting bloom and godrays low essentially has volumetric lighting reduced to the point where it's almost disabled while medium and high utilized more of this effect in terms of performance you get a big uplift of over 8% when you switch the lighting system from high to low however lighting is one of the only effects in 476 that actually looks somewhat decent so I try and avoid using the low mode here otherwise the game looks even worse my preference used to use medium there's not a huge difference between high and medium visually but you get about 2% to your performance making the switch shadow quality is one of the weirdest settings in fallout 76 it mostly governs shadow resolution so how clean the edges of Shadows are and how realistic they look to start with Ultra seems to use a heavy blur filter to the edge of shadows in conjunction with a high shadow resolution in real life shadows aren't always defined and don't necessarily have sharp edges but usually the level of shadow softness is based on how far the shadow is from the object some games do use a realistic distance based shadow system that accurately blurs shadow edges where it should but fall at 76 isn't one of those games so using the ultra shadow mode just leaves you with blurry shadows to me the high mode actually looks best here with more shadow definition as the blur filter is toned down then you get to the medium and low modes which have less blurring but also lower shadow resolutions in the case of the low mode shadows are extremely pixelated and look like utter garbage there's also a lot of shadow artifacting with the medium and low modes it's really ugly as something that haven't seen in many other modern games in terms of performance again high is looking like a solid choice because it gives 4% more performance than ultra for a quality improvement so that's a pretty clear win right there meanwhile there's not a lot of point using the medium or low modes the quality downgrade is significant for a fairly small improvement to performance and one last thing GLaDOS check out the way the game renders shadows for static objects after you move if like the game is using some sort of 10 poor reconstruction foreshadows to improve performance yet performance is still bad and the shadows are still really ugly it's kind of weird stuff their shadow distance probably doesn't do what you think it does your fall at 76 there is a fairly obvious transition where low-quality fire shadows are swapped out for higher resolution near shadows I was hoping the shadow distance setting would increase the radius where new shadows are loaded which would make this transition less obvious but no all the mode does is determine where the shadows are rendered for really distant objects see this faraway Hill at the start of the benchmark run well shadows are rented for the trees using the high mode and are not rendered using low and yeah that's pretty much the main difference there then performance difference between all three modes isn't all that large you stand again about two to three percent switching to either the medium or low modes my preference here is medium it's hard to spot the difference even in areas with expansive views yet you gain three percent average frame rate so I wouldn't bother with felow setting here the final four settings are all fade sliders which essentially control draw distance but again they probably don't do as much for visuals and performance as you might be expecting in particular the actor and item fade sliders do almost nothing so I'd recommend keeping those maxed out the first big change is when using the object fade slider which governs elements like trees destroyed cars boxes and you know the usual Fallout non movable objects cracking this setting down to the lowest points these draw distances creep in slightly its most noticeable up on tall Hills where you have far view distance you'll often see less trees on faraway Hills but the difference is also visible with more close-range environments while the object fades sending doesn't improve average frame rates in a significant way does improve 1% lows where a middle ground setting can give upwards of 5% improvement to 1% lowest presumably as fewer objects are loading into the game at any one time I'd recommend something around this middle setting to get a smoother experience but don't expect radically better performance grass fade is a similar story where higher settings cause grass to appear further away and I think this setting has more noticeable pop in on lower settings so ideal you to keep it as high as your system will allow however you can gain a reasonable amount of performance setting to the lowest notch on the slider gaining 2% average frame rates and 10% to 1 percent lows in our benchmark run so that's every setting covered in 476 for those that are looking to gain a bit of performance without significantly affecting visual quality I'd recommend the following settings textures on ultra water quality on low lighting quality on medium shadow quality on high shadow distance on medium and all the fade sliders as high as possible except for object fade which I've set to around 50% with these settings you'll gain around 8% to performance for almost no difference to visual quality it's not a radical improvement been in the game that runs like trash it's nice to tweak things a bit to get those higher frame rates what surprised me most about four at seventy six or seven is that most options have very little impact on visual quality sure in a game that already doesn't look great you probably want most effects unable to squeeze the absolute most out of this engine visually but it's strange to see effects like screen space reflections ambient occlusion depth of field and motion blur all permanently enabled I think having the option to disable or tone down these effects could greatly help performance on lower end systems especially because you're not going to gain much performance just simply switching to the low preset as it is but the reality is the engine Bethesda is using perform at 76 the creation engine is well past its use-by date it was past its use-by date with fallout 4 in 2015 and in 2018 it's basically gone green and blue with mold it simply should be thrown in the trash at this point there are just so many aspects of this engine that are fundamentally flawed or broken and I really believe the developers that have had to work with and patch up this engine over the past decade to make modern games that's it for this one next game we'll be looking at is just course for which is set to be officially released in early December so stay tuned for that one as always you can subscribe for more videos just like this one consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our exclusive discord chat and monthly live streams and I'll catch you 94 at 76 because I'll probably never play that game again but in the next one