Hi! Here are some INI tweaks I have been using these years:
* iMinGrassSize=80 - This setting controls the density of grass clumps. The higher the value, the less tightly packed grassy areas will be; the lower the value, the more grass there will be. In other words, lowering this value will significantly reduce FPS in most outdoor areas, but can make the game world seem more lush and overgrown. For example, try a value of 10 and it will radically alter what the wasteland looks like. Alternatively if you're after a performance boost or just want less grass for visual reasons, raise it to a value such as 140 to greatly thin out the grass (Fallout.ini and PREFS).
* It has been discovered that by inserting the line fDefaultWorldFOV=75.0 at the bottom of the Display section of the Fallout.ini file, and assigning it a value equal to the FOV you want, you can now permanently change the default Field of View in the game. Remember however that if you change the default FOV, you may also need to change the FOV for other screen elements - see the fRenderedTerminalFOV and fPipboy1stPersonFOV commands below. Note also that you can alter the fDefault1stPersonFOV=55.0000 value to alter how much of your body/weapon is shown in front of you (Fallout.ini).
* Some users can't see the left-most columns of text in the console; they can only see the end of statements, and can't see what they're typing, unless it's very long. This is known to impact some users without widescreens. Fortunately, this can be easily fixed by increasing the iConsoleTextXPos figure in the Fallout.ini file to about 200, using a text editor like Notepad.
* Changing this line in Fallout.INI also appears to help, by giving Fallout 3 more memory to work with:
iPreloadSizeLimit=26214400
The default is 25,600K (i.e., 26214400 bytes). If you have a lot of system memory, you can try changing it to 1 GB (1073741824) or even 2 GB (214748364. If you are using hi-res textures or mods that introduce a lot of new textures because of new objects, this ought to help.
* Move to HUD Bars Closer to the Edge of the Screen Find the follow and change the default 15 to a lower value (I'm using 5): iSafeZoneXWide=15 iSafeZoneYWide=15 iSafeZoneX=15 iSafeZoneY=15
* FalloutPrefs.ini Edits:
Remove Waypoints from Pipboy Compass change bShowQuestMarkers=1 to bShowQuestMarkers=0 in the [Gameplay] section. (This will disable the quest markers which appear at the very bottom of your compass.)
I'm glad you happened to upload this not long after I got Fallout 3 for PC. Played the heck out of it on the 360 but I can't take that with me everywhere. Already had skyrim for PC but it's just a bit too intensive for my laptop plus I overmodded it. Now I can take my favorite game anywhere and it plays nicely on my laptop thanks to your ini changes to allow multiple cores.
Something I first discovered from playing EVE Online is changing the Presentation Interval ( iPresentInterval ) to a higher value has a large impact on performance as the default setting has the game make your graphics processor render as high a framerate as possible all the time. So with iPresentInterval=1, which is default, your graphics card will try it's best to render 60fps even it isn't powerful enough to do so. It's extremely stressful on older or less powerful graphics cards like the Intel HD graphics on laptops without dedicated graphics cards, not to mention the fps can change a lot so the game can appear choppy.
Setting iPresentInterval=2 has the game tell your graphics card to only render a maximum of 30fps. It's much less stress on a graphics card and the game appears much smoother. I recommend adding this to your list of tweaks for anyone with older or less powerful laptop or even desktop graphics cards, or even for anyone who has heat concerns or problems as the decreased graphics demand will generate less heat.
[edit] Ok so what it does , apparently it reduces lag a bit at the expense of some jumpy frames..which i don't really care. if there is too much to process game runs fine but skips a few frames. i'm gonna add this to info thanks a lot
I've been playing for years. Massive amount of mods and tons of merge patches, tweaked the hell out of my ini file over and over testing and tweaking. i saw this and thought to myself "this is a good idea. lots of people don't learn a lot of those tweaks". Then I was surprised when I found 2 items I didn't know about.
bPreloadIntroSequence I've had to go through the loading sequence literally thousands of times. I can't believe I never noticed this tweak. For this alone I love you.
iNumThreads Somehow I didn't even know this existed. I played with the havok threads one but this wasn't in my ini file even.I had to add it. I've played with it on for a bit now (set it to 4 and havok to 4) and while it's completely anectodal I had an instant improvement. Much smoother, etc....
num threads and threaded ai improves performance by making the game use multiple cores and using the cores to process ai in background . hdr FX , the ai and texture size directly affects performance in that order. With MMM mod the order is ai then fx then textures due to the amount of actors used.
Great idea and will be tracking. One thought on this is to upload a document with all the changes. This allows downloads for off line use and allows us to endorse your work. thanks
Be careful when modifying the values of the number of threads The engine of the "Fallout" and "New Vegas" is very sensitive to these changes Gamebryo is very unstable
The reason I made this page is because some of these settings are very poorly documented. But as peterpan13 pointed out this engine is buggy and very sensitive to change. Make sure you backup your FALLOUT.ini file before you make any changes. Actually i'm going to update the description a bit.
[edit] I've updated the description with the thread section a bit more detail and simplified it.
11 comments
* iMinGrassSize=80 - This setting controls the density of grass clumps. The higher the value, the less tightly packed grassy areas will be; the lower the value, the more grass there will be. In other words, lowering this value will significantly reduce FPS in most outdoor areas, but can make the game world seem more lush and overgrown. For example, try a value of 10 and it will radically alter what the wasteland looks like. Alternatively if you're after a performance boost or just want less grass for visual reasons, raise it to a value such as 140 to greatly thin out the grass (Fallout.ini and PREFS).
* It has been discovered that by inserting the line fDefaultWorldFOV=75.0 at the bottom of the Display section of the Fallout.ini file, and assigning it a value equal to the FOV you want, you can now permanently change the default Field of View in the game. Remember however that if you change the default FOV, you may also need to change the FOV for other screen elements - see the fRenderedTerminalFOV and fPipboy1stPersonFOV commands below. Note also that you can alter the fDefault1stPersonFOV=55.0000 value to alter how much of your body/weapon is shown in front of you (Fallout.ini).
* Some users can't see the left-most columns of text in the console; they can only see the end of statements, and can't see what they're typing, unless it's very long. This is known to impact some users without widescreens. Fortunately, this can be easily fixed by increasing the iConsoleTextXPos figure in the Fallout.ini file to about 200, using a text editor like Notepad.
* Changing this line in Fallout.INI also appears to help, by giving Fallout 3 more memory to work with:
iPreloadSizeLimit=26214400
The default is 25,600K (i.e., 26214400 bytes). If you have a lot of system memory, you can try changing it to 1 GB (1073741824) or even 2 GB (214748364
* Move to HUD Bars Closer to the Edge of the Screen
Find the follow and change the default 15 to a lower value (I'm using 5):
iSafeZoneXWide=15
iSafeZoneYWide=15
iSafeZoneX=15
iSafeZoneY=15
* FalloutPrefs.ini Edits:
Remove Waypoints from Pipboy Compass
change bShowQuestMarkers=1 to bShowQuestMarkers=0 in the [Gameplay] section.
(This will disable the quest markers which appear at the very bottom of your compass.)
Something I first discovered from playing EVE Online is changing the Presentation Interval ( iPresentInterval ) to a higher value has a large impact on performance as the default setting has the game make your graphics processor render as high a framerate as possible all the time. So with iPresentInterval=1, which is default, your graphics card will try it's best to render 60fps even it isn't powerful enough to do so. It's extremely stressful on older or less powerful graphics cards like the Intel HD graphics on laptops without dedicated graphics cards, not to mention the fps can change a lot so the game can appear choppy.
Setting iPresentInterval=2 has the game tell your graphics card to only render a maximum of 30fps. It's much less stress on a graphics card and the game appears much smoother. I recommend adding this to your list of tweaks for anyone with older or less powerful laptop or even desktop graphics cards, or even for anyone who has heat concerns or problems as the decreased graphics demand will generate less heat.
[edit]
Ok so what it does , apparently it reduces lag a bit at the expense of some jumpy frames..which i don't really care. if there is too much to process game runs fine but skips a few frames. i'm gonna add this to info thanks a lot
bPreloadIntroSequence
I've had to go through the loading sequence literally thousands of times. I can't believe I never noticed this tweak. For this alone I love you.
iNumThreads
Somehow I didn't even know this existed. I played with the havok threads one but this wasn't in my ini file even.I had to add it. I've played with it on for a bit now (set it to 4 and havok to 4) and while it's completely anectodal I had an instant improvement. Much smoother, etc....
I salute you sir.
num threads and threaded ai improves performance by making the game use multiple cores and using the cores to process ai in background . hdr FX , the ai and texture size directly affects performance in that order. With MMM mod the order is ai then fx then textures due to the amount of actors used.
thanks
hardware thread section is confusing, more clear please.
The engine of the "Fallout" and "New Vegas" is very sensitive to these changes
Gamebryo is very unstable
[edit] I've updated the description with the thread section a bit more detail and simplified it.