This mod has been superseded by Godrays Performance Fix Redux. It is an ESPless, plug-and-play recreation of this mod. I will leave this page up for any who still wish to use the original version.
Figured I'd repost this here since its still relevant info.
FOR AMD GPU USERS
The Volumetric Lighting in Fallout 4 is an NVIDIA technology, and as such looks and performs best on their GPU's. Unfortunately, AMD GPU's do not handle this effect very well at all. Performance and quality are noticeably worse even at settings parity, which ultimately means the aggressive tweaks used by this mod will do more harm than good. I've documented my findings below so that the relevant Godray settings can be understood, and tweaked effectively for AMD users - though there's still relevant information here for everyone regardless of GPU vendor. For reference, this was done on a Vega 64. (Still don't know if ALL AMD cards are affected by this. but until evidence is provided suggesting otherwise, lets roll with it.)
The relevant tweaks for Godrays via console are as follows:
gr grid (Default is 64) Lowering this brings significant performance gains at the expense of fidelity. Since Godrays on AMD are already inherently worse off, you cannot lower this value to the same degree as on an NVIDIA card - the grid value of 12 as employed by this mod is way too low for us, and the Godrays will look horrible. The value you choose for this will depend on your maxcascade value as seen below.
gr maxcascade 1, 2, 3 (Default is 2) maxcascade 3 should never be used under any circumstances, as its quality is too low to be considered. A setting of 1 will improve the visual stability of the Godrays, but will affect performance significantly; especially when using Ultra quality. However, you can use the increased stability from this setting to further lower the grid value, which can negate the performance hit - or even allow higher fidelity Godrays with BETTER performance than maxcascade 2. Unfortunately, using maxcascade 1 will cause Godrays to clip through geometry at certain distances, though this is highly variable and somewhat rare, so you should decide for yourself if its worth it or not. As a general rule of thumb, you can use lower grid values when using maxcascade 1 to gain performance, but you will not be able to lower grid NEARLY as much (if at all really) when using maxcascade 2 due to the inferior stability of that setting - unless you're ok with your Godrays being extremely unstable. gr scale Default is 1. I don't know why this is included in the mod, as it doesn't affect performance at all, it only affects the overall appearance. I recommend deleting this from the file included in this mod, or just setting it back to 1.
Adjusting Godrays on the fly in-game
I do NOT recommend using Shadow Boost FO4 to adjust Godrays dynamically. Godray performance is entirely GPU limited, and Shadow Boost's primary job is to dynamically adjust SHADOW DISTANCE to manage excessive draw calls - the performance implications of this will most likely be limited by your CPU. Managing two settings that hit entirely different parts of your system via the same FPS target is a bad idea in my opinion. If you use Shadow Boost, you should disable the Godray portion of the mod. Shadow Boost is a fantastic mod otherwise though!
Instead I recommend getting Fallout 4 Hotkeys, which will allow you to bind console commands directly to a key, to toggle between godray settingswhenever you want. This might sounds annoying, but in want of a better solution it's the best I can come up with.
As an example, these are my hotkeys (using maxcascade 1): [=gr quality 1; gr grid 64 ]=gr quality 3; gr grid 32
Generally...if you're in an Urban area, or an Interior, you can set Godrays to Ultra. If you're in a Wooded area, toggle them to Medium. This advice might sounds overly simplistic but its shockingly effective in practice. I believe foliage heavy areas naturally hit the GPU harder, and the Godrays interacting and resolving through all those trees, branches, grass, and brush massively impacts their complexity - and therefore cost. Whereas in Urban areas, this is far less of an issue - and you're FAR more likely to be CPU bound in those areas anyway.
Finally, make sure Tesselation Mode is set to "AMD Optimized" in Radeon Software. It should be by default, but it's worth checking regardless. This is the best balance of Performance and Visual quality. And in fact, in my testing, I've found cranking Tesselation doesn't even necessarily improve the quality of Fallout 4's Godrays anyway.
I too have a Polaris GPU and on High it was kinda bad but i didn't looked much for godrays so i played with it ON anyway, but you can turn it off to enjoy the FPS boost
sorry for the late reply, but i have seen this asked a bunch of other times so i might as well respond:
Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE/AE use different solutions when it comes to god rays. Fallout 4's implementation uses "NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting", tech created by both Bethesda and NVIDIA. due to the amount of scrutiny it received in 2015 (poor performance, anti-aliasing issues, ect), Bethesda had to look towards a softer, more realistic solution.
this solution has gone on to be used in both Skyrim SE/AE as well as Fallout 76. it doesn't carry as big of a performance impact as NVIDIA's version. the performance impact came from the fact it uses tesselation to displace the light, something that takes A LOT of power, enough so that "higher quality god rays" was a selling point for the Xbox One X Enhancement for Fallout 4.
TL;DR: the god rays between F4 and Skyrim SE/AE are completely different. this mod wont work on Skyrim
I'm playing on survival, console commands are disabled, how can I be sure the command is being made every time I start the game? I choose the ini "install".
set gameplay difficulty in main menu to non-survival and check console, you can set it back anytime - it won't affect your saved game as it just sets difficulty for new game.
So, are you guys noticing heavily extended load times upon startup and savegame loads with this mod? I will attempt to play with High FPS Physics Fix and it's sister to circumvent it, but so far my load times more than doubled. It's like the game wants to adjust all the godrays before I get in there.
Worked great indoors, but outside I still get a performance hit of like 20 fps, is there a fix?
Edit: A great solution would be disabling GR when outside (turning it on low), also there is an issue where the light rays are on during night, but I guess I'm asking for much here.
Edit 2: NVM, I used the patch b and it seems it works like a charm, 60 fps in/outdoors with 161 mods on my patato gtx960!
It used to work before when I played FO4 a year ago, and decided to install it again recently. No matter what I do, the auto command just doesn't work for me for some reason. After loading in to the game, I don't see the applied godrays in the console too. When I load in the game, I don't see god rays too until I type the "bat godrays" manually. Any ideas?
EDIT: Nvm, I found the issue. I'm using Clarity4.3 mod, it seems this is overwriting the ini file. So I just added the gr grid and gr scale and gr maxcascade there. Sorry, my bad.
I've tried to remove this mod considering it's been made quite redundant by the shadowboost mod, however I can't seem to undo and sort of clear away the auto execute console commands for whatever reason. Been an hour and I've been trying to add in other auto exec commands like: cl off; fov 100 100; setfog 1 0. But even with the txt file and the ini command removed, it seems to keep overwriting those changes and it simply just doesn't register.
Update: It turns out it seems to come from a separate mod, but I kind of forgot where exactly it came from and I'm trying to figure that stuff out. Any help is appreciated.
This helped a lot, but for some reason during the night everything illuminated by the moon looks very pixelated, I don't know if it's a problem with the light or it has to do with the fog :(
the Ultra Quality God Rays Performance Fix has a batch file which you have to activate via console commands. but there's a much better solution: create a txt. file and call it AutoExec. then paste this in: gr quality 3 gr grid 8 gr scale .4 gr maxcascade 1 save the AutoExec.txt file in your fallout 4 main folder. then open your fallout4.ini (located in documents/My Games/ Fallout 4) and add this line under [General]: sStartingConsoleCommand=bat AutoExec save. now those tweaks starts automatically with the game. you can add other tweaks to the AutoExec.txt.
Including the first line ("gr quality 3") crashed my game on startup. The download here doesn't include a bat file, it's just a txt. So the second method mentioned in the description that is the same as the one you mentioned, with the only difference being the filenames and the first line (which crashed my game).
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This reduces the shimmer/flicker at the expense of some performance.
If you find performance issues with this version try using 1.0b.
FOR AMD GPU USERS
The Volumetric Lighting in Fallout 4 is an NVIDIA technology, and as such looks and performs best on their GPU's. Unfortunately, AMD GPU's do not handle this effect very well at all. Performance and quality are noticeably worse even at settings parity, which ultimately means the aggressive tweaks used by this mod will do more harm than good. I've documented my findings below so that the relevant Godray settings can be understood, and tweaked effectively for AMD users - though there's still relevant information here for everyone regardless of GPU vendor. For reference, this was done on a Vega 64. (Still don't know if ALL AMD cards are affected by this. but until evidence is provided suggesting otherwise, lets roll with it.)
The relevant tweaks for Godrays via console are as follows:
gr quality 0(Low), 1(Medium), 2(High), 3(Ultra)
Low, Medium and High will exhibit significant aliasing. The severity of the aliasing will depend on your resolution. Ultra fixes it, but is extremely expensive - and the cost scales with resolution. Depending on the scene, running Ultra Quality can HALVE or even QUARTER your framerate easily, though stronger, more modern GPU's may be able to brute force it just fine. If you can't run Ultra, use the Medium setting as it has next to no performance hit vs Low, whereas High can impact performance quite a bit and still has aliasing anyway. Regardless of the chosen setting, I highly recommend using ENB's blur filter to effectively de-alias the Godrays with practically zero performance hit. Its worth noting that when using Low or Medium, Godrays are actually surprisingly cheap to run, even on GPU's that struggle greatly with Ultra, so I really don't recommend disabling them outright, as a large part of this game's visual identity is lost by doing so IMO.
gr grid (Default is 64)
Lowering this brings significant performance gains at the expense of fidelity. Since Godrays on AMD are already inherently worse off, you cannot lower this value to the same degree as on an NVIDIA card - the grid value of 12 as employed by this mod is way too low for us, and the Godrays will look horrible. The value you choose for this will depend on your maxcascade value as seen below.
gr maxcascade 1, 2, 3 (Default is 2)
maxcascade 3 should never be used under any circumstances, as its quality is too low to be considered. A setting of 1 will improve the visual stability of the Godrays, but will affect performance significantly; especially when using Ultra quality. However, you can use the increased stability from this setting to further lower the grid value, which can negate the performance hit - or even allow higher fidelity Godrays with BETTER performance than maxcascade 2. Unfortunately, using maxcascade 1 will cause Godrays to clip through geometry at certain distances, though this is highly variable and somewhat rare, so you should decide for yourself if its worth it or not. As a general rule of thumb, you can use lower grid values when using maxcascade 1 to gain performance, but you will not be able to lower grid NEARLY as much (if at all really) when using maxcascade 2 due to the inferior stability of that setting - unless you're ok with your Godrays being extremely unstable.
gr scale
Default is 1. I don't know why this is included in the mod, as it doesn't affect performance at all, it only affects the overall appearance.
I recommend deleting this from the file included in this mod, or just setting it back to 1.
Adjusting Godrays on the fly in-game
I do NOT recommend using Shadow Boost FO4 to adjust Godrays dynamically. Godray performance is entirely GPU limited, and Shadow Boost's primary job is to dynamically adjust SHADOW DISTANCE to manage excessive draw calls - the performance implications of this will most likely be limited by your CPU. Managing two settings that hit entirely different parts of your system via the same FPS target is a bad idea in my opinion. If you use Shadow Boost, you should disable the Godray portion of the mod. Shadow Boost is a fantastic mod otherwise though!
Instead I recommend getting Fallout 4 Hotkeys, which will allow you to bind console commands directly to a key, to toggle between godray settings whenever you want. This might sounds annoying, but in want of a better solution it's the best I can come up with.
As an example, these are my hotkeys (using maxcascade 1):
[=gr quality 1; gr grid 64
]=gr quality 3; gr grid 32
Generally...if you're in an Urban area, or an Interior, you can set Godrays to Ultra. If you're in a Wooded area, toggle them to Medium. This advice might sounds overly simplistic but its shockingly effective in practice. I believe foliage heavy areas naturally hit the GPU harder, and the Godrays interacting and resolving through all those trees, branches, grass, and brush massively impacts their complexity - and therefore cost. Whereas in Urban areas, this is far less of an issue - and you're FAR more likely to be CPU bound in those areas anyway.
Finally, make sure Tesselation Mode is set to "AMD Optimized" in Radeon Software. It should be by default, but it's worth checking regardless. This is the best balance of Performance and Visual quality. And in fact, in my testing, I've found cranking Tesselation doesn't even necessarily improve the quality of Fallout 4's Godrays anyway.
Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE/AE use different solutions when it comes to god rays. Fallout 4's implementation uses "NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting", tech created by both Bethesda and NVIDIA. due to the amount of scrutiny it received in 2015 (poor performance, anti-aliasing issues, ect), Bethesda had to look towards a softer, more realistic solution.
this solution has gone on to be used in both Skyrim SE/AE as well as Fallout 76. it doesn't carry as big of a performance impact as NVIDIA's version. the performance impact came from the fact it uses tesselation to displace the light, something that takes A LOT of power, enough so that "higher quality god rays" was a selling point for the Xbox One X Enhancement for Fallout 4.
TL;DR: the god rays between F4 and Skyrim SE/AE are completely different. this mod wont work on Skyrim
Edit: A great solution would be disabling GR when outside (turning it on low), also there is an issue where the light rays are on during night, but I guess I'm asking for much here.
Edit 2: NVM, I used the patch b and it seems it works like a charm, 60 fps in/outdoors with 161 mods on my patato gtx960!
Edit 3: Or maybe not :D
It used to work before when I played FO4 a year ago, and decided to install it again recently. No matter what I do, the auto command just doesn't work for me for some reason. After loading in to the game, I don't see the applied godrays in the console too. When I load in the game, I don't see god rays too until I type the "bat godrays" manually. Any ideas?EDIT: Nvm, I found the issue. I'm using Clarity4.3 mod, it seems this is overwriting the ini file. So I just added the gr grid and gr scale and gr maxcascade there. Sorry, my bad.
create a txt. file and call it AutoExec. then paste this in:
gr quality 3
gr grid 8
gr scale .4
gr maxcascade 1
save the AutoExec.txt file in your fallout 4 main folder.
then open your fallout4.ini (located in documents/My Games/ Fallout 4) and add this line under [General]:
sStartingConsoleCommand=bat AutoExec
save.
now those tweaks starts automatically with the game.
you can add other tweaks to the AutoExec.txt.
So the second method mentioned in the description that is the same as the one you mentioned, with the only difference being the filenames and the first line (which crashed my game).