Fallout 4

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Marisa Kirisame

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OrdinaryMagician

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About this mod

The Fallout 4 port of MariENB 2.
More of the same, now for Bethesda's latest terrible game.
At least with FROST it's fun for me.
Good hardware recommended, I can't optimize much.

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MariENB is a personal project I started back in 2013, tired of the awful performance (and visuals) and terrible writing of existing presets.
It is designed with three guiding principles:


  • Cleanness: All the code is carefully written so as to be as readable and maintainable as possible.
  • Efficiency: Optimize everything without sacrificing cleanness.
  • Flexibility: Being a sucker for customization, I try to make absolutely everything tweakable.

One of the main objectives of the project is to bury down every single other preset in the world and become the one true god among them all, serving as an universal base for any and all future presets. Nah, just kidding... or maybe not.

This is a rewritten port for Fallout 4, for the Skyrim original, see here. There's also a New Vegas version here. Note that it's possible to make it work in Skyrim Special Edition by uncommenting the #define SKYRIMSE line in the global defs file, but it isn't officially supported as I don't play it (you're free to do the porting job yourself).

Most features of the original are fully implemented, with a couple changes due to internal differences.

An enblocal.ini file is not provided, as usual, it has to be configured by you. Remember, you only need the dlls and the enblocal.ini from the ENB wrapper (currently 0.399 or later is required).

Install process for noobs:

  • Download ENB binaries: Put the DLLs and the enblocal.ini from the wrapper folder where Fallout4.exe is.
  • Download the MariENB edition of your choice: Extract to where Fallout4.exe is.
  • (Optional) Set up enblocal.ini: For this you'll need Boris' VRAMSizeTest, check the DX11 value, and paste it onto enblocal.ini's VideoMemorySizeMb setting, while also setting ForceVideoMemorySize to true. This is generally not needed if you have a lot of VRAM and no troubles with texture loading in-game.
  • It's done.

There are two modes of operation for Bloom and Depth of Field. By default the package uses high quality multipass Bloom (single pass available for slower machines) and cheap DOF (circular bokeh is available, but it has an atrocious performance hit and it's best left off for fancy screenshots).

It's recommended to disable the game's own DOF by setting bDoDepthOfField to 0 in Fallout4Prefs.ini (this breaks underwater visuals, but I'm looking into a workaround for that). You can keep vanilla SSAO on, it looks nice combined with ENB's, though you can disable one of them if you have performance problems. Additionally, you should reduce the game's blatantly fake and hideous by default rim lighting, the command is "cl rim <value>". I recommend a value of 0.002, but you can disable it entirely if you want (there's an option for that in the ENB GUI so you don't have to use the command every time).

The bare minimum requirements (if you consider 25 to 40 FPS at 720p on medium playable) are the same as the minimum requirements for the game itself. The minimum GPU for a "smooth" experience should be a 1060, at least. Tests on a GTX 680 have given me about 25 to 40 FPS most of the time out in the wild, 20 to 30 on cities and almost 60 indoors, in 1080p with high settings. Recent tests on a GTX 1060 give me 60 FPS indoors and 40 to 50 FPS outdoors, this is in 1080p on ultra settings, though.

ENBs with lots of features just don't work all that well in FO4 (I've even come across people with 1080s having trouble with other presets, and AMD GPUs have even worse issues).


I really would recommend investing in lots of performance optimization with other mods and with the game's own settings. As of now, I've practically reached my limit on how much I can reduce the FPS hit from all the features I add. It's really hard to make the heaviest filters perform well.

Features exclusive to this edition:

  • Mouse manual focus: Focusing mode #-2 lets you pick what to focus on by right clicking anywhere on the screen with the ENB GUI open.
  • Simplified bloom: Changes in how the bloom shader is implemented have resulted in some complications which make the traditional multi-pass bloom perform worse, so a "simple" version is also available.
  • Full time of day support for heat and frost: Dawn, sunrise, day, sunset, dusk, night... They're all there.
  • SMAA: The game's own post-processing AA options have a tendency to cause issues with ENB, so here's some SMAA as an alternative (remember to disable in-game AA first). Commented out by default in 3.5.1.

Features missing in this edition (they might be possible to add back with some clever plugin DLL hacking):

  • Multi-weather handling: Along with all things that depend on it, such as hot and cold handling for heat and frost, and fog depth of field.
  • FOV-relative depth of field strength: Like in the New Vegas edition, there's no way to access FOV here either.

What's yet to be done:

  • Full dawn and dusk support for all variables.
  • Fix inconsistent fog once ENB supports properly modifying it. Currently I have to limit myself in terms of lighting modifications to not make it look weird, can't really tweak fog as much as I could back in Skyrim.
  • More attempts to improve performance.

Since 3.1.0, MariENB 3 supports FROST. It further adds to the coldness of the nuclear winter while boosting the colours here and there, and correcting some of the ugly sky gradients. Since 3.2.7, the vanilla Fallout 4 edition has been brought back.

Recommended mods for better visual consistency:

  • Fogout (interiors only): Removes the fog indoors that clashes with the thick darkness.
  • ELFX: Seems like a good combination.
  • For the FROST edition, whatever visual mods FROST recommends using.
  • For the Vanilla edition, darker nights are recommended (medium or below), as vanilla night is way brighter than it should.
  • Any and all mods that add more shadow casting: Just a general recommendation, really.

For the best experience, Digital Nightmare is recommended. I just like the exploration music. You can combine it with Dynamic Music Overhaul if you want more ambience and less fighting music. Also for FROST, a very good music mod is the one from PILGRIM (pretty good ENB, too, but not too fitting for FROST to be honest), just download the optional mod and make sure to place the ESP before FROST's so it doesn't overwrite the weathers. 
The vanilla edition also goes well with Dead Skies (Ambient Version) (and optionally also Dustbowl Overhaul), for a DUST-like feel.

All the code is published under the GNU General Public License version 3.

Since I picked up FO4 again, this project may still get updated, though rarely.
Older versions can be found here and here.








MariENB (C)2013-2020 Marisa Kirisame, UnSX Team. ENB (C)2007-2020 Boris Vorontsov.