PC Report: Fallout 4

The botched final sentence is used again. You guys really should correct the template.

Ouch. That's a hard conclusion.

I agree it's not the most PC-friendly game, but the controls are quite OK. You can scroll through the PipBoy with WASD, and the keyboard mapping in general is pretty logical. (I am pressing V all the time to get into V.A.T.S. though, hehe.) The only really hateful thing is the dialogue wheel, but you know, you'll get used to it as you did with Mass Effect.

 

Major thing though: When the game indicates Enter, you can also push E. Having to reach for Enter all the time is annoying, and Bethesda should've known that.

And about the graphics... yeah they're not state-of-the-art, but the game world is nonetheless beautiful. Saying that the game looks like a modded Fallout 3 goes a bit far, imho. What I find the most jarring is that they didn't include proper AA options. TXAA is just way too blurry, so I turn it off and use SMAA through ReShade. Which doesn't help that much, but you know, jaggies > blur.

Heh I knew the fanboys were wrong. Good one LDK.

Good report, only two things that I found wrong with it though: the game uses TAA not nVidia's TXAA and the game is capped to the monitor's refresh rate instead of just 60FPS (In my case it was capped to 144Hz).

Heh I knew the fanboys were wrong. Good one LDK.

That seems kinda mean to the playerbase, and the game doesn't look that bad to me, it's miles ahead of what Fallout 3 had, I expected the report to be setup a bit differently. I was kinda hoping the graphical settings would be covered but oh well.

Nice report.

Figured about the bad ui controls, though never saw anyone mention it tell now.. Ill wait for some mods.

 

Some minor things though:

TXAA is an nvidia exclusive technology. It 100% doesn't function on AMD cards. As such it's very rarely seen.

Plus it's rather garbage, and is complex enough to require nvidia's aid to implement, so extremely few games have it, and hopefully next to none in the future.

Why: It's a render based AA technique, which would be awesome since so few triple A games these days include one.. But it's essentially MSAA + Temporal (post processing) AA. In the end you get the worst of both words:

Similar or heavier performance hit then MSAA. (Huge reason it's often ignored on console centric games like this)

Similar or worse blurring then TAA

So it's like full motion vaseline on the screen like you get with low quality FXAA/TAA, but with added performance impact.

 

That said, the game does have one nvidia designed piece of tech, so it does run better on nvidia cards:

http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/11/04/fallout-4/

 

And imo calling it a "renamed gamebryo" is pretty foolish. It's a screwed up version of the creation engine (perhaps an upgrade for consoles, but downgrade for PCs with the lack of MSAA)

I mean with that logic you can call unreal engine 4 a renamed version of unreal engine 3/2/1.. Or source engine a renamed version of quake 2s engine, or IDtech2..

If nothing was changed, sure it's renamed.. But quite a ton was changed since gamebryo. (Dx11, deferred rendering, msaa broken, etc)

 

Well hopefully there are some AA bits to enable proper AA. I imagine the skyrim ones work at least for SGSSAA.

A bit harsh. I've honestly never had problems with the interface. You can use WASD to browse inventories and you can use E instead of Enter in most situations. It could be better, but don't forget what a confusing mess Skyrim's interface was.

 

Also, "modded Fallout 3"? I'm sorry, but... no. I was playing Fallout: New Vegas before Fallout 4 came out, with a ton of mods. ENB, Vurt's, NMC's texture pack, etc., and I can honestly say, the game's visuals are miles above Fallout 3 and New Vegas. The characters look real, clothes have physics, hair has physics, there are proper shadows shadows, draw distances are MASSIVE (I remember standing a few hundred meters away from something, then I scoped in on it, and it was almost fully detailed, featuring NPCs), and don't forget PBR. Some of these features you can mod into Fallout 3, but Gamebryo back then was a lot less stable, so you would definitely strain the game. Some of these features, however, can't be modded in without altering the engine, if I'm correct, which is not legal.

 

When you compare this game to Bethesda's previous games, you might be a bit disappointed, but that's mostly because pretty much everyone modded those games. This game is definitely Bethesda's best launch. It's a bit buggy here and there, but it's much, much better than all the other titles at launch. Hell, if you play vanilla Oblivion, Fallout 3 or Skyrim, even with all the patches, I bet the games are much buggier than Fallout 4 is right now, merely a week after launch.

Certain gameplay features have hard-coded key bindings (custom mappings are ignored) and the keypad can't be remapped at all. There are also issues with non-QWERTY keyboard layouts (as with the issue mentioned of the console key binding being incorrect). There is a forum topic about the various keyboard issues.

Well hopefully there are some AA bits to enable proper AA. I imagine the skyrim ones work at least for SGSSAA.

 

Not gonna happen. (there are no working AA bits for DX11, at least on nVidia's side; can't say anything regarding AMD) The only way you could get SGSSAA working on a DX11 game is if said game has MSAA support.

The Game Logic is tied to Vsync not the Framerate.