Bethesda Adds High Resolution Pack To PC, PS4 Pro Support For 'Fallout 4'

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Good info, but a game that's a VRAM hog is a sign of sloppy coding, not awesome graphics. There has not been that great of polygon and lighting advancements to warrant such a massive jump in VRAM allocation just in the past year and a half or so like we've seen. By the way, VRAM monitoring tools like Afterburner do not show the actual amount of VRAM use, just what is being allocated *to* use if needed.

Otherwise I will respectfully disagree with you on Nvidia's DX12 performance. My game benchmark links in the previous post proved it. Last summer it was a concern, but Nvidia's driver tweaks resolved most issues. With that said, there appears to be a continuation of some games being more favorable to AMD GPUs, and others being favorable to Nvidia GPUs. This has been going on for many years. There are conspiracy theorists out there who claim that one GPU is favored over another by developers (see: Project Cars and AMD owner accusations), but it's more about architecture differences than actual under-the-table deal making.


 

ledhead11

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Good to know about afterburner, its my goto/gosub no return for monitoring and most of my quotes with my own experiences. I also agree with you about the DX12 thing along with people not understanding the architectural differences vs. theories. I don't really understand but I know they exist from people deep in the trenches on either side. I've seen substantial improvements w/ ROTTR DX12 but its still not as good as I think it should be, but I know that was a game that really had DX12 shoehorned in.

I did read someones post on Steam about how these textures only barely rivaled, if that, those on the nexus whose size were exponentially smaller but these were much more consistent throughout the game. I suspected in-efficient coding when I read that, so we'll see.

I'm hoping to start my testing tomorrow afternoon and the rest of the weekend. I'll post what I experience at 4k/60hz and 1440p/144hz.
 

ledhead11

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Well here's some early observations:

I'll try to keep this to performance related notes and not so much some kind of game review. I never played the previous games(someone gave me an unopened of the first and after opening and reading the docs I never installed). I did read a lot of game reviews for the original 4 and also have TES(now with enhanced but many mods prior). I have mixed feelings when it comes to Bethesda. I love the new Doom, but I know it was developed differently.

All these tests were done with either V-Sync 4k/60hz or G-Sync 1440p/144hz at Ultra settings and HBAO. 4k avgeraged 40-60 while 1400p held mainly at 72hz.

So on to my observations. Performance wise it does fine in either 4k/60hz or 1440p/144hz with SLI support. Its important to note that this engine will limit to either half of 120/144hz or simply cap at 60hz depending on your display and display settings. There are ways to tweak it further but its one of those engines that will render some things at totally wrong speeds if you do, hence I didn't tweak that. I did have a problem with the configurator not initially letting me have non-windowed full screen mode at 4k. I found a number of fixes that worked and after switching displays it was all good. While trying some of the fixes that required changing the ini file I noticed a HBAO setting in the file that was off(0) and wasn't offered to me initially. I set it to 1 and it suddenly showed in the menu. There's even an HDR setting but I didn't mess with it since most of my displays aren't HDR.

The SLI isn't bad. It mostly hung in the 40-80% range 1440p and 60-100% at 4k. I didn't really look at Vram since I'm currently running afterburner for such things but my guess is that you really want 6GB+ for 1440p/4k. Mostly I was just happy that it had SLI support and I didn't need to tweak bits like users did on the original release. It could probably be optimized futher but it at least was working.

Graphics/Textures: We'll I'm glad I use a pair of Samsung 850 pro's in Raid(0) for hi-res texture games. Load times weren't bad but I could see them taking a while for 4k on a slower HDD/system. I didn't play the original release since the screen caps I saw didn't really 'wow' me. After having spent nearly 100+ hours with TES I'm pretty critical of Bethesda's graphical textures. I'd honestly say this is a bridge somewhere between 1080p and 1440p. Probably not worthy of the 58gb but I'm only a few hours into the game.

The natural backgrounds, weathered erosion's and some faces look pretty good. I'm basing this on what I've seen in Witcher 3, GTA V, Metro's, Crysis 2/3, even Alien Isolation. The man made items like the buildings, metal, walls look as dated as TES did when it came out. A bit disappointing there. I find myself comparing to the Metros a lot with this one and considering their age I feel this should look a bit better but as I say I'm only just starting the game. It mostly feels like TES skin on Metro.

I'm really hoping that Bethesda jumps in the game to 144hz+ refresh rates before the next decade especially since 1080p/165hz panels are gaining in popularity and 1440p/144hz already have such a foothold. All in all I feel this is a much better effort than TES enhanced and I look forward to completing it.
 
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