Are you still wandering through the wastes of Boston weeks after release? Are you playing the Windows PC version on mid-range hardware? If you answered yes to both questions, then I might have the right mod for you! Don’t worry Vault-tech isn’t involved in any way!
“FPS dynamic shadows” mod by creator Shadow Beast adds the ability for the game engine to dynamically shadow draw distance and level of detail based upon your desired frame rate. The mods creator offers the following description of it:
Many of you may have noticed that in some locations of Fallout 4 fps gets low even with a good hardware, like in the City, mostly it happens in theareas with lots of objects. Since the game isn’t properly optimized, almost everything that it does with objects which it renders takes more time thanit actually should. One of the most time consuming operations in Fallout 4 is shadow rendering and because the game has only predefined shadow drawdistance, which applies everywhere in every location just the same, we have a choise either we set it to high value with having a good picture but eventually facing fps drops in locations with lots of object or we lower the value to make fps more stable in general. And this is exactly the pointwhere this plugin comes handy!
With this mod installed I saw my frame rate increase in diamond city from 35 FPS on average to a respectable 55. Outdoor areas like the commons faired even better never dipping below my target of 60 frames per second even during intense battles. Before installing the mod I was ranging between 40 – 50 during intense firefights with super mutants. I don’t know all the technical ins and outs of this mod but it seems to work wonders.
If you’re wondering what kind of rig and graphical settings I am running to achieve these results – I’ve got everything except Godrays set to ultra with maximum draw distance enabled. My system specs just meet those recommended by Bethesda with probably my graphics card being the weakest component.
My system:
4.0 GHZ 8-Core AMD Processor
16GB DDR3
Radeon R7 270 2GB Overclocked
Fallout 4 installed on a mechanical hard drive
Installation of the dynamic shadows mod is really easy as well. If you’ve installed mods for Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas you might be familiar with having to use tools like the nexus mods manager or even the built-in plugin loader to ensure everything worked without a hitch. To install the dynamic shadows mod you just drag the files into your games directory and you’re good to go!
Users on Reddit are reporting similar findings to mine in terms of performance on cards as high as the Geforce 970. Interesting posters on the Reddit thread are also comparing the capability of this mod to 2011’s RAGE which featured a dynamic graphics performance system designed to optimize the user’s experience on lower end hardware.
We’ll keep you posted on any other interesting Fallout 4 mods as they continue to emerge.
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