If like me, you’ve been watching the Amazon Prime Fallout TV Series and developed a hankering to delve back into the world of the Fallout games – specifically Fallout 4 – you may have encountered some setup issues. Particularly if you play on Valves Steam Deck OLED handheld, which is capable of an up to 90hz screen refresh rate.
Booting the game using the following settings, I found that the Steam Deck would report 90fps in some areas of the game. Strange, as I had anticipated no higher than 60fps in certain areas. Something’s not quite right here, the game doesn’t feel smooth. After some searching, I came across this reddit post by user Life-Grapefruit-9377.
The poster reported that Fallout 4 runs at half framerate on the OLED deck. If it says 90fps, it’s actually running at 45fps, a quirk of Bethesda’s Creation engine. Luckily, user OriginalSpicyDill came to the rescue in the comments, with a fix:
Comment
byu/Life-Grapefruit-9377 from discussion
inSteamDeck
I tested this today, making the required change to 'Fallout4Prefs.ini' file, setting 'iPresentInterval' to ‘0’, using Steam Deck per-game profiles to set the refresh rate to 60hz, and my game is noticeably smoother as a result. It’s important that you follow the instructions in the correct order, making sure to configure your game options and run the game at least once before making this change.
My Settings
Here are the settings I used to run the game, which I found on YouTuber Santiago Santiago’s channel. The full video is embedded below and worth checking out:
- Graphics adapter and resolution settings:
- Resolution: 1280×800
- Antialiasing: TAA (Best quality)
- Anisotropic filtering: 16 Samples
- Advanced settings:
- Texture quality: Ultra
- Shadow quality: High
- Shadow distance: Medium
- Decal quality: High
- Lighting quality: High
- Godrays quality: Low
- Depth of field: Standard (Low)
- Ambient occlusion: SSAO (High)
- Screen space reflections: ON
- Wetness: ON
- Rain occlusion: ON
- Motion blur: OFF
- Lens flare: ON
- View distance settings:
- Object fade: Approx. 70%
- Actor fade: Approx. 70%
- Grass fade: Approx. 65%
- Item fade: Approx. 70%
