My Adventures in Performance Tuning Fallout 4 VR

TLDR;- FO4VR still takes serious tuning to make it playable even in 2019 even for a beefy rig. FO4VR is a CPU intensive game and sadly it was upgrading to an i9-9900K that made the biggest difference. But tweaking and modding can bring FO4VR to an "acceptable" state of play. 

When I first started playing Fallout 4 VR on my Alienware R4 17 with an external GTX 1080ti,  the stuttering and blurriness was so atrocious, plays would give me severe eyestrain then headaches.  I've invested a significant amount of time trying to bring FO4VR to the level of my heavily modded SkyrimVR visuals but I gave up and tried frantically to stabilize with acceptable graphics.  After I had given up everything(shadows,interior lights,particle effects,grass) to run a decent stable game, I realized I couldn't do any serious settlement building which was a big part of my enjoyment.  So I finally capitulated and built me a new gaming rig.  However I decided to chronicle my performance tuning in detail as I still needed all the fixes even for my beefy rig to load up on 4k textures and to mod further.

The bad performance in this game is a death by a thousand cuts and there is no magic bullet- even an i9-9900K/GTX 1080ti requires compromises and tuning. I still won't run lush tree and grass/ hair physics mods since my reprojection rate can run as high as 30% in my growing settlements. My nightly/weekend tuning exercise fell under 5 categories:

• Performance Mods- Probably Lights Remover made the most noticeable difference.
• Fallout 4 VR config/ini - TAA tweaking, lowering shadow quality, particle effect, turning off grass, etc
• SteamVR Configuration- Supersampling and reprojection options. Before my hardware upgrade, I ended up running "Always On" interleaved projection with  Motion Smoothing to reduce stutters.
• Existing Hardware Configuration such as overclocking GPU/CPU/DRAM, GPU power options
• Hardware Upgrades- unfortunately the most expensive yet the most effective

Also the performance problems vary in nature- low fps, stuttering, high load times,  slow and unstable workshop menu. I've put more details below this summary diagram.  Even though my husband thinks this diagram is overkill, I use this diagram to reason more systematically about my tuning. The green to red color scheme indicates performance impact positive to negative:

• green- improved performance significantly 
• light green - moderately improved
• white- setting at neutral (could crank up)
• yellow - nibbles away at performance
• orange- degrades performances significantly, but I use the settings to improve immersion
• red- kills performance and hence avoiding them for the present
• blue- not sure if it worked as a FPS boost was not seen

Performance Tuning Tools- FPSvr

A good performance tool can more objectively show the impact of your changes and I highly highly recommend FPSvr. Only for 4 bucks you get a GPU/CPU breakdown for each session that can show you where you bottlenecks are. (It's sad that SteamVR fps tool is so unusable.)  You can check  the FPS rates and CPU/GPU usage in-game by tilting up your controller, and at the end of the game session stats are automatically saved to analyze through the included FPSvr Viewer.  Having historical baselines for comparison is huge when you are piling on mods at every play.

Click me to see this fantastic tool for VR session breakdown.

If you click to enlarge, you can see the breakdown of GPU/CPU frame times and usage. I used this to see that the CPU was no longer a bottleneck and the current Intel Turbo Boost (~4.6GHz -~4.9GHz) was more than ample for this game and I didn't need to bother overclocking just yet. In my old rig, couldn't play without overclocking my i7-6820HK.

Yes you can see from the sessions table on the left that I played an unhealthy amount of  FO4VR this week except this wasn't exactly playing- I was performance testing all over the Commonwealth on my new gaming rig obsessively looking at the in-game FPS monitor and checking the newly installed 4K textures.  

In addition, I also use GPU-Z and HWInfo  to monitor usage and temps to see if I can eke out more from the hardware.

Performance Mods

I installed all the standard recommended performance mods but it was only the Lights Remover that I saw a noticeable difference. Admittedly I did not have as much discipline in my early testing without FPSvr and was relying on SteamVR in-game fpsviewer.

• ***Lights Remover - Moves all complex interior lighting and leaves just the lamps. As a bonus, this is a huge immersion booster as you have to use your flashlight when indoors. Fighting supermutants in Medford Hospital can get truly creepy in the dark. 
• Insignificant Objects Remover 
• Optimized Vanilla Textures - probably I have overwritten half of these changes with my 4K mod.
• FAR - Faraway Area Reform by SparrowPrince
• Clear Weather Only - the game does have to work harder during rain and radiation storms so I installed this mod when I was having severe stuttering problems. 

Insignificant Objects Remover, FAR, OVT on their own did not fix my initial stuttering problem. However I leave them.

Mods that I couldn't yet see an improvement:

• Load Accelerator - I really really wanted this mod to work. I still have slow load times(15-30 seconds) on my beefy rig and m.2 Nvme SSD.  Performance stats show CPU/GPU are just hanging out not working much during this time. Curse you Bethesda- you still found a way to defeat me.  I am giving up on this at the present since I spend the time looking at my FPSvr stats and resting my eyes.  
• Boston FPS Fix - this curiously increased my FPS in Boston areas and I don't know if I have a conflicting mod that undid this mod's changes or the weather changed.  I need to spend more time retesting.

Increasing Workshop Menu Performance

When you mod in thousands of items to your workshop menu, you are going to start seeing the workshop menu load slower and slower.  There is a fix for pancake involving F4SE which sadly will not work in VR.  Surprisingly turning off the rotation animation in your Fallout4Custom.ini does provide a performance boost and prevented my games from crashing every 10 minutes to about 60. 

[Interface] fWorkshopRotateSpeed=0.00 ;(Default: 1.00) fWorkshopRepeatTime=0.15 ;(Default: 0.25)

I found the solution from this handy reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/4panl5/psa_you_can_stop_items_from_rotating_in_the/

Moderating Mod Usage and Avoiding Performance Killers

As soon as I get my build stable, the first thing I do is slap on more mods.  I am greedy when it comes to mods and I know "some" of my performance/stability issues stem from my mod addiction. (The terrible initial performance, blurriness and stuttering was ALL Bethesda since I had it before modding!).  Mods are what I love about Fallout and this habit requires a lot of restraint.

I can not NOT have 4K texture mods so I make a tradeoff and pare everything else down.  I try not use any mods that turn off or mess with precombined meshes no matter how hard I want to get rid of garbage in my settlements. See these explanations from: 

• Red Rocket TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQX-F_zBGGM
• Sim Settlement education guide: https://simsettlements.com/site/index.php?threads/scrapping-mods-and-performance-issues.6992/

Then there are cases where my own gameplay rather than the mod degrades performance. For instance Sim Settlements is an excellent mod is not a performance killer in itself.  However it does make growing your settlement so easy that I tend to create larger settlements than I normally would if I had to micromanage it all by myself.  Fallout 4 settlement building in general is a performance killer and you can see many youtubers (Oxhorn) talk about how frame rates drop below 30 in their heaviest settlements. That's bearable in the pancake version but totally a no go in VR.

Unfortunately this poorly optimized game may force you to change your gaming behavior. I don't build settlements in a heavy areas like Hangman's Alley or Jamaica Plains and prefer those situated in decent performing areas.

Fallout 4 INI Tweaks, TAA etc.

Tuning TAA-  I tried turning TAA off, using FXAA. FXAA just hurt my eyes and decided I must have TAA. You have to tradeoff between sharpness and sparkling edges vs blurriness- sharper it is more sparkly it gets. Shine like a diamond, shine like a diamond in the sky~~~ My current TAA settings are for 2.0X SS:

fTAAPostSharpen=0.75
fTAASharpen=1.0000
fTAAHighFreq=0.8000
fTAALowFreq=0.5000
fTAAPostOverlay=0.75

I used lower 0.675 for  fTAASharpen/fTAAPostOverlay when I used to run at 1.5X SS.  I adjust shadow settings, ambient occlusion all in-game.

SteamVR Configuration, SS etc.

Managing Reprojection

With my old rig(i7-6820HK/1080ti), pegging at 45 fps with the  "Always On" interleaved projection Application setting was THE only way to reduce stuttering by reducing overall load on the CPU which would run below 80% and have headroom. If I ran without it (with just motion smoothing/ asynchronous projection), as soon as I went into a heavy area like Boston or Sanctuary Hills, CPU would run up to 100% and stuttering would ensue. Yes combat of any kind esp. heavy shootouts suck with interleaved projection but it beats getting a headache. But now even with the i9-9900K, I have motion smoothing on and reprojection rates still range from 5% to 30% depending on how fast I whip around and which area I am in. 

Supersampling 

I manage super sampling strictly from SteamVR Application Menu. I run at SSx200% and I'm surprised how much clearer everything is- esp. when reading text in game.  I know this is the knob I can crank down for more performance if I need to but I am loath to give this up. Supersampling taxes the CPU and GPU both. I could only manage about 1.5x with a i7-6820HK for CPU load but I still used to get the stuttering problem at 1xSS.

Performance Goals and Tradeoffs

In PC gaming, the more you tune and tinker, the less time you leave for gaming. Unfortunately FO4VR is like an old Alfa Romeo.  It is not a game you can simply pay higher components to buy yourself out of performance problems due to the creaking engine and modding.  I still have slow loading times and workshop/settlement problems that are barely utilizing the underlying hardware. Sadly with FO4VR, I find myself  trading off game enjoyment with with fixing performance problems. There's how much time you will spend to get things better and there's also what you have to sacrifice in order to get there.

You might just be trying hard to stabilize your FO4VR and reduce stuttering trying anything possible.  Once you get your system stable and depending on your system's capabilities,  you might have choices on what to cut instead of having to cut as much as possible. In the old rig, I cut out everything- no grass, low shadows, no interior light, no face light, no particle effects, and peg to 45fps which wasn't great during shootouts but this let me start building. But when I heard from some youtubers that they can only play their big settlements  20-30fps, I realized settlement building was a ticking time bomb to unplayability for VR. That's when I bit the bullet to build a new system. 

Fallout 4 VR- Wasteland Architecture Part II - Spectacle Island

By land mass, Spectacle Island is the largest buildable settlement in Fallout giving the player a lot of flexibility to experiment with more sizeable structures.  The real life Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor was named so for the early natural shape of two vaguely round land masses connected by a thin strip. After decades of trash dumping and a final massive dump from the Big Dig, it looks more like a small "b" or a "9" or worse. Since Fallout 4 history diverges in 1950, the game Spectacle Island is shaped like an amoeba.

Unlike Graygarden, I used this island as more of a blank slate since there wasn't any natively interesting structures preexisting on the island. I used my favorite cleanup mod to get rid of unscrappable garbage piles, Clean and Simple.  

Super mutants, raiders, and complaining settlers can harsh your mellow and I wanted to build a quiet seaside getaway to decompress from all the wasteland violence.  This happily has become my remote outdoor base where I do most of my crafting outdoors without being harassed by NPCs- enemy or otherwise.  Since I am cooped up at home inside a VR headset, I want to spend as much of the game time in the virtual outdoors- radiation be damned.   The first problem was unexpected- after fighting off the waves of oversized mirelurks, I walked around the island looking for possible build sites. The ocean/wind sound was so deafening I could not continue without a sound reduction mod.

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For the main living areas, I wanted to connect railcars together and it's the fantastic Custom Concrete Walls with Window Glass mod that really tied this together. I had originally used SOE institute glass assets which didn't match as well.  The island has an uneven topology so concrete base support was used for some token amount of visual anchoring although the game engine lets you have floating detached structures. Fallout severely limits where you can snap/place items preventing me from putting supports exactly where I wanted. I also didn't want to risk corrupting my save with some potentially unstable mods so the support base is the few places the engine would let me snap.

Hall before Guest Bedroom

Most of the sides of box cars are closed off with concrete framed windows so Dogmeat wouldn't fall off.  Even if he is immortal and survives the fall, sometimes he would get stuck in circles underneath the deck and you would see a pair of twitchy ears clipping through- a total immersion killer.

The railcars are connected and placed so each window would have the most pleasing views of itself and the surrounding island. Since there is so much land here, I could have gone nuts and added dozens of railcars for a giant maze complex but it didn't feel right after about 7 railcars and I pared it back as it felt too gratuitous and unwieldy.

VR Bedtime

I keep most of the interior relatively minimal with most of it is empty except an small armory, lab, bed room, and a guest room- a huge departure from my hoarding Skyrim days.  Most of Fallout 4 exteriors and interiors are so piled with junk that one really needs visual relief in game.  My bedroom has a sleeping bag, chair, suitcase, and a doggie bed. I use the camping mod so I sleep in various places in the Commonwealth but I like to return to this home at the end of my play session.

Hung with Immersive Toilet Paper

I originally put the bathroom inside but it's impossible to get privacy in such a transparent structure and I didn't want to cover up anything.  I ended up placing the waste facilities just underneath the bedroom. Why do I even need to add a bathroom in this virtual world? Friend, if you need to ask- the answer is all about raising immersion levels.  Just look at the immersive toilet paper flipped the correct way. I don't actually use it in game and it's out of the way enough that followers will not avail themselves so it's here purely for visual immersion.  (Yes I am aware of "needs" mods but I'm not that kind of player.)  I will have to put in a magazine rack once I have enough collected.

Chemistry Workshop with Best Wasteland Views

This was the perfect corner for a chemistry station as it's visible from a window in the front entrance hall so you know you have to turn left and not get lost in the maze.  All other crafting- weapons/ammo/food is outside surrounding the original unscrappable workshop.  

Some practical Spectacle Island tips:

• You don't need Preston Garvey/Minuteman to take over this island, just fight off waves and waves of Mirelurks and restore power to the island.
• Custom Concrete Walls with Window Glass mod does require the Wasteland Workshop which I bought for pancake Fallout 4 and copied over into the VR folder.  

Fallout 4 VR- Wasteland Architecture Part I - Graygarden

The magic of moddable Bethesda open world games lies in the power to repurpose the base game to suit the player that diverges entirely with the main intended gameplay.   I slogged through enough of the Fallout settlement building of pitiful shanty towns to see that kind of grind was not for me. Why waste precious game time looting spatulas off ghouls for that 1 unit of steel and rubber when you can just have infinite build materials at the click of a console command.  Plus there just isn't enough Nuka Cola bottles in all of the Commonwealth to build the kind of structures I wanted.

Fallout 4 didn't have to be just a pseudo FPS/RPG.  When I saw the beauty of the fractured freeway of Graygarden, I realized Fallout 4 VR is a very unique VR construction simulator albeit sited in a nuclear wasteland.  I need not limit myself to lore friendly structures and I could go all out and build whatever a modded system would let me.  However the post apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout contains aesthetically compelling sites of broken infrastructure that I didn't want to cover over but highlight it in all it's ruined glory.

With Graygarden, I felt compelled not to use any mods to artificially clean up or restore the location.   I relied heavily on Settlement Object Expansion Pack using Institute glass assets.   Using glass floors allowed a safe navigable structure (slipping is not a thing in the Creation Engine) and still reveal the these lovingly modeled splintered rebars and dangling bits of concrete beneath. It would have been a high crime against immersion to cover these up.

 

The joy of architecting in the game world is that even though glass ramps are a dangerous slip hazard no one would build in the real world, they work wonderfully in game. Not only do they provide unique views below, these institute glass ceiling assets are wide enough that Dogmeat and other followers do not get stuck or fall off as they do on regular ladders which I had originally before I found the SOE mod.   I was never so completely engaged in VR as I did building out Graygarden and I was able to power through a year end 40 hour real life fast.  Puzzling out how to structure the stairways to the 8 storied top deck was crazy fun as you had to  dynamically building an ascending path.  I fell to my death a few times losing an hour of work when I accidentally selected and moved the item I was standing on which has turned me into an obsessive compulsive saver- but also a heavily modded Workshop wheel CTDs a lot, a lot. 

My initial plan was to build as many flat level platforms as possible for settlement building for Sim Settlements. However after building everything out, I realized I didn't want to clutter this space with repetitive immersion breaking NPC settlers. I got enough of them back in Sanctuary Hills and Taffington Boathouse. So I maintain Graygarden as a robot colony true to it's historic origins and plan to make the decks into a museum.

Adding to my immersion, I kept getting hit with heavy radiation storms during construction and trusty Codsworth kept warning me "Radiation Mum".  I could have just flipped the weather to clear but it was fun to build under adverse conditions popping all the Rad-X and Radaway I had stockpiled.  The top deck displays some custom power armor and larger weaponry but most importantly I have a vertibird helipad for the Immersive Travel mod which I use for flying to Spectacle Island.  I went a little overboard with decorative statues on top.

I also added a triple relay of elevators to get to the vertibird without having to ascend via the glass ramps. Sadly I wasted a few hours trying to fix the Bethesda floating elevator button bug trying 2 separate mods. It didn't fix it so I don't use the elevator much.

(You will have to take my solemn word that these photos do not do justice to the fun of exploring the actual site in VR. I had originally planned to make a video walkthrough of the site but I realize that my head bobs uncontrollably and since I move through teleportation, a video would be a most unpleasant jiggly experience for the viewer.)