Fallout 4 frame rate tanks in-game: Suggestions please?

[mauve]

I feel stupid for having to ask this, but I don't know much about troubleshooting issues like this. I picked up Fallout 4 on sale on Steam, and DAMN is the frame rate horrible. I have a decent enough PC (running Windows 7 x64), and I have the graphics quality set to medium (and I suspect the game downgraded to "low" after about fifteen minutes) but the frame rate and the control response times are so bad that I can barely play. In combat I pull the trigger on a gun, hear the gunfire, and then in half a second later the animation follows through and the shot is actually fired. I can barely navigate through menus because the cursor delay is so bad.

My sister installed the game on her own PC (also Windows 7) and had similar issues, so I'm hoping it's not a windows 7 compatibility issue.

I know next to nothing about fixing such problems; I've been lucky enough that most games I purchase for the PC run with minimal issue. Does anyone have any suggestions for things I could try? I passed the 2 hour gameplay mark for a Steam refund, and I'd really like to be able to play this. Where do I even start to troubleshoot this? Graphics card drivers? In-game settings?

[phil_]

All I'm getting besides the usual "Update your drivers, Bethesda doesn't care about PC gamerrz, etc." is some guy changed his "Shadow distance" to medium and that helped, and same thread someone suggested playing in a borderless window instead of full screen. But there was a steam thread informing the developers that borderless window mode was less than 60FPS on some other guy's triple monitor set-up. So mixed messages there. Things to try.

Other stuff I get is Fallout 4 apparently doesn't get along as well with AMD cards as it does with Nvidia, and that RAM speed might actually make a difference. Not much to do about either of those things.

[mauve]

Thanks, I'll give those a try. I've got an Nvidia card, but it looks like I haven't updated my drivers since 2014. So uh... that's probably a thing to do.

[Krylo]

Update your drivers, yes. Also try turning down draw distance, shadow distance, and anything else that has 'distance' on it. Those tend to cause the biggest frame rate drops in my experience.

And give us your full system specs. It might just come down to plugging in another RAM stick or upgrading your GPU.

Edit to Add: I'm on Win 7 and was able to play through the game when it was new just fine so I don't think it's an OS issue. HOPEFULLY it's GPU drivers or an old DirectX version that's the problem (update DirectX, too, btw).

[mauve]

I updated drivers and removed any extra effects like lens flare, motion blur and rain occlusion, and that combination helped a lot. There's still a minor bit of delay when navigating the pause menu, but that's more than tolerable in comparison to the way it was before. I can actually play now.