How to increase the draw distance in the Bethesda (Gamebryo engine) Fallout games?

How to increase the draw distance in the Bethesda (Gamebryo engine) Fallout games? - Side view of charming girl drawing in notebook while sitting on bed with crop mother freelancer using laptop

The grass draw distance was extremely limited in Oblivion, but Fallout 3 and New Vegas still have quite noticeable issues with loading (streaming?) their sparse landscape. I've maxed out all related sliders in the options menu.

The related .ini variables apparently are (15 is the highest in-game setting):

fObjectLODMax=
fItemLODMax=
fActorLODMax=

According to some reports the settings can be increased manually, with a performance and a potential stability impact of course — that's why Bethesda capped the in-game values.

The .ini files are located in %USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\Fallout3\ and %USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\FalloutNV\. Visit PC Gaming Wiki for further information.


UPDATE: The GOG versions have some values increased over the original releases.



Best Answer

In 'FalloutPrefs.ini':

  • Under the [Grass] section:
    fGrassStartFadeDistance: the higher this number, the further away the grass will be drawn. A value of 18000 will set it to 5 cells, for example.

Additional vegetative tweaks, in 'Fallout.ini':

  • Under the [Grass] section:
    iMinGrassSize: decrease this value to improve the grass density.
    iMaxGrassTypesPerTexure (the misspelling is supposed to be there): increase this to get a wider variety of textures.

Naturally, all improvements come at a performance cost.
And, as always, be sure to create backups of your .ini files.


Here is an overview of these values pertaining to Skyrim (the parameters work exactly the same, if I'm not mistaken).




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How do you increase your draw distance in Fallout 4?

Increasing fDefaultBlockLoadDistanceLow will increase the distance Lights will render. Get new vegas configurator, you can increase it even more. The default value is 15, you can double that to 30. Once you've made that change, go back into your game and adjust the sliders in your Options screen to max them out again.



The Creation Engine Did Nothing Wrong | It's Bethesda! | Morrowind to Fallout 76




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