How to unlock your framerate in Fallout 76

The beta version of Fallout 76, or B.E.T.A., arrived on PC yesterday. We have discovered some things during the process, such as the available graphics options and the lack of FOV settings in the game. However, one of the major problems with any PC game is the ability to run at capture speeds arbitrarily high. If you have a prominent gaming computer with a high refresh rate monitor, being forced to play at 60 fps is like a training wheel on a racing bike.

Fortunately, there is a solution to the limit in Fallout 76, and it will be familiar to anyone who has ever played at Bethesda in the series. (As for DIY with any game file, you do it at your own risk.)

After running the game once and choosing your settings, exit it and open Windows Explorer. Navigate to the "Documents My Games Fallout 76" folder and open the Fallout76Prefs.ini file. This is where most of the game's settings are (along with a few others in Fallout76.ini). If you search for "iPresentInterval", you must find the line of text to edit. If the line is missing, add it as [Display] on your mind. The revised line should read "iPresentInterval = 0" to disable vsync and remove the framerate limiter.

As an alternative to users with Nvidia cards, you can try to force the deactivation of vsync in the Nvidia control panel. Navigate to Manage 3D Settings and disable vertical synchronization. It certainly worked for me in the tests, although it did not seem to work for others. I've tried the same thing with an AMD graphics card, using only the AMD settings to force the disabling of the sync. This does not seem to have any effect, so it is best to stay with the INI file edition.

To check if it worked, you can still launch the beta version of Fallout 76 even if no test is in progress. Perform a framerate overlay like FRAPS and you should see the initial loading screens with incredibly high framerates. On a fast PC with a 2080 Ti, I saw up to 2500 and up. If the frame rate is set to 60 or higher refresh rate displays, it seems to target half of your refresh rate (so 72 frames per second on a 144 Hz display), does not work. You may need to run the full screen mode instead of the borderless window mode.

Some remarks for the moment on the removal of the framerate limiter. Bethesda's previous games have linked some of the game logic to the number of frames per second. As a result, problems such as physics and speed of movement can be broken if you use excessively high processing speeds. Skyrim with iPresentInterval = 0 is basically unplayable – the dragons are teleporting and flying backwards and other shenanigans – and Fallout 4 was a well-known problem: you could get stuck on a terminal.

As far as I know, Fallout 4 has been corrected to solve this problem, but if you exceed the threshold of 144 frames per second, the game speeds up. If you look down, you can easily break 200 frames per second and advance much faster than normal. In a single-player game, of course, do what you like. In multiplayer, however, this normally enters the cheat classification.

With Fallout 76, it seems that Bethesda has made some changes to the engine to improve the situation compared to Fallout 4. I will confirm this point in the next beta of tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure that the game supports running at the refresh rate of your display default (up to 144Hz), even with iPresentInterval = 1. So, if you have a display of 144Hz or 120Hz, the above INI hacking may even not not be necessary. That's the good news. The bad news is that beyond 144 frames per second, some problems remain.

Bethesda will have to make sure everything is working properly and that everyone is running the game at the right pace, because you can not create a multiplayer game in which some people can move faster and break physics. I've noticed framerates of almost 200 frames per second inside some buildings during the beta, and as with Fallout 4, things have accelerated. Nicknamed "fast hacking", it is a banable offense in most multiplayer games.

Bethesda may lock INI file changes or implement a hard-coded FPS cap. Let's hope that the ultimate solution is to provide PC gamers the ability to operate with an unlocked frame rate, at least up to an appropriately high ceiling of 240 frames per second, for these owners. 240Hz screen. In my opinion, if a game engine can handle 20 to 120 frames per second without problems, this same code can also be adapted to support 20 to 240 frames per second. As we have already said, coded hard coding ceilings are a remnant of a bygone era and must disappear.