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

William Harris |

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.

3

2 Answers

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).

2

According to a Gamerpoets video, the relevant settings in Fallout 3 and their increased values are:

in Fallout.ini

fNearDistance=8
bForceFullLOD=1

in FalloutPrefs.ini

fGrassStartFadeDistance=18000
fLODFadeOutMultActors=15
fLODFadeOutMultItems=10
fLODFadeOutMultObjects=15
fTreeLoadDistance=250000
fBlockLoadDistanceLow=250000

I wasn't able to make any difference by raising fObjectLODMax, fItemLODMax and fActorLODMax to 30. I'm unsure if the settings work in Fallout 3.

As said in the original question, GOG raised some graphical settings, improved compatibility on modern systems and disabled mouse acceleration when the games were released on GOG in 2017. You can still apply the same tweaks manually in the other versions, but Games for Windows - LIVE (GFWL) may cause issues since the service isn't supported by Microsoft anymore.

I'll verify later if the same tweaks apply to New Vegas. This answer only covers Fallout 3.

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