Fallout 4 Mods To Improve Performance And Boost FPS

Ever boot up Fallout 4 and immediately feel your PC slowly dying? You’re ready for adventure, but the game’s performance is just… not cooperating. I mean annoying stutters, sudden fps drops, and lag spikes. It’s a bummer when the base game struggles even on decent hardware.

Why is Fallout 4 so poorly optimized? The engine has some unresolved problems, and some areas downtown Boston for example are just tough. Common issues hurting your fps may include:

• Overly demanding visuals (god rays, shadows)
• Inefficient textures and distant object loading
• Engine bugs messing with physics and memory
• Complex areas overwhelming the system

Sure, you could buy a new graphics card, but honestly, for many of us, that’s not realistic or even the full answer. This is where mods are lifesavers for Fallout 4 performance. They fix the actual problems in the game’s code and assets that hardware alone can’t solve, cleaning things up and genuinely boosting your fps. 

Mods are often the smartest way to get the game running smoothly. 😉

List Of The Best Fallout 4 Performance Mods

Getting good performance in Fallout 4 with a hefty mod list or even just on base game can feel like a never-ending battle. But these mods? They are the heavy hitters, the silent guardians of your fps. They target everything from physics bugs to memory leaks to texture overload.

High FPS Physics Fix

This mod is crucial if you play Fallout 4 at frame rates above 60 fps. The base game’s physics engine is tied to the frame rate, which causes all sorts of bizarre issues when you go higher. This mod completely untethers the physics calculations, allowing you to enjoy a higher fps without the game breaking in weird ways.

📌 Core Features

• Untethers physics from framerate.
• Fixes jump height glitches at high fps.
• Cures dialogue desync issues.
• Eliminates NPC moonwalking.
• Prevents SSD loading stalls caused by high frame rates.
• Allows playing at any refresh rate without physics problems.

Buffout 4

Think of Buffout 4 as the ultimate stability and crash-prevention tool for Fallout 4, especially if you’re using a lot of mods. It’s a powerful F4SE plugin that acts as both a crash-catcher and a memory management helper, tackling some of the most common and frustrating issues that cause the game to suddenly quit on you.

📌 Main Functionality

• Catches and prevents common game crashes (CTDs).
• Improves memory handling, crucial for large mod lists.
• Logs crash information to help diagnose mod conflicts.
• Increases overall game stability and performance.

Sprint Stutter Fix

This is a simple, focused mod for Fallout 4 that eliminates a very specific but annoying micro-stutter that occurs when you initiate sprinting in first-person view. It provides a smoother, more fluid feeling right when you hit that sprint key, which helps with the overall sense of good performance.

📌 Mod Capabilities

• Removes micro-stutter when starting sprint in first-person.
• No changes to animations.
• No known side effects.
• Provides smoother motion during gameplay.

Baka ScrapHeap

Papyrus, Fallout 4’s scripting engine, can get overwhelmed, especially with complex mod setups. When it chokes, you get random pauses and stutters. Baka ScrapHeap increases the memory available to the script engine, giving it more room to breathe and preventing those pauses, leading to better sustained performance.

📌 Here’s What You Get

• Increases Papyrus script memory allocation.
• Reduces or eliminates random pauses.
• Improves stability with script-heavy mods.
• Smoothes out gameplay during intense scripting moments.

Wasteland 512 Textures Reloaded

Wasteland 512 RELOADED optimizes the game’s textures by downsizing the original vanilla assets to a smaller resolution (primarily 512px). This drastically reduces the VRAM footprint of the game and its DLCs. The clever part is it does this while keeping the visual quality surprisingly high during normal gameplay, offering a major performance boost.

📌 What’s Inside

• Downsizes vanilla textures across base game and all DLC.
• Significantly reduces VRAM usage.
• Maintains visual quality effectively.
• Improves loading times and reduces texture-related stutters.

FAR – Faraway Area Reform

This mod specifically targets the distant terrain textures (LOD) in Fallout 4. It re-optimizes over 6,000 of these textures to be more efficient for streaming and rendering. This means the distant landscapes load faster and are less taxing on your system, leading to smoother performance when looking across large open areas.

📌 Primary Effects

• Optimizes distant land textures (LOD).
• Improves streaming efficiency for outdoor environments.
• Reduces hitching when looking at distant areas.
• Helps maintain higher fps in open world spaces.

Optimized Vanilla Textures

Similar in goal to Wasteland 512, Optimized Vanilla Textures reworks the base game’s textures but focuses on using better compression and file formats to reduce their size and VRAM impact while aiming to keep the original art style as intact as possible. It’s another excellent option for gaining performance from texture optimization in Fallout 4.

📌 Mod Overview

• Optimizes original game textures.
• Reduces VRAM usage.
• Maintains vanilla art direction.
• Improves overall texture loading performance.

Ultra-Quality God Rays Performance Fix

Want the look of Ultra quality god rays without the crippling performance cost? This simple batch file tweak tricks the game into using the lower-performance settings profile for god rays while displaying them at what appears to be the higher visual quality. It’s a neat trick to keep the atmospheric lighting effect without tanking your fps.

📌 What this mod does

• Enables perceived “Ultra” god ray quality.
• Uses lower performance settings profile.
• Saves significant fps compared to true Ultra god rays.
• Maintains atmospheric lighting.

Shadow Boost FO4

Shadow Boost is a dynamic performance mod for Fallout 4 that actively monitors your current framerate. When your fps drops below a certain threshold, it temporarily reduces the shadow draw distance to ease the load on your GPU. Once your fps recovers, it restores the original setting. This provides automatic performance optimization exactly when you need it.

📌 Key Features

• Dynamically adjusts shadow draw distance based on fps.
• Boosts frames during performance dips.
• Restores shadows when fps is stable.
• Automatic and seamless performance optimization.

Dynamic Performance Tuner & Load Accelerator

Taking the dynamic approach further, this mod tunes both volumetric lighting (god rays) and other performance settings on the fly to help you maintain a target fps in Fallout 4. It constantly adjusts these demanding graphical features in the background to keep your frame rate as stable as possible during gameplay. It also includes functionality to speed up loading screens.

📌 Core Features

• Dynamically tunes god rays and other settings.
• Aims to maintain a target fps.
• Automatic performance adjustments.
• Includes loading screen acceleration.

Boston FPS Fix – aka BostonDT PreVis-PreCombine

Downtown Boston is infamous for its terrible performance in vanilla Fallout 4 due to broken pre-vis and pre-combine data. This mod is specifically designed to fix that. It regenerates the pre-combined meshes and visibility data for the downtown area, allowing the game to render the complex environment much more efficiently, resulting in huge fps gains where the game was previously unplayable for many.

📌 What This Mod Changes

• Fixes broken pre-vis and pre-combines in downtown Boston.
• Provides significant fps boosts in the city center.
• Improves performance in the most demanding game area.
• Essential for smooth exploration of Boston.

Insignificant Object Remover

Does Fallout 4 really need to render every single tiny piece of debris, like pebbles, empty bottles, and random junk items scattered across the wasteland? Probably not for your performance. This mod simply removes those “insignificant” objects that contribute to draw calls and can lower your fps without adding much to the visual experience or immersion.

📌 Features Rundown

• Removes small, insignificant objects from the world.
• Reduces draw calls and GPU load.
• Provides a small but noticeable fps increase.
• Does not negatively impact immersion.

BethINI (Utility)

BethINI is an indispensable external utility for any Fallout 4 player, especially mod users trying to optimize performance. It provides a clean, user-friendly interface to properly configure your game’s INI files. It fixes common issues with the default INIs, exposes hidden settings, and lets you quickly set up profiles for different graphical or performance needs.

📌 Main Functionality

• Cleans and optimizes game INI files.
• Provides a user-friendly interface for configuration.
• Exposes hidden game settings.
• Allows quick switching between performance and quality profiles.
• Essential tool for any Fallout 4 modder.

Stuttering & Memory Patch ENBoost

Developed by Boris Vorontsov (creator of ENBSeries), ENBoost is a memory management utility for 64-bit games like Fallout 4. It helps the game handle memory more efficiently, particularly with large texture mods, by offloading certain caching processes. This can significantly reduce stutters and improve stability, especially on systems with less VRAM or when running many high-resolution textures.

📌Key Features

• Improves 64-bit memory handling.
• Reduces stutters caused by memory issues.
• Helps stabilize games with high-resolution textures.
• Beneficial for systems with limited VRAM.

NVIDIA Reflex Support

This mod injects NVIDIA’s Reflex API into Fallout 4. If you have a compatible NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, Reflex significantly reduces input latency by optimizing the rendering pipeline between your mouse/keyboard and what appears on screen. While it doesn’t increase your fps, lower input latency makes the game feel much more responsive, which is a critical part of perceived performance, especially in combat.

📌 Mod Overview

• Adds NVIDIA Reflex API support.
• Reduces input latency.
• Improves responsiveness in combat.
• Requires compatible NVIDIA GeForce GPU.

Load Accelerator

Tired of staring at Fallout 4’s loading screens? Even on fast SSDs, they can take a while. Load Accelerator tackles this by temporarily disabling V-Sync only during loading screens. This simple trick allows the game to load assets as fast as possible without waiting for frame synchronization, drastically cutting down loading times. It has no impact on in-game performance or fps.

📌 Core Features

• Disables V-Sync during loading screens only.
• Significantly speeds up loading times.
• Works best with SSDs.
• No impact on in-game performance.

No Ugly Plants And More

This is a niche performance mod for Fallout 4 for players who prioritize frames over flora in certain areas. It replaces the textures for specific dense, ground-level vegetation (like certain vines and weeds) with tiny, transparent textures. This removes the visual clutter and reduces the rendering load in areas where these plants are prevalent, offering a small fps boost and cleaner sightlines.

📌Detailed Mod Features List

• Replaces specific plant textures with invisible ones.
• Reduces rendering load in vegetated areas.
• Provides a potential small fps gain.
• Offers a cleaner visual aesthetic (if you dislike those plants!).

How Mods Make Your Fallout 4 Run Better?

So, how do these community creations actually boost your fps and smooth things out? It’s all about fixing the stuff the base game engine struggles with. Mods basically get under the hood and tackle issues Bethesda either missed or couldn’t fully fix.

Here are the main ways mods make Fallout 4 run better:

• Patching Engine Problems: They directly fix bugs in the Creation Engine itself, like the weird physics at high fps or memory leaks that cause crashes.
• Optimizing Game Files: Mods replace inefficient textures and 3D models with smaller, better-optimized versions that are easier on your GPU, freeing up VRAM and boosting performance.
• Fixing Problem Areas: They correct broken data in specific parts of the world (like downtown Boston!) that make the game render things inefficiently, bringing big fps gains in those spots.
• Better Memory Handling: Some mods and utilities improve how the game uses your system’s memory, reducing stutters and improving stability, especially with lots of mods.
• Opening Up Settings: Utilities let you properly tweak hidden configuration options that give you finer control over graphical settings impacting performance and fps than the in-game menu allows.

Basically, mods provide targeted fixes for the fundamental issues hurting Fallout 4’s performance. They let the community polish the game beyond its original state.

Final Recommendations and Fallout 4 Optimization Guide

Okay, deep breath. That’s a lot of mods and technical stuff, I know. If you’re just starting out trying to get better performance in Fallout 4, don’t feel like you have to install every single one of these immediately. Think of it as a tiered approach.

Here’s a solid strategy to boost your fps and improve overall performance:

1. Start with the Essentials: Absolutely get F4SE (Fallout 4 Script Extender) first, as many crucial performance mods require it. Then, install Buffout 4 and High FPS Physics Fix. These two tackle fundamental stability and high fps issues and are non-negotiable staples for better Fallout 4 performance. Also grab BethINI and use it to set up a clean INI profile tailored to your system. This fixes a lot of base game issues before you even add other mods.
   
2. Address Micro-Stutters: If you’re still getting annoying little hitches, add Sprint Stutter Fix and Baka ScrapHeap. They target specific scripting and movement stutters that hurt perceived performance.
   
3. Optimize Textures (Pick One): Choose one of the texture optimization mods – Wasteland 512 RELOADED or Optimized Vanilla Textures. Don’t use both! Add FAR – Faraway Area Reform for distant object performance. This will significantly reduce VRAM usage and help your fps, especially on cards with less memory.
   
4. Tackle Lighting and Shadows: Add Shadow Boost FO4 for dynamic shadow optimization. You could also try the Ultra-Quality God Rays Performance Fix if god rays are a big fps drain for you.
   
5. Fix Problem Areas: If downtown Boston is killing your fps, Boston FPS Fix is mandatory. Insignificant Object Remover is an easy win for a minor performance boost everywhere.
   
6. Consider Utilities: If you’re running tons of mods or have memory issues, Stuttering &
   Memory Patch ENBoost might help. Load Accelerator is just a quality of life improvement for load times, not strictly performance but feels good. NVIDIA Reflex Support is great if you have the right card and want lower latency.

Install a few at a time, test your game, and see what gives you the best results. Every system is different, and what works wonders for one person might be less impactful for another. Be patient, and don’t be afraid to experiment a little. I have the same list of Fallout New Vegas performance mods and Stalker 2 Mods for removing stutter and improving fps because honestly I got really tired of both games mediocre performance. 😀

How to make Fallout 4 perform better?

The best way is a combination of tweaking game settings (use BethINI!), installing essential performance mods that fix engine bugs and optimize assets, and ensuring your drivers are up to date. Focus on mods like Buffout 4, High FPS Physics Fix, texture optimizers, and area-specific fixes like Boston FPS Fix.

Should I turn on performance mode in Fallout 4?

Fallout 4 doesn’t really have a dedicated “performance mode” setting in the traditional sense like some newer games. You adjust settings like shadow distance, god rays, and texture quality individually in the options or, more effectively, using a tool like BethINI. Lowering these settings generally improves performance and fps.

Does Fallout 4 support 144Hz?

The base game can run at 144Hz (or higher), but the physics engine is tied to the frame rate. Without High FPS Physics Fix, running above 60 fps causes game-breaking issues like broken physics, dialogue problems, and animation glitches. So, yes, you can target 144Hz, but you absolutely must use the High FPS Physics Fix mod to do so correctly and maintain stable performance.

Is Fallout 4 CPU or GPU intensive?

Fallout 4 can be demanding on both, but it’s often more CPU intensive than many games of its era, especially in complex areas like cities or during heavy combat. This is due to things like AI calculations, physics, and how the engine processes objects. However, graphical settings like God Rays, Shadow Distance, and Texture Quality are very GPU intensive and significantly impact fps. It’s a bit of a balancing act, but the CPU can often be a bottleneck in specific situations.

How many CPU cores does Fallout 4 use?

Fallout 4 is primarily optimized to use a few CPU cores well, rather than spreading the load across many. It heavily relies on single-core performance for some tasks, though it does utilize more than two cores. Having a CPU with strong single-core speed is generally more beneficial for Fallout 4 performance than having a huge number of cores with lower individual speeds.

Does Fallout 4 on PC have a frame rate cap?

Yes, the base Fallout 4 PC version is soft-capped at 60 fps because of the physics engine tie-in. While you might see frames go slightly above 60, pushing it consistently without the High FPS Physics Fix mod will break the game’s physics and cause problems.

How much RAM does Fallout 4 need?

Bethesda’s official minimum requirement was 8 GB RAM, and the recommended was also 8 GB RAM back in the day. However, especially with mods, 8 GB can be limiting for Fallout 4 performance. 16 GB of RAM is highly recommended for a smoother experience and stability, particularly if you use texture mods or have a large mod list. More RAM helps prevent stuttering and crashing related to memory limits.

Does Fallout 4 support DLSS?

No, the base Fallout 4 does not natively support NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), AMD FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution), or Intel XeSS. These are features implemented by the game developer. Fallout 4 was released before these technologies were common. There might be unofficial mods attempting to inject similar techniques, but native support is not present for better performance.