Does draw distance rely on GPU or CPU? (in Fallout 4)

sargentoblivion

Prominent
Feb 16, 2018
8
0
510
I just bought Fallout 4 and when I loaded it up the following things happened...

-In the vault at medium to high settings, I had a stable 60FPS (capped at 60FPS) with all the cool lighting, but not many entities being rendered, apart from the small radroaches.
-When I exited the vault, my PC would occasionally drop to 40FPS, so I lowered the settings, making draw distance lower and my PC ran it just fine, occasionally dipping to 55FPS.
-I increased the shaders and the PC still ran it at the same FPS.
-When I got into a battle where there were many enemies in an area the FPS dropped significantly again.
-I put all the shaders back to low and the FPS was still significantly low.

I noticed that my PC can render shadows and wetness just fine, but whenever I am in a large open area with lots of things to process at one time, my FPS drops. I do not know if I am to upgrade my CPU or GPU, to mess around with the graphics or overclock. Also would the fact that I am on windowed-borderless mode impact my FPS significantly?

My specs are...
GTX 1050ti
AMD FX 6300 (Not overclocked)
8GB DDR3 RAM

*This may be slightly unrelated, but whenever I am playing Fortnite and I go to TItled Towers, where there is a large number of breakable objects, my framerate tends to dip.*
 
Solution
Shadow distance is most likely what is ruining your FPS when outdoors and in firefights, draw distance in the creation engine generally uses both CPU and GPU resources. FX CPU's have always preformed pretty poorly in fallout 4, linked a bench below, I would upgrade your CPU first but not to anything on the AM3+ platform. I would recommend a switch to ryzen or a modern intel platform, either would require a new mobo, cpu, and ddr4 ram.

fallout-4-cpu-benchmark-1080-u.png

Dunlop0078

Titan
Ambassador
Shadow distance is most likely what is ruining your FPS when outdoors and in firefights, draw distance in the creation engine generally uses both CPU and GPU resources. FX CPU's have always preformed pretty poorly in fallout 4, linked a bench below, I would upgrade your CPU first but not to anything on the AM3+ platform. I would recommend a switch to ryzen or a modern intel platform, either would require a new mobo, cpu, and ddr4 ram.

fallout-4-cpu-benchmark-1080-u.png
 
Solution

sargentoblivion

Prominent
Feb 16, 2018
8
0
510

Thanks, I was planning on getting an i5 8400 and then getting a new GPU later.