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

fallout-3fallout-new-vegaspc

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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