Fallout 4 was one of the most anticipated games of 2015. The result was awesome as expected. The game bagged several Game of the Year Awards of popular sites. However as usual, the PC version of the game suffers from several issues like crash, black screen, stuttering and more.
In this guide, we teach you how to fix the most frequent bugs and errors encountered in Fallout 4 PC version. But before going any further, please make sure your PC meets the official system requirements to run the game. We also don’t recommend players to play the game on Laptop as the mobile GPUs are not officially supported. Find the minimum and recommended system requirements of the game below.
Fallout 4 Official System Requirements
Minimum Requirements
- OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-2300 2.8 GHz/AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz or equivalent
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or equivalent
- Hard Drive: 30 GB available space
Recommended Requirements
- OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
- Processor: Intel Core i7 4790 3.6 GHz/AMD FX-9590 4.7 GHz or equivalent
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB/AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB or equivalent
- Hard Drive: 30 GB available space
How to fix Fallout 4 Errors: Crash, Black Screen, Poor FPS, Freezing, Stuttering and more:
1 Crash during startup/random crashes/failed to launch fix:
- Players who are facing issues like the game crashing to desktop while launching or during gameplay should try updating their video card drivers. We suggest users to doing a clean install of the video card drivers by downloading them from the official website.
- If you have the game on Steam, we suggest you to verify the game cache to avoid such errors.
- Another simple but useful method is to play the game in Compatibility mode. For this, right click on the game’s .exe and click Properties. Under the Compatibility tab, set the Compatibility mode to either Windows XP SP3 or Vista.
2 Stuttering/Micro-stuttering during gameplay fix:
If your game is getting frozen every 2-3 seconds, you are facing the issue of stuttering. Issues like this can be solved by following the #1 method that is updating your graphic card drivers. Another solution for these kind of issues is turning off the V-Sync option and playing in fullscreen mode instead of window mode or borderless window mode.
3 xlive.dll/ xinput1_3.dll missing/corrupted fix:
This one is simple. Just download the missing DLL file from here and extract it in the game’s installation directory. Alternatively you can also download the DLL-Files Fixer from here and install it. Launch the fixer and go to the “Install DLL files” tab from top. Enter the name of the missing DLL in the search box. After that, it automatically installs the required DLL and your problem is solved. You can also check and fix registry errors with this tool.
4 Remove FPS cap in Fallout 4 fix:
Developers some time limit the FPS to 30 to have more stable gameplay. However if you believe your PC can handle the job and hit 60 FPS or above, you have to edit the game configuration file. It can be found in at
\Documents\My Games\Fallout 4\Fallout4Prefs.ini
Make a backup copy of the file to avoid future problems if any. Now to remove the FPS cap, set the iPresetinterval parameter to 0.
5 Low FPS/Lag in Fallout 4 fix:
This issue can again arise due to outdated video card drivers. So, update them before trying any other workaround. The second most basic thing to do in this case is to lower the graphics settings. This mainly includes GPU intensive features like Anti-aliasing and Post Processing.
Set the priority of the game in Task Manager to high.
If you are on NVIDIA GPU, then go to the NVIDIA control panel and set the “Power Management Mode” to “Prefer Maximum Performance” in 3D settings. Make sure the CUDA-GPUs is set to “All”. Also enable triple buffering, threaded optimization and textured filtering.
If you are playing on a Laptop, make sure you are using the dedicated Nvidia/AMD GPU for playing the game instead of integrated GPU.
6 Mouse acceleration fix in Fallout 4:
For this issue, open the configuration file which can be found at
\Documents\My Games\Fallout 4\Fallout4Prefs.ini
Change bForceIgnoreSmoothness=0 to bForceIgnoreSmoothness=1
7 Fallout 4 freezing fix:
This is more of a hardware oriented issue. The game starts to freeze when your PC gets overheated. Install or upgrade your system’s cooling system to resolve this problem.
8 Skip intro videos in Fallout 4:
If you are annoyed of those intro videos during the game’s startup, follow the given workaround. Navigate to
\Documents\My Games\Fallout 4\
Open Fallout4.ini from there and add this under [General]:
SIntroSequence=1
Do the same with Fallout4Prefs.ini and save.
9 Can’t change resolution in Fallout 4 fix:
If you are one of those who are having trouble changing the resolution in Fallout 4, then follow the steps. First open Fallout4Prefs.ini from
\Documents\My Games\Fallout 4\
Now find the below setting in it
bBorderless=1
bFull Screen=0
iSize H=1080
iSize W=2560
and set your desired resolution. Here H and W are the values of the resolution.
If you are still facing issues, feel free to ask in the comments. We will try our best to solve the problems you are facing to run the game.