Fallout 4 widescreen lighting fix

Fallout 4 has just been released and I’ve been stuck fighting a lighting issue rather than raiders due to stretching the game to widescreen, a massive 3440×1440 due to having an LG ultra-wide monitor, the 34UM95. I’m not sure if this happens with smaller 21:9 widescreens notably 2560×1080, but the lighting has been confirmed to break with a resolution of 5760×1080.

This error typically only happens indoors where there’s a lot of shadows and lights within a small area, but it’s incredibly annoying as it takes up a good third of the screen.

I’m not even sure why Bethesda didn’t support ultra-wide monitors in the resolution selection but there are quite a few of us out there with larger unconventional monitors. To even get the game to run in fullscreen on my monitor I went into ‘Documents’ > ‘My Games’ > ‘Fallout 4’ and then edited the Fallout4Prefs.ini fields to this:

iSize H=1440
iSize W=3440

The above directory is on windows 7 and may differ if you have an alternate operating system.

Now to fix the lighting. If you’re using an ultra-widescreen monitor with Fallout 4 you’ll have go into the ‘Prefs’ file like above and set:

bComputeShaderDeferredTiledLighting=0

Here’s some screenshots of the lighting surface that appears amidst some lights:

Fallout 4 Lighting
Fig1. – The lighting surface error in Fallout 4.
Fallout 4 Lighting
Fig2. – The lighting inside a Concord building.
Fallout 4 Lighting
Fig3. – How the lighting should look instead of the above image.

There will still be a couple of bugs in the game such as the sniper scope image below, but the lighting one is the most noticeable.

Fallout 4 Lighting
Fig4. – The sniper scope screen.

Fallout 3 – Bethesdas best work, so far…

Fallout 3, commonly referred to as Bethesda’s biggest milestone in the gaming industry and a game that has revolutionized RPG’s. However what makes this game so brilliant? below I’ll delve into each aspect of why players find this game so thrilling and compare against a few other RPG’s along the way.

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