Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hello!

I've been playing Fallout 4 at 3440x1440 since release with varying success (goddamn you Bethesda, I love your games but please hire Boris Vorontsov or learn how to code for DirectX properly: I am sick of Bethesda games running on engines that are four years out of date at release). For some time I have been using Flawless Widescreen with a mod (https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/274) to get 21:9 support. This has been a fine solution for some time, but I have recently encountered an issue I'd love some advice with.

I will apologise now for the length of this post: the problem I am experiencing is a little complicated and I need to explain how my machine is set up and how I use it to explain how I found the issue. I am also trying to anticipate questions ahead of time as I am in a weird time zone so it will take me a while to respond to replies.

I have noticed that with many older DirectX 9 and 10 games that Crossfire was actually dropping performance, so I have changed my setup to have Crossfire off by default. This yielded an immediate gain in Fallout 4 and all was well until about a week ago (new Radeon drivers, 18.6.1, to support the latest release of Windows 10).

Moving away from Crossfire is fine for my use case: the games I play that support GPU scaling well support DirectX12 and MGPU, so I don't need Crossfire for those. The games it doesn't work on it's a wash anyway, and when I am encoding video or running modelling software OpenCL allows scaling without Crossfire. For the rare case I want to play a Crossfire game I just enable Crossfire and reboot my machine and then disable it after I am done.

This has also meant I can plug my second monitor into my second GPU. On the rare instance I enable Crossfire I don't miss the second monitor, but for the rest of the time the second GPU can at least take on the work of drawing the second screen. All this has been working fine, with some minor hiccups (I have since solved) with the enable/disable process for Crossfire. Great.

But, there is some weirdness happening in Fallout 4 (and Windows) since making these changes.

Let's say I start the machine fresh. Windows loads. Everything is great, windows drag around very fast. I load Flawless Widescreen, everything is fine. I start Steam. Still all good. Now I start Fallout 4 (using the F4SE launcher). Immediately I notice that the video playback is stuttery (audio is fine). I load a savegame and while ENB reports a solid 40 to 60 FPS (good enough for 3440x1440 with FreeSync) it's not smooth. So I exit to Windows, and suddenly I can't drag windows around the screen without them jerking and moving in insane steps, even if I close Flawless Widescreen. If I reboot, Windows drag around just fine, until I start FW and Fallout 4 again.

So, what happens if I load Fallout 4 without Flawless Widescreen? Besides the UI being wonky, the performance is fine: Fallout 4 runs fine, and if I exit back to Windows I can drag explorer windows around again and they move as fast as I can move the mouse, and smoothly.

It would be easy for me to just declare that Flawless Widescreen is at fault, but I'd love some advice diagnosing this further.

Does anyone have any suggestions about what to do next? How can an issue (seemingly) caused by code injection remain after the injector (Flawless Widescreen) and injectee (Fallout 4) are both closed? Is there some interaction between Flawless Widescreen and ENB that's maybe setting something within the driver that is reset on reboot?

For now, I am using 21:9 fixes in DEF_UI (https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/10654) and just dealing with the few instances that the aspect ratio can't be fixed by mods alone, but I'd love to hear about other people's experiences running Fallout 4 in 21:9, and to hear any suggestions to investigating my issue.

If it's relevant, here's my current build: http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/9510180

On my Radeon settings the only settings I have changed from default are Vertical Refresh (set to Enhanced Sync) and Frame Rate Target Control (set to 150 FPS).

Thanks for reading my wall of text, and I look forward to your replies and suggestions!

Are you sure they aren't running in the background? (Look in Task Manager)