Is XB1S not powerful enough to run Fallout 4?

[dragontology]

I have Fallout 4 on both PC (Steam) and Xbox One (we have the white 2TB Xbox One S). On the PC, Fallout (and Elder Scrolls) games have a bunch of problems, but that's part of the fun of PC gaming, right? I played Fallout 3 and New Vegas on Xbox 360, as well as Oblivion and Skyrim. I have all the achievements for all of them on both PC and Xbox. However, the XB1S continues to fail me with Fallout 4.

 

Mostly what will happen is, the game will stop responding and I'll get a grinding sound. It's not a hardware sound (e.g. fan clicking). I can always jump to the Xbox home screen and force quit the game. Other games don't do this. Xbox One games, Xbox 360 games. Disc games, digital games (no disc required). Literally only Fallout 4 does this. I've deleted the 2GB cache and force reboot the console. It doesn't really matter. After force quitting the game, I can jump right back in. It can happen 5 minutes into my game after a cold boot after being off for 2 days. Or it can happen 4 hours after it happened and I force quit the game and started it up.

 

The other thing is, a loading screen will dump me back at the Xbox home screen, and the game can't be resumed, only relaunched.

 

Fallout 4 has a good auto-save system. I've never lost more than 5-10 minutes of gameplay due to this.

 

The third and by far least common issue is severe input lag. Basically the game will wait 2-5 seconds before taking any action. This is the only bug I have proof of. Since the others are more... instant... I haven't captured them doing it. The first bug, I can absolutely get video of, but I don't think it will help without catching it happening (before the fact as opposed to after). If I could make my iPhone (or my wife's Droid Turbo 2) record on a one minute loop, I might be able to catch the bug, but again, I could be playing for hours. And the video wouldn't really prove much. Here's a video of the input lag. Please excuse the mess!

 

Actually now I can think of another game that behaved similarly. Final Fantasy XV pulled this every single time I'd resume the game. Force quit and relaunch and it's fine, but if you save the game, power off the console, and the next day (or whenever) turn it on (wake from sleep), sign in, and launch the game, there's a similar sound bug, and horrible lag. Quitting the game and relaunching it fixes it every time. Fallout 4's problem comes up randomly, and happens even if the game is relaunched, or resumed.

 

As a PC gamer, I'm inclined to think this would be a symptom of a failing GPU, but this only happens in Fallout 4, and not other games, and when it's not bugging out on me, it mostly plays fine. No graphical artefacts or anything that would also indicate GPU failure. So I don't think it's that.

[Dysphoria]

Ive never had problems on my PC with  Fallout 4... always ran smooth... havent played it in a while though....

[George P Global Moderator]

If it released on Xbox One it'll play on the S, just not as good as it can on the X or the PC.  If you're fine with lower level visuals/performance then it's fine.

[Xerxes]

I have a X1 (just the normal one, not the S) and Fallout 4 does (sometimes) lag up abit for me, sometimes it can get so bad the game grinds to a halt and freezes. Only Fallout 4 does it, so maybe the game just pushes the console too hard? it doesn't do it all the time, I fired it maybe a few months ago and for the short blast it was smooth as butter. So I dunno :shrugs:

2 minutes ago, George P said:

If it released on Xbox One it'll play on the S, just not as good as it can on the X or the PC.  If you're fine with lower level visuals/performance then it's fine.

It will only run better on the X1X if Bethesda released a patch to take advantage of the extra power, which they might of done but not sure?

[George P Global Moderator]

8 minutes ago, Xerxes said:

I have a X1 (just the normal one, not the S) and Fallout 4 does (sometimes) lag up abit for me, sometimes it can get so bad the game grinds to a halt and freezes. Only Fallout 4 does it, so maybe the game just pushes the console too hard? it doesn't do it all the time, I fired it maybe a few months ago and for the short blast it was smooth as butter. So I dunno :shrugs:

It will only run better on the X1X if Bethesda released a patch to take advantage of the extra power, which they might of done but not sure?

Don't know, but at the least it should load faster or stream in content faster.

[spaceelf]

1 hour ago, Xerxes said:

It will only run better on the X1X if Bethesda released a patch to take advantage of the extra power, which they might of done but not sure?

It will run better on the X1X regardless.  Things run better on the X1X for many reasons (caching content for games that aren't aware of the extra RAM, significantly faster internal drive, much better at sticking to its intended framerate, etc)

 

It would look better too, just not as good as it would with an enhanced patch.

 

(And yes, they did. - https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/xbox-one/xbox-one-x-enhanced-list )

 

(Fallout 4 is one of the titles I've heard the original X1 is horrible with, but I have no experience.)

Edited April 25, 2018 by dwLostCat

[spaceelf]

I don't know if you already did or not, but you might try running it from an external drive.

[dragontology]

23 hours ago, Euphoria said:

Ive never had problems on my PC with  Fallout 4... always ran smooth... havent played it in a while though....

You're in the "Microsoft console (Xbox)" forum, bud... runs good on my PC, too. Xeon 1231v3, 16GB RAM... GPU could be better but it's good enough. This thread is about if the game is good enough to run on the Xbox One S in particular.

22 hours ago, George P said:

If it released on Xbox One it'll play on the S, just not as good as it can on the X or the PC.  If you're fine with lower level visuals/performance then it's fine.

That awkward moment when people say, in not so many words, that they didn't read the post... I'm referring to some pretty specific bugs. I also play on a pretty good PC, I know it's lesser visuals (but honestly I can't tell the difference, the biggest difference is longer load times).

21 hours ago, dwLostCat said:

I don't know if you already did or not, but you might try running it from an external drive.

I have enough space on my portable SSD. USB 3.0 or 3.1 (not sure), and of course it's an SSD... Samsung T3 500GB. It's about as fast as a desktop SATA SSD. Much faster than any console hard drive. Will the Xbox need to completely take the drive over? Because I'm not willing to give up the whole drive. I could pick up a 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive on Amazon (I like the little aluminium ones, and they have great read/write speeds) and install on that, just for Fallout 4.

 

I wish I'd gotten the 500GB version... instead we went for 2TB. If we got the 500GB, we'd have already filled it (our 2TB is 73% filled) and I'd have been able to get my wife to let me throw a WD MyBook 6TB or 8TB drive at it. But, those aren't terribly fast, either... They just have lots and lots of space.

 

Microsoft really needs to start putting SSDs in Xboxes. They start doing that, and SSD prices will drop. They're not bad now but a Samsung T5 (newest version of what I got) is $160 for 500GB (mine was $200). WD has a MyPassport 500GB SSD for $140, and that's probably just as good. The WD goes up to $300 for 1TB, and the Samsung is $350 for 1TB and $725 for 2TB.

[spaceelf]

1 hour ago, dragontology said:

I have enough space on my portable SSD. USB 3.0 or 3.1 (not sure), and of course it's an SSD... Samsung T3 500GB. It's about as fast as a desktop SATA SSD. Much faster than any console hard drive. Will the Xbox need to completely take the drive over? Because I'm not willing to give up the whole drive. I could pick up a 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive on Amazon (I like the little aluminium ones, and they have great read/write speeds) and install on that, just for Fallout 4.

 

I wish I'd gotten the 500GB version... instead we went for 2TB. If we got the 500GB, we'd have already filled it (our 2TB is 73% filled) and I'd have been able to get my wife to let me throw a WD MyBook 6TB or 8TB drive at it. But, those aren't terribly fast, either... They just have lots and lots of space.

 

Microsoft really needs to start putting SSDs in Xboxes. They start doing that, and SSD prices will drop. They're not bad now but a Samsung T5 (newest version of what I got) is $160 for 500GB (mine was $200). WD has a MyPassport 500GB SSD for $140, and that's probably just as good. The WD goes up to $300 for 1TB, and the Samsung is $350 for 1TB and $725 for 2TB.

Sadly it doesn't work that way, it will have to be formatted for gaming on the X1 and has to be at least 240GB I believe.

 

There isn't a universe where a 1TB SSD is anywhere near as cheap as a 1TB HD.  We'd all love it to be true, but it just isn't going to happen yet.

Edited April 26, 2018 by dwLostCat

[dragontology]

"At least 240GB". Le sigh. I remember the days when Microsoft wouldn't trust us with any more than 16GB, and then they graciously raised it to 32GB. This was flash drives for the Xbox 360. And if you used anything faster than whatever their top benchmark was (which could be attainable with a 7200RPM hard drive over USB 2), it would tell you it failed the test and you were on your own, but the game Borderlands was proven to install a little faster and take less time loading.

 

The 250GB version of one of those hard drives (either the Samsung or the WD) was like $100, that's not bad. And these are bus powered drives, so you could plug one up in the back and let it dangle off the back of your entertainment center and it would just work. Assuming an SSD would work (it should).