I just got Fallout 4 for the pc, but when it goes to detect video hardware, it says it cant identify anything, so the game gets set to low quality setting. I tried looking around online, but couldn't find a solid answer.

I have an alienware laptop, with a GTX 980M GPU and Intel i7 GPU, with windows 10.

Update the driver for your GPU. That might be the problem

If you have not tried it, have you set the launcher exe in NVidia Control Panel to use the High Performance GPU ?

If no, then that will probably sort you out.

If yes, and you still have the problem ...

Join the club http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1544248-bug-report-index-pc/page-12#entry24525362

I have sent detailled reports to Bethesda ( via the contact form aswell as the bug report index linked )

Also to NVidia

And to MSI

One of them should be able to help, unless they all just sit back and blame each other, hopefully one day we will get to the bottom of it. Optimus machines are a PITA, but I seem to recall the situation was the same for Skyrim users on similar machines when that game was first launched, so I think either NVidia or Bethesda need to update something to resolve the issues

One thing you can do in the mean time - Let the NVidia installer install Geforce Experience ( I know I dont like having another background systray tool running either ), get it to recognise you have Fallout installed, and use its Fallout 4 profile for your machine

It will not be perfect, but at least you will get a ball park setup, and can tweak it a bit afterwards until someone fesses up and solves the launcher using the NVidia GPU so it gets the settings correct

Mind posting a dxdiag report? (In spoiler tags pls. [spoiler*]TEXT GOES HERE[/spoiler*]. <--Just remove the *'s after "spoiler" to make it work in your post. Or use the 'Special BBcode" icon left of the 'Font' drop-down box (When posting) then paste the DxDiag contents in the text field.



To run a DxDiag report follow the steps below:


1. If you are running Windows Vista or higher go to your task bar.

2. Click on, "Start Button".

3. Click on, "Run".

4. In the pop-up window enter DxDiag and hit ok.

5. The DirectX Diagnostic Tool pop-up window should appear.

6. Click on, "Save all information".

Have you disabled the on board Intel GPU accidentally, or do you get any error mark in your device manager under Display adapters?

You should have two actually. An intel, and the GTX 980M

Also sometines if the correct Intel driver is not installed, Nvidia (accelerator) doesn't work either.

Try to update to the latest the Intel and the Nvidia driver.

The game will always fail to detect the Nvidia card and suggest low settings. It appears to be a laptop issue. You can check to see if the game is launching with the right card by looking at the pref file in your Fallout 4 folder in your documents/My Games/Fallout 4 folder and look for a line s3D3Device = "Nvidia Geforce GTX 980M". As long as you see that, you are good. Alternatively, you can use Nvidia Inspector of Control Panel monitor to see if the game is using the GPU.

With your card, choose Ultra settings/1080p resolution, then run the game. If you have a better monitor, you can likely run higher resolution too. If you have Steam Overlay on and set to show your FPS, you should see ~60 FPS (or higher if you turned off Vsync and have a 120hz monitor). If you see more like ~20 FPS and the game is unstable, it is not running off the 980M

My Razer laptop (Intel HD 4600 and GTX 870M) tells me to use low settings and even GeForce experience says my card is below minimum requirements for the game. But my card runs great with High settings, and even pretty good on Ultra. On laptops, the game seems to only detect the integrated card and report its capabilities, even though it will detect the dedicated card for writing the pref file and launching the game.

If you do have problems launching the game on the right card, its a software issue. I had that problem and in order to solve it and have the game launch on my 870M, I had to do a factory reset prior to a driver update to get rid of whatever registry changes I had accumulated that were interfering with launch. All other methods to force the right GPU to be used had failed.