Fallout 4 to get native 1440p PS4 Pro patch next week, PC owners to get a 58GB 'Hi Res Texture Pack'

I thought this was somewhat interesting given the recent talk over download sizes. Bethesda are releasing a 58GB Hi Res Texture Pack for Fallout 4, like they did with Skyrim. It's an optional download of course but wow. 58GB of just textures lets me know that my internet speed is certainly not ready for the super hi-def future yet.

For comparison, the Skyrim HD Texture Pack from 2012 was a 3GB download.

They also have some recommended specs for PCs running the Hi Res update. This isn't a minimum requirement list but certainly is pretty beefy. I know that Mafia 3 recommended a 1060 but I think this is the first thing I have seen that recommends as 1080.

Recommended PC Specs

Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)

Intel Core i7-5820K or better

GTX 1080 8GB

8GB+ Ram

The PS4 pro patch was mentioned a while ago and is finally coming next week. It is meant to add:

Enhanced lighting and graphic features, including:

Native 1440p resolution

Enhanced draw distance for trees, grass, objects and NPCs

Enhanced Godray effects

No word on how big the download is for that. Hopefully Digital Foundry will look at the PC pack and the Pro Patch and say what's up. They also said that there will be an announcement about mods across all platforms next week for both Fallout 4 and Skyrim: Special Edition.

58GB is insane, I'd love to see some shots that justify it. Somehow I don't think they will live up to the file size, and most people will end up preferring user made hi-res texture packs with custom shaders.

Nice, thanks for the update.

I was thinking about replaying Fallout 4, but I wasn't anticipating having to buy a new video card first!

My guess is you need a 1080 because the textures wont make a difference at 1080p resolution, so you will probably need to run at 1440p or higher.

I fell of this game hard, spent most my time getting it to run stable and installing mods. Any conversion mods that make it a good game yet?

Those PC recommended specs are nuts. I don't pay a lot of attention to recommended specs, but this is the first time I've seen an HEDT CPU listed. They must be doing more than just better textures if the CPU and GPU requirements have increased so much.

Maybe everything won't look like it's been smeared with vaseline.

Wonder if I'll be able to get at least a near - 60fps with a GTX 970 4GB and 8GB RAM?

They have a paid DLC for that, it involves downloading and launching either Skyrim or New Vegas.

Nah but for real though Fallout 4 gave me like 25 golden hours before I realized how boring it was. That's honestly more than I can ask from most games.

@octopusrocketmark said:

Do you have a Intel Core i7-5820K or better? If not, then no.

I wonder if Fallout VR is still happening. I've been playing Arizona Sunshine (with the new movement) and it's real immersive to scavenge in that game, but eh I doubt they will change the game so that you can pick stuff up with virtual hands anyway. ;(

Hmm... no mention on its biggest issue framerate?

I'd prefer 58gb of dialogue options or 58gb of interesting quests but I guess a pointless graphics upgrade is great.

X] Too bad Fallout 4 wasn't really worth going back to.

"You know, I enjoyed the first few hours of Fallout 4. That went south real fast. I uninstalled Fallout 4 to make room for Skyrim Special Edition."

Y] I really didn't care for Fallout 4

"You know, I enjoyed the first few hours of Fallout 4. That went south real fast. I uninstalled Fallout 4 to make room for Skyrim Special Edition."

A] This game was great fun.

"This game was great fun. I enjoyed the first few hours of Fallout 4. That went south real fast. I uninstalled Fallout 4 to make room for Skyrim Special Edition."

B] Help me find my baby Shaun!

"Have you seen my baby Shaun? No? You know, I enjoyed the first few hours of Fallout 4. That went south real fast. I uninstalled Fallout 4 to make room for Skyrim Special Edition."

Would be curious to see some side by side shots of Bethesda's textures compared to the higher res stuff modders have made. The official Hi-Res ones for Skyrim didn't really look any different. For 58 gigs, or close to 5% of my data cap, they better be awesome. As is, the game had some frame rate issues. Maybe they've been fixed, but there were areas where for no reason, my frame rate would drop into the 40's on a 1070, 4.8ghz 6700k, at 1920x1200.

Well, better double check to make sure Fallout 4's either uninstalled or the auto-update for it is disabled. I'm sure the textures will be marked as free DLC. But I was also pretty sure Microsoft wouldn't push out an auto-download dev build of a game that broke the release build's save.

I feel like I kicked a hornets nest by just mentioning this game.

I believe they are still working on it yes. No idea what their time frame is for it. Maybe they'll aim for the two year anniversary in November. I wonder if their future games are going to be made with VR in mind.

I might need to reread some reviews, but I would love some critique on why it is boring. I played through Fallout 3 maybe half a dozen times, but eventually fell off of Fallout 4. I found it's focus to be weak and things that I thought I would love (the settlement stuff, gun mod stuff, etc) I ended up hating.

Search youtube for "Fallout 4 Critique" and "Fallout 4, One Year Later" both by Joseph Anderson. I can't link them because my work computer blocks youtube (RIP) but they're both fantastic long-form deep dive video essays about Fallout 4 if you're into those sorts of things.

58gb?! Isn't that basically the size of the game by itself? This better be a hell of an upgrade.

Welcome to the forums! The size might be a bit inflated if they are also doing hi-res textures for all the DLC they put out too. I actually don't know how much space the game+dlc+patches comes to but I think it would be somewhere around 50gb. I am really interested to see if it makes a significant difference. It's almost like a Pro Patch for a Steam game.

I'll check that out, thanks for the tip.

Yeah, at 3 MB/s or (3*60*60) / 1024 = 10.5 GB/h I'm going to be downloading this one for over six hours, which is total overkill. I'm also going to have to evict the game off my SSD before this comes through. The funny thing is, textures were never why FO4 looked dated on launch. It was the horrible animations, low poly counts, and various related jank due to Bethesda's continued reliance on old engine technology and quantity over quality. I did pick up some of the DLC in a sale recently, so I suppose I ought to go back and see how the performance issues are now. But back during launch, the game was a glitchy, stuttery mess on my 4.11ghz 2500k and R9 290X.

This reminds me of the original Titanfall's PC port with its 40-something gigs of uncompressed audio.

Fun is like, subjective, man...

gtx 1080 requirement probably due to the vram needed to load textures without being a total drain on the gpu. A less powerful card with the same amount of vram would probably due ok as well.

Is it just me, or do the textures still look a bit muddy? Doesn't exactly motivate me to buy a 6-core CPU.

Increased draw distance is cool, tho.

@paulmako:

There is nothing really stopping you from putting those limits on yourself, though I get why its not ideal.

I enjoy Fallout 4 for what it is, but there are definitely some major problems in various areas.

In this case there is plenty stopping you from putting those limits on yourself. Older Fallouts and New Vegas knew that those traits were apart of the game therefore there were numerous areas throughout the games in which these traits were considered in things like quest design, exploration, environment design etc. Fallout 4 would just act as it always does and not acknowledge that the player has these limitations at all which is wholly unsatisfying basically making the self imposed limitations worthless.

As someone who sometimes works with 4-6k texture resolutions in 3D I can say 58gb is nothing for a game as big as Fallout 4.

I get what you guys mean, though in the end it's simply a design decision that they want people to be able to experience close to all the content in the game on one charater. Personally I love making new characters in these types of games, so I would also prefer if the game was designed around that. But nevertheless I still make new characters and try as best I can to make them different from each other.

I think my problems with the game are actually more to do with the lackluster writing and I dislike being pidgeonholed into always being a mother/father looking for her/his son. Makes suspending your disbelief required to roleplay a certain type of character.

@freedom4556: I imagine there will be some difference from the overall PC size, but looking at it now on my PS4 the game+DLCs+patches comes to 45.6GB. So if the new textures apply to the DLC content too then it could be pretty close to downloading the whole thing again.

@paulmako: I have all the DLC on PC (just double checked). If the 58GB figure is correct, I'm downloading another game and two thirds. 58 / 34 = 1.71 There are lossless texture compression methods that are built into Directx and free from a performance perspective. This can't be necessary.

So what you are saying is I should go write a negative steam review because Bethesda is HIDING the full sized textures that I am OWED as a customer!?