With the release of the free High-Resolution Texture Pack for Fallout 4, the irradiated wastes of the Commonwealth have never looked so pretty.
But it takes a powerful PC to tour Diamond City and South Boston in improved HD. For a start, you need an extra 58GB of disk space for the texture pack itself. Even then, Bethesda recommends a hardware spec that includes an Intel Core i7-5820K or better and an 8GB NVIDIA GTX 1080 graphics card.
A hefty upgrade
It’s a jump up from the game’s original recommended spec, which detailed an Intel Core i7 4790 3.6 GHz or equivalent, 30GB of free HDD space and an NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB/AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB or equivalent GPU. The Texture Pack almost triples the size of the game.
The Fallout 4 DLC offers a glimpse into the sort of sumptuous visual detail that will utimately shape the next generation of PC games. With high-end games like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Red Dead Redemption 2 also coming out in 2017, you’ll need a monster PC to make the most of them.
A monster PC like the 4K VR Ready Gaming PC from Computer FX. With a 7th gen Intel Core i7-7700K inside, it’s got the raw processing power to handle Fallout’s rich open world. Put this together with 16GB of DDR4 memory, an 8GB ASUS GTX 1080 STRIX graphics card, a 500GB PCIe SSD and 4TB HDD, and you’ll be good to go.
Of course, Bethesda’s recommended specs are just that. The High Resolution Texture pack will work on lower-end systems, although fps could suffer if you have less than a 6GB GPU installed.
Is it worth it?
The results of the texture pack aren’t immediately obvious. The 58GB download makes little difference at first glance, as not everything you see onscreen gets a visual upgrade. You have to look closer, at the walls, stones, doors and panels of rusted metal. This is where you’ll see that the quality is often dramatically improved. Textures that were once blurred, now look clear, detailed and sharp.
HardOCP’s Brent Justice writes;
“At the end of the day I’d rather play Fallout 4 with the High Resolution Texture Pack installed than without.”
“If you have a good graphics card there is no reason not to. You will experience the best textures Bethesda has to offer on the PC. The texture quality will be superior to the base game in several areas, not all, but for the most part it will be there. It doesn’t impact performance, so we only lose hard drive space.”
While the High Resolution Texture Pack is an optional extra for Fallout 4, it shows just what a high-end PC is capable of.
