Fallout 76 supports ultrawide resolutions with a simple ini tweak

The second lengthier B.E.T.A. for Fallout 76 gave us enough time to dig into performance, graphics settings, and other tidbits. One of the things at the top of our list to confirm is whether ultrawide resolutions would work. To be clear, ultrawide resolutions are not listed in the game itself—only 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios showed up on my test system with a 21:9 display—the Acer XR382CQK bmijqphuzx, if you're curious. That's a FreeSync display with a 3840x1600 native resolution, so actually a bit wider than a strict 21:9 ratio. Having already discovered the INI files in the 'My Games\Fallout 76' folder, though, we knew where to start looking.

iSize H=2160
iSize W=3840
bFull Screen=1
bBorderless=0

Launching the game again, the whole screen was in use, but I wasn't sure if it was being used properly or if a 16:9 aspect ratio was merely being stretched to fill the desired resolution. So I grabbed some images for comparison:

Standard 16:9 aspect ratio at 3840x2160.

Ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio at 3840x1600.

There are a few things worth noting. First, the UI does not scale properly to support ultrawide and instead stretches the standard widescreen UI to fill the screen. You can see the 'square' icons in the bottom-right end up being slightly rectangular, and the text in the top-right is also stretched. That's the bad news.

The good news is that everything else looks great. The FOV is clearly increased to handle the wider resolution, and things like the '300' circle on the Vault-Tec celebration sign look correct. Excellent! Unfortunately, manual adjustment of the FOV via INI file editing did not work.

We're not out of the woods on ultrawide support, of course. Bethesda could lock us out of editing the INI files if it wants, to "prevent cheating" or whatever. Or it could put in a check to force the use of a supported aspect ratio. But for now at least, it's possible to manually set other resolutions in Fallout 76 and have the game run fine. Let's hope it stays that way, or even better, gets official support within the game's settings.

Because let's be honest. It's 2018, there are dozens of different 'common' display resolutions, and many other games have long since figured out how to handle supporting arbitrary resolutions and FOVs. Also, fix the physics being tied to the framerate. It was a bad choice in Skyrim seven years ago, and it's even worse now.

Mama Murphy sees a glorious ultrawide world in your future.

Jarred's love of computers dates back to the dark ages when his dad brought home a DOS 2.3 PC and he left his C-64 behind. He eventually built his first custom PC in 1990 with a 286 12MHz, only to discover it was already woefully outdated when Wing Commander was released a few months later. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.