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.

After launching the game and choosing an initial resolution of 2560x1440, I quit to the desktop and edited the Fallout76Prefs.ini file in Notepad. I changed the following lines and left everything else alone:

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:

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.