Performance Guide for Potato PCs (2026)

I wanted to make a small guide to put all of the information I had gathered to be able to play this great game on even the worse of computer. This guide is intended for users with low-end gaming PCs or laptops and whom, like me, want to squeeze out as much peformance out of their hardware as they can!

It is divided into sections which should be mostly independent from each other. I'm open to all discussions, questions and improvements and I'm not here to gatekeep information or to push a certain agenda!

At the time of writing this I'm using an Acer Aspire 5 A515-44 which I bought around 2019. It has 12GB of DDR4 ram, a ryzen 5 4500U processor (6 cores / 6 threads) with integrated graphics and I'm on windows 11 installed on an NVME SSD. Not a bad PC at all but not a gaming PC either. Having Windows and your game installed on SSDs will greatly improve your experience!

Before doing anything else, make sure your drivers (GPU especially) are up-to-date!

If you read this guide I assume you're NOT starting from scratch and have some kind of base like the VNV modlist (recommended installing with Wabbajack). I also built this guide around the usage of MO2, so sorry for Vortex users. The VNV modlist already includes a lot of performance mods which I will not go over. This includes but is not limited by :

Unofficial Patch NVSE Plus

The 4GB Patcher

Ultimate Edition ESM Fixes

BSA Decompressor

New Vegas Tick Fix

FNV Mod Limit Fix

Crash Logger

Cell Offset Generator

Depth Resolve

ActorCause Save Bloat Fix

Combat Lag Fix

IStewie's tweaks and Engine Optimizations

ZLib Updated

For testing I also recommend the following tools:

• []New Vegas Quick Start: Start a new game in seconds to quickly test your setup.

  []New Game Initialization Script: Save and reload instanteneously your new game to properly initialize all mods.

  The graphics game settings which you use will have a great impact and is one of the first things you should determine. If you have a very weak PC, it is suggested to launch the game launcher (FalloutNVLauncher.exe) through MO2 and choosing the "Medium" Preset.

  You can also determine the resolution at which you want to play, which if lowered can give a performance boost but might require some more setup.

  The game resolution can have a big impact because it reduces the number of pixels that needs to be processed by your harware, following a quadratic rel