If you’re like me and have been reluctant to ditch your old CRT monitors, you may be disappointed by the brightness levels in Fallout 3. Even if you max-out the brightness levels in the settings menu, your display could still be horribly too dark at night and in buildings.

I did some digging around and found out that you can edit 2 Fallout 3 .ini files to increase the minimum, maximum and default levels of the brightness slider. .INI files are simply text files that you can edit with notepad.

What are the files called and where are they?

The two files we are looking for are the FALLOUT.INI and FalloutPrefs.ini files which can be found in one of these two directories.

Documents and settings[username]My DocumentsMy GamesFallout3 directory in Windows XP
or
the Users[username]DocumentsMy GamesFallout3 directory in Windows Vista.

Fgamma min, max and default values

In the FalloutPrefs.ini file, on line 28 under “Display”, you will find the following :

fGamma=1.0000

I changed my settings to fGamma=0.4000 (lower is actually brighter)

Then in the FALLOUT.INI file on line 147 under display, I changed the the exact same value.

fGamma=1.0000 to>> fGamma=0.4000

While still in the FALLOUT.INI file I changed lines 159 and 160.

fGammaMax=0.6000 to>> fGammaMax=0.4000
fGammaMin=1.4000 to>> fGammaMin=0.6000

Those are the settings that worked with my card and monitor, but yours might be quite different. Try experimenting with different values and remember that lower is brighter and higher is darker in regards to the values.

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