Fallout 3 – performance decrease on new machine

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ritch1

Weaksauce
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Sep 1, 2005
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I upgraded my Q9650 system to a i5 2500k running windows 7 64bit and seem to be getting worse performance in Fallout 3 for some reason. I am using my same graphics card (amd 6870). Funny thing is it was smooth as butter on the old machine.

It loads on the windows 7 system but is not smooth, I’d describe it as stuttering. If anyone is familiar with this problem I’d appreciate any advice. cheers
 
The only thing I can really tell you is that FO3 has funky issues with ATi cards. I have experienced some odd problems as well on my 5870. FO:NV isn't as bad about it. My old 280 ran it just fine. Try editing the game config for vSync, and set AA and AF to application controlled.
 
well I have tried everything imaginable to get this game to run smoothly and have gone pretty much insane over the last 3 days, Ive tried everything in the tweak guides and installed every fix I could find. I really cant believe they have not made a patch to sort this. I guess it just doesnt like my i5 system and windows 7. I was tempted to even get a new card as this is the main game I play but really cant justify upgrading my 6870.

truly gutted about this. now need a new rpg that compares to FO3 :(
 
It's not the hardware, it's the drivers. I had a lot of issues with FO3, even on Nvidia cards. I had to use drivers that were almost a year old to run the game properly. They did eventually fix the issue but it was with a driver release that was a couple years after the game released.

Try rolling back to older AMD drivers that were released 6 months or so after the game came out. You may not have any issues with other games but if you do, it would only be newer games. If you find a driver that works, beat the game then update the drivers again.
 
Google "Fallout 3 stutter reducer", it's a "mod" that makes FO3 run a lot smoother. You'll need FOSE (Fallout Script Extender) to use it though, but that'll all be explained in the readmes for FOSR.

Fallout 3 has always been a stuttery mess by default thanks to the horrible, horrible Gamebryo engine. I get great FPS but stutters when loading new areas and such. FOSR stopped that completely for me.
 
thanks guys, I did try the stutter mod but it didnt work. I didnt try rolling the drivers back very far though, i'll give that a go then give up! shame the engine is so bad for such a great game. all the games I couldnt care less about work great :confused:
 
I had issues with this game too. Never was able to play it much due to the constant wtf??? issues.
 
The following is a fix for occasional freezing when running FO3 in win 7 64 with a quad core cpu, which I guess in theory you should be having on top of your stuttering. In any case just do it and see how it works for you.

Open up the fallout.ini file in: My Documents\My Games\Fallout3
Find the line:
bUseThreadedAI=0
change it to:
bUseThreadedAI=1
Add another line after it and insert:
iNumHWThreads=2
This will limit the game to 2 cores and prevent the engine bug from causing the game to freeze.

If I were you I'd set 3d settings to performance in driver controlpanel, low graphics in Fallout settings and work my way up systematically to troubleshoot. With my 6850 I had luck with no AA, vertical sync on, shadows on medium, anisotropic on 2 samples, lod settings left alone, and everything else on high. Latest official drivers. Only problem for me ever was the freezing though.
 
bigdogchris said:
It's not the hardware, it's the drivers. I had a lot of issues with FO3, even on Nvidia cards. I had to use drivers that were almost a year old to run the game properly. They did eventually fix the issue but it was with a driver release that was a couple years after the game released.

Try rolling back to older AMD drivers that were released 6 months or so after the game came out. You may not have any issues with other games but if you do, it would only be newer games. If you find a driver that works, beat the game then update the drivers again.
Click to expand...

Which Nvidia drivers have you found to work best with Fallout 3? For the longest time,I just used the original driver that came with my 285 a couple of years ago,and they worked well with all the games I played,even with Fallout. Then some of the files in the driver were damaged by a power outage,so I decided to try the latest drivers,and started having problems with freeze ups that I never had before.
 
hfk said:
The following is a fix for occasional freezing when running FO3 in win 7 64 with a quad core cpu, which I guess in theory you should be having on top of your stuttering. In any case just do it and see how it works for you.

Open up the fallout.ini file in: My Documents\My Games\Fallout3
Find the line:
bUseThreadedAI=0
change it to:
bUseThreadedAI=1
Add another line after it and insert:
iNumHWThreads=2
This will limit the game to 2 cores and prevent the engine bug from causing the game to freeze.

If I were you I'd set 3d settings to performance in driver controlpanel, low graphics in Fallout settings and work my way up systematically to troubleshoot. With my 6850 I had luck with no AA, vertical sync on, shadows on medium, anisotropic on 2 samples, lod settings left alone, and everything else on high. Latest official drivers. Only problem for me ever was the freezing though.
Click to expand...

I used this fix recently for stopping freezing myself, even on my old Q9450 the game runs smoothly on just 2 hardware threads.

Also you might want to investigate hyper threading if that's on the i3, I can't remember off the top of my head, but if the game is forced to use just 2 threads and it picks a virtual core to use it could be troublesome, you might have to look into core afinity to fix that.
 
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