Fallout 3 weird frame rate issue

ellusivegman

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Jan 11, 2012
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A while back I bought fallout 3 on steam and everything was working fine. The beginning part of when you are in the vault gave me no problems until the part when you start to escape. When I got to a certain part of the vault where it had to load another part of the map and after the loading screen went away, my framerate began to drop dramatically. So then I got out of the game and started it back up after a couple of minutes and it was working fine again. Then after about a minute or so the framerate started to gradually plummit untill the game was reduced to nothing more than a slideshow.
Before you jump to any conclusions, all of my drivers are updated and yes my computer should be able to handle the game. The weird thing about this whole thing is that my computer doesn't overheat at all once the frame rate starts to go down and before it does it is running at a good 60FPS. I also ran the task manager along with the game to see if it was my RAM or processor and neither of them seemed to be bottle-necking. I have also been able to run crysis on ultra with no problem so my computer should pretty much be able to handle anything i throw at it.
Thanks in advance to anyone who might be able to help me. Your advice would be greatly appreciated.


my specs:

motherboard- asus M4A785-M
CPU- AMD AnthlonII X3 455
video card- Nvidia GTX 560
RAM- 4Gb DDR2
 

ellusivegman

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I am running windows 7 64 bit professional and my computer defrags regularly. Also I ran a memtest and there was nothing wrong with that.

Any other advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
 
it could just be the game is a buggy mess, it did get better after patching but its far from perfect... have you tried reducing the gfx quality to see if that stops the fps drop... turning off things like bloom, blur and soft shadows may help to pinpoint the issue.
also when the game crashes are you checking the event logs to make sure it is the game crashing and not a driver issue.
 

ellusivegman

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I lowered all of my settings to their lowest and it still happened. Also when the games frame rate starts to slow down, it doesn't crash. it just becomes unplayable. This also happens in the main menu. if I leave the game at the main menu for a long period of time, even that will become extremely choppy. I'm thinking of just re installing it and seeing if that works. What do you think I should do from here?
 

ellusivegman

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Alright so the weirdest thing just happened to me. I was about to try and uninstall then re install fallout 3 when someone told me that I could try to verify the game cache files. So I did that and then I started fallout 3 up again and I noticed some improvements. For one thing the menu wasn't choppy at all. the opening animations in the title screen before the main menu ran very smoothly and so did my mouse. Before, I couldn't even see where my mouse was going because even the main menu was so choppy. But now that problem is gone. Even in game I noticed some dramatic improvements in frame rate. However I didn't even have time to see if the frame rate would hold up because not even a minute in, the game freezes. I cant go into the main menu or anything and I have to use task manager to exit out of it. If anyone has any idea about what the problem could be, your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.