The developers are a joke for still not fixing this when that guy made it less than a day after the Game came out, when are people gonna start suing them for this bull?

$20 says this issue isn't fixed in the next patch.

Actually the guy did not fix it, he just sort of lucked onto the fix (best guess as he doesn't describe the origins of the idea of using a year old .dll meant to do something entirely different to fix performance issues). However with this information out there I do agree that Bethesda needs to get moving on deploying a patch. I have however been trying to get into contact with the original uploader of the .dll and have discovered/contacted him on his facebook page to inquire as to what exactly is fixing this issue.



Also I have no clue who Gstaff is but I am glad the developers are already looking at it.

Your money is safe. This bug existed in FO3, as well.

Then how come I don't experience this bug in FO3? I'm not using the d3d9.dll in FNV either, the togglemotions console command does the trick for me.

Luck?

So basically this dll-'fix' just guesses so Fallout is using another shaderpackage?
(As I heard the dll-fix doesn't seem to report the proper videocard, even says there's an nvidia-card, when it's an ATI, etc.)

The best solution for every setup would be:
* Check Renderinfo.txt to see what shaderpackage is being used.
* Rename and/or backup that shaderpackage
* Now rename a different shaderpackage* to the shaderpackage above
* Run and test FNV
* Rinse & Repeat until you find the shaderpackage that best works on your system

Okay, it'll take a few hours, but in the end you'll find the optimal shaderpackage for your setup.

Am I right, or just talking cowdung?

* Nb. Except shaderpackage 19 as seen that's shader model 3.0 (right?)

Not cowdung but not accurate, the renderinfo.txt file does indeed indicate the shaderpackages to use however the ati version of the .dll fix changes these to the default ATi renderpath and regardless of that fact, still offers improved performance. This quote that is in the description for the Ati fix on newvegasnexus would seem to support this conclusion.

I forgot something important:

Rendererinfo.txt:

Win7 = nvd3dum.dll (With the DLL = nv4_disp.dll)
WinXP = nv4_disp.dll

With xp the game runs by default with nv4_disp.dll, with win 7 only with the DLL.
It is obvious why with xp everything goes well without the DLL.

Hmm I don't see any Renderinfo.txt file in my Fallout folder? Where should it be? Is it only there if you run Fallout?


EDIT

nevermind found it

That must be why there are so many people complaining about this issue with FO3. I never had this problem with FO3 either and thats with and without a ton of mods.

What is interesting is that on my Win7 x64, nv4_disp.dll doesn't exist. and dxdiag shows nvd3dum as the part of the driver.

Hi all,

I'm the author of the DLL hack. To be honest I wasn't aware that it fixed a performance issue. I merely created it in an attempt to fix an issue with the FaceGen technology not supporting certain graphics cards and SwiftShader 2.0 (the http://transgaming.com/business/swiftshader has the workaround built in). When it doesn't detect a modern GeForce or Radeon card, FaceGen simply aborts (regardless of whether the necessary features are actually supported). It appears this was done to simplify QA and support: they rather say other graphics solutions are not supported than spend time and money fixing unexpected issues with untested ones. This is quite understandable from their perspective. Compared to console games that are not even released for PC, this is a minor restriction! But it's obviously an annoyance for those with capable Intel graphics or wanting to test the game with SwiftShader.

Anyway, before taking a guess at why it might fix performance issues as well, let me clarify what it does. When an application wants to render something with Direct3D 9, it will load the d3d9.dll file. Windows will first check whether a DLL is in the same folder as the executable, and if not, it will look for it in the system32 folder. So normally there is no d3d9.dll file in the game's folder, and Microsoft's d3d9.dll runtime will be loaded. With my DLL next to the Fallout executable it will load that instead. But the first thing it does is explicitly load the d3d9.dll file from the system32 folder. All the functions in the DLL that the executable calls, are linked through to Microsoft's, except for the http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb174317(VS.85).aspx method. Regardless of your graphics solution, I made it return the information for a GeForce 7900 GS. Note that this is a dirty hack. There is no way to tell exactly how the application will respond to this spoof. And even if Bethesda allowed other graphics solutions than "NVIDIA 6800 or better/ATI X850 or better", this may open up another can of worms. So don't expect a quick and easy fix. The DLL hack 'appears' to work, but use it at your own risk...

That said, I'm surprised it also appears to help performance. Somehow the software must be taking a badly optimized path when the hardware is not what it expects. It appears that a lot of people who report issues have a GeForce 400 series card? This is higher than the GeForce 200 series I found in Fallout 3's readme.txt listing the supported graphics cards. It's possible FaceGen never got updated to detect newer hardware and select the optimal rendering path. Things like placing geometry or textures in system memory instead of graphics memory can easily kill performance while having no impact on the visual results (this is really a wild guess). But for some hardware it can be necessary to take the safe path instead of the optimized path to avoid crashes. Running the game slowly is better than not running it at all. Some people report having no issues at all, and this can potentially be explained by having a newer driver with a 'profile' for Fallout 3 to incorporate a similar workaround. Also, the graphics memory management on Windows XP differs from that on Vista and up.

My suggestion to Bethesda would be to show a dialog window when running on an unknown configuration. Some other games already do this, clearly indicating that they can't offer support for it because it falls outside of the system requirements, but they'll still do a "best effort" instead. Also, when the game crashes unexpectedly (i.e. did not close properly), the next time it is run it could suggest to lower all the settings and run in compatibility mode.

Kind regards,

Nicolas Capens

P.S.: All of the above is just my personal opinion, and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer or clients. I created the DLL hack in my spare time.

nvd3dum stands for NVidia Direct3D User Mode.

Starting with Windows Vista, the graphics driver is split into a user mode part, and a kernel mode part. The user mode part is like any other application: it has to communicate with the O.S. for input/output, memory management, etc. And if it becomes unstable or crashes, the O.S. prevents it from affecting the rest of the system. It can jus be loaded again to return to a stable state. A kernel mode driver on the other hand has the same privileges as the O.S. and even a small bug can cause everything to go haywire, possibly resulting in the dreaded bluescreen. So by moving as much as possible to the user mode part, they greatly improved system stability. Microsoft found that the majority of bluescreens were caused by the graphics driver. And since the graphics card manufacturers want to update the drivers frequently for performance improvements, this solution is the best compromise.

I guess this ist just because the 200 series cards were the latest nvidiacards at this time in 2008, i have played Fallout 3 without any problems with the GTX480 and even win7 and because of this i cant understand why new vegas with the same engine has so much problems with win7.
The Geforce 400 is not the problem, also New Vegas is running fine with this card with excellent performance and no crashes in many hours now.....BUT only with win xp!

My fallout experience with the GTX480, win7 x64 and win xp:

Fallout3: windows doesent matter, have played it first with xp and second playtrough with win 7, no problems with both windows.
New Vegas: Unplayable with win7 x64, terrible performance issues and fps drops, only the dll helps, fine with win xp and runs even better for me than with win7 and the dll.

Hi,
Running awesome on my rig, ~60 fps minimums.
Avg. and max. much higher!
Of course, if your frames ever go below 60 fps you must not run vsync.
So probably 90% of people should turn it off!
No dll hacks for me...
Also:
Notice people are comparing WinXP to Win7-64?
Where is all the 32-bit Win7?
I believe it is the secret of my success...
That, plus disabling vsync (but that's no secret - just common sense).
Regards

Well I for one want to thank you for the "fix", and for taking the time to come here and share your thoughts. So thank you.

You have made my NV experience absolutely wonderful! :celebration:

good point, could it really be the x64 is the only reason?
any other win7/vista 32 users here?

Seconded, very glad to get the detailed explanation of the fix!

That this one issue with FaceGen would drop someone's game from 60+ FPS down to 30-40 is pretty baffling and amazing - it must be a pronounced effect of having to use system memory over GPU memory ALOT to drop the performance like that. Must be all of the NPC's and bad-guys shouting stuff in battle that brings the FaceGen bug to it's worst?

Interesting...

Hi Nicolas, Thanks for posting! After messing around for the past week or so, I am pretty sure you are correct about FaceGen. If you disable FaceGen in game, there are no performance issues but obviously characters do not have a head. For those that don't know, this game (along with and many others) uses FaceGen from Singular Inversions in order to generate the heads/faces of NPCs. FaceGen only generates the heads/faces though, not the facial animations which are performed by another 3rd party component called FaceFC by OC3 Entertainment (which is also used by many other games). According to the game's credits and title screen the copyright date for whatever implementation being used of these technologies is 2006 which coincides with the release of Oblivion. Even though these software technologies have been updated since then, I am going to guess that the components being used in NV have not.

When the game came out last month there was a widely-linked bug video of Doc Mitchell's head spinning around like something out of the Exorcist. According to the devs this was a last minute bug that was fixed at release (? I think that's what was said, so I am assuming the new assets were downloaded on initial steam install). Since this likely points to FaceGen, that would explain why the performance issues around NPCs was not caught in testing - it was possibly working correctly and broke on launch. But that's just a guess

I tried hex editing the executable so that I could use PIX from the directx SDK (get rid of the d3dperf setoptions) but wasn't very successful in doing so. I did get pix to run for a frame but there was too many lines of text to go through. I ran a diff on on the results for your .dll vs none and there were many lines but all were mostly similar between the two. (Probably the difference between a Geforce 7900 GS and my GTX 460, and also probably what is throwing off FaceGen)

Thanks for creating this in your spare time even though it was never intended to be used for New Vegas! Somebody hex edited this to spoof an ATI card (and thus allow those users to enable transparency AA) but the jury is still out on whether or not it is beneficial to ATI users to begin with. There is also an 'installer' written in Java that will hex edit whatever you want your .dll which I don't recommend using. Somebody even posted a d3d9.dll created to add effects to old games (called ENBseries) and claimed it worked, but people shouldn't be using it since it was created for a Silent Hill game and that game only. Hopefully the devs just fix this once in for all, but I completed the game using your d3d9.dll and had no issues at all

On top of it already...? re you kidding me, they have known about this since late '08 and did nothing to fix it. funny thing the community fixed the problem due to Bethesda being too damn slow.

Plain and simple there was limited QA and is shows. many quests are broken, the amount of corruption from saves is baffling, NPC pathing and scripting is broken in many places, and the 2 years they had to take the communities concepts on the UI/engine and clean it up for F:NV, they ignored.

No one can deny that this game clearly was built for a quick buck, nothing new has been brought to the genre which Every Fallout over the years has. This was a rehash of textures and quests that are under-compelling and boring. then there is the engine that has been around for a few years now and during that time you have seen the community comment/fix/optimize/improve but Bethesda just unwilling to acknowledge. i mean when fallout 3/Oblivion were out we were using 7/8 series cards on x2/p4, now we are 2 generation past that in both GPU's and processors.

Get it together or sell the license back to Interplay!

That's your opinion and I strongly disagree. Firstly, what are you referring to that they've "known about since late '08" ? The NPC FaceGen thing? I haven't had that problem with Fallout 3 so you're wrong there. What has the community fixed in two years besides altering aspects of the game? (admittingly, sometimes this might seemingly 'fix' something but other times not so much.. ex. stopping dogmeat from leveling with character using broken steel add on.. a mod stopped this why?) Obsidian even hired a FO3 modder as a developer!

I haven't experienced any save corruption except when my power went out coincidentally while saving. With a game this big, the quest bugs were bound to occur and they will most likely all be patched. In 65 hours of playing the game I haven't experienced a single one. I disagree they have limited QA when they had 300 people testing three different platforms. Other than the FaceGen thing the d3d9.dll 'fixes', I have experienced CTDs after hours of playing and creatures stuck in the ground/wall, the latter being really the only 'bug' I've encountered that is actually a real bug

This engine is used much differently than in the past two games that used it, towns are much larger out in the open and there are areas with a dozen deathclaws. Calling it under-compelling and boring is certainly your opinion and you're pretty much alone there. It has a great story, great dialogue, huge map, the gameplay has been changed for the better.. I'm sorry you don't like it

Finally, Interplay doesn't exist anymore. Sure the name does, but do some research... it's basically Titus AKA the developer of Superman 64. And they haven't made a game in nearly a decade. When Titus bought Interplay, the people who hadn't left already left yet did and the ones that stuck around sued them for unpaid wages. Titus went bankrupt and Interplay disappeared only to re-emerge as basically a get-out-of-jail free card from Titus's creditors. They've spent the past 7 years selling Interplay's IPs and virtual console games just to pay off their creditors and also keep them getting a paycheck. You definitely do not want them to have the license.

When fallout 3 launched there were many problems with high end machines that were unable to play this game, very similar to the launch of F:NV. it is funny how similar problems even thought the current tech is essentially 4 generations ahead of the engine. do you really want to get into the problem that Oblivion had on both PC and 360? http://tinyurl.com/3x7f8rp

so in "your opinion and experience" there is no problem with facegen/fallout:NV...exactly my point we are lucky with our game experience, doesn't mean we have to sit idle while others are getting the short straw...what is the lack of information form Bethesda? 10/19 and there aren't even fixes to the main quest chain...how is that okay?



i haven't experienced it either, but it is not to say it isn't a problem. sounds like you and i are the exceptions as we have had limited issues. i expect quality from Bethesda and the fallout name...we didn't get it with F:NV <-- not opinion!



i agree that calling the game "under-compelling" and "boring" it is my opinion, but when you have a genre that always pushed the envelope in both content and design, and then you experience the next installment that is a rehashed version of a game made 2 years ago...i feel(my opinion along with many other fans) that F:NV should have been released as add-on content.

The game is Fallout 3 in a new area, they have built and re-skinned a handful of new npc/mobs/weapons/items...that doesn't justify a retail release of the next installment...not to mention the hype they put on this.

the fact that a user spent over a year to rebuild Fallout 3 textures due to the stock textures be of such poor quality and Bethesda didn't even consider to adapt an optional bump in texture quality, is baffeling. go look it up and you will be amazed at how nice i game could have looked if they really put time and energy into this game.

how about NPC pathing?
How about a horrid UI? one of the largest complaints was how the inventory was never able to be sorted...they knew about this in Fallout 3.
how about performance on all systems? pc/360/ps3
how about scripting bugs? infinite exp/money/etc
how about quest bugs?

This game was released for a quick buck, can't deny it otherwise some of these very easy issues that many consumers have seen would have been QA'd Properly.



That comment was a snipe at them it was in jest!


At the end of the day people need quit being apathetic and say "this isn't right", don't let your hard earned money support mindsets that are willing to release a product in such poor quality.

All that said i like the game, because i like the style. while that appeases me to a certain extent it does not make me ignore the facts about how poorly thought out this release was, and the lack of Quality Assurance that was performed on this game.

The original D3D9.DLL that was going around did indeed disable some graphical features. I did a comparison between that one and the one I generated from the Java program here:
http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34970

...and there was a very noticeable difference in graphical fidelity. Aliasing of branches and leaves on plants, for example.

*deleted*

Jeez, I need to read better.

You're referring to transparency anti-aliasing probably on ATI cards. Yes this was broken originally, but apparently this 'new' ati spoofed iteration allows it

Just an FYI, do this test: Shoot somebody in the head at close range with and without transparency multisampling checked in the launcher. Notice how there is much less blood with it enabled? Yes the trees looks better, but look at their branches... dithering. Enable this feature in your driver control panel and disable it in game for the best of both worlds