Go to your Nvidia control panel. Under "3D settings" click "Adjust image settings with preview" Now make sure "Let the 3D application decide" is checked.

I use to have horrible slow downs outside in the wasteland. Especially in populated areas like the Crimson Caravan Company. This trick increased performance by 100%.
Using the "advanced 3D image setting" or using the falloutNV nvidia profile brings back the horrible lag.


my Nvidia card

Geforce 9800 GT

I will give this a shot. Thanks for sharing.

One thing that I noticed in advanced 3d image settings is the power management mode settings. Not sure if you have this but setting it to use maximum power instead of adaptive helps alot with stuttering.
Adaptive is the global default unless otherwise specified.

My panel doesn't have a power mangement heading, unfortunately.

What card do you have?
Go into nvidia control panel under the global settings tab on the right panel (towards the bottom)? You would have to manually add falloutnv.exe and change the settings if you want them to apply to that program.

I can't find any power management setting under global settings or my falloutnv.exe profile. My card is a GT 240 myself. The op mentioned having a 9800 GT

You will only have a "Power Management Mode" for GPUs that can support it. Some GPUs can manage and adjust their own clock speeds. "Adaptive Mode" allows a GPU to reduce clock speeds to save power and reduce heat when the maximum clock speed is not needed. This is a good thing. Ordinarily, when the GPU is in 2D mode such as when displaying your Windows desktop a reduced clock speed can be used but when in 3D mode the GPU will use the maximum clock speed. The GPU (when it can support this feature) is smart enough to know the difference between 2D and 3D modes and can detect what amounts to an idle mode even when in 3D mode.

I have set my GTX275 to use a custom profile and it does use the "Adaptive" power mode. Setting to "High Perfromance" mode does not make any difference that I can observe in the performance of FalloutNV. This may only be due to the fact that the GTX275 is a very competent and fast GPU.

I use a custom profile for FNV because I want to force "High Quality" textures and force a certain level of antialiasing. Selecting the generic "Let the application decide" causes lower quality settings to be used.

I use to mess with the "Power Management mode" setting but with no real results. One day I was trying to get rid of lag and the "let the 3D application decide" got it working.

Thank you for this (that was the default on my card but i didn't know it was there) :icecream:

I have a 9800 GTX. It may just be that that card doesn't support the power management.

I was not so lucky, while playing I was getting odd slow downs, took me days to track it to the adaptive power settings, it's not something I would have thought of with a GTX470, but true enough, when I set it to use max power I no longer had slow downs.

Sorry, but I'm calling placebo. Mainly because your 'fix' involves using the "driver settings for dummies" option in the nvidia control panel. If you do a google search for nvidia control panel driver options and actually put some time to read in what each manual option is capable of doing then you will be smart enough to manually adjust profiles to suit each game you play. It's not rocket science, it is actually quite simple to navigate. Here, I'll make it easy:

Ambient Occlusion only works in a few select games and enhances shadow detail but can cause artifacts. Best left off
Anisotropic filtering should be application controlled unless the application has no controls. Otherwise crank it up to 16x, the performance trade off is negligible even on weaker modern cards in most cases
AA gamma correction only works with opengl, turn it off or leave it on since even in open gl games there is no performance hit
if the game has built-in AA (like NV) leave AA mode at enhance and no matter what level it is at in game, choose whatever level (ex- 4x) you want here
Transparency AA at the very basic turn on at mulisampling. the SS options decrease performance depending on your setup
Ignore Cuda for NV
leave max pre rendered frames at 3
change multi display to single display perf. mode
change power management to perfer max perf
leaave the next few settings at their default except if using AF above or in game, change the negative LOD to clamp. If you want the best texture filtering with no optimizations, change it to high quality. quality plus at least anisotropic sample optimizations is default and relatively good. Triple buffering only effects opengl games here and vsync doesn't matter since NV enables by default. Use d3doverrider to turn on d3d triple buffering

I tried this and my fps went from 60 to 30-40. Using a gtx 260 black edition. Also, I don't have any power management settings.

Whats your driver version?

Interesting info from nvidia support:
This feature is available only on select GeForce 9 Series and above GPUs that support multiple performance levels (idle, 3D, etc) and applies only to DirectX and OpenGL-based applications running under Windows Vista and above.

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2441&p_created=1247763219&p_sid=OE5JUXfk&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_srch=1&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MTIsMTImcF9wcm9kcz0wJnBfY2F0cz0wJnBfcHY9JnBfY3Y9JnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5cGU9YW5zd2Vycy5zZWFyY2hfbmwmcF9wYWdlPTEmcF9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD1wb3dlciBtYW5hZ2VtZW50&p_li=&p_topview=1

260.99, the newest. So your saying power management is only under Vista and 7?

That seems to be the case. Looks like the forceware 190.38 drivers were the first drivers to support user selectable power management mode.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_winvista_32bit_190.38_whql.html
from the control panels release notes:
Power Management mode (Windows Vista and later)
Many NVIDIA graphics cards support multiple performance levels so that the PC can
save power when full graphics performance is not required. To provide more control
over these power management capabilities, NVIDIA has added the Power
Management Mode control. The control consists of two settings–Adaptive and Prefer
Maximum Performance.

alright, well thanks for the info.