First off my system

AMD Phenom II 955 quad core
8 Gig 1333 Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM
MSI Nvidia GTX 480 PCI-E
WD Velociraptor 10,000 RPM HDD
HT Omega Striker 7.1 Sound card

Now by those specs alone my machine should handle Fallout:NV without breaking a sweat right? i only wish.


The two big game breaking issues i have been having are like most of us

1, Severe drop in frame rate when encountering any NPC's/ combat with humans (doesn't seem to affect animals/creatures ect)

2, Crashes to desktop frequently and randomly.

By those two alone i say Obsidian/Bethesda should not have released this game. The engine is old and clunky and prone to bugs/crashes anyway.


but on to the fixes,

I fixed issue 1 by the D3D9.DLL trick someone else posted. Now my frame rate remains constant even with a lot of NPC's around me and combat is nice and fluid instead of a slideshow. Interestingly enough it seems this .DLL fools Fallout: NV into thinking you have a Nvidia 7900 GPU, So that tell sme the game runs better on older hardware??? Further proof that computers have become too sophisticated for the Gamebryo engine.

Issue number 2 was caused by the lack of quad core support in this Gamebryo Engine. It was designed before quad core CPU's were invented and it does not play nice with them. The game gets confused with all 4 cores and causes the game to crash. To fix that i had to edit my Fallout.ini to manually only use 2 cores.

After those two fixes the game is as stable as the gamebryo Engine will ever get. I also had to use the mouse acceleration fix but thats more of a nitpick. No reason why a PC game in 2010 doesn't have a hardware mouse, no reason at all.

I loved Fallout 3 and have well over 400 hours clocked in on it. I love New Vegas but honestly if this level of development/support continues i doubt i'll but another Fallout game made by Obsidian or Bethesda. I bought them both on PC because of the modding community, it is simply amazing the quality and quantity of mods for Fallout/Elder Scrolls.

bottom line bury the Gamebryo engine, it's had it's time, you can't squeeze anymore out of this thing, it's dead, time to develop a modern engine that doesn't svck.

Yup from my experience as well those two fixes should get it stable enough to have some fun. It was great to play for like 8 hours yesterday and not have it crash or lag. There IS an amazing game under that mess of technical issues with an old engine.

I'm sure this will be the last game you see with Gamebryo. If their next game isn't using some version of ID's Tech 5 from Rage i'd be very surprised.

I also forgot to mention the fact i had to deny access to my folder that STEAM kept using to "backup" my save game completely ruining my quick saves and auto saves by setting them back in time. I don't know if this is a Fallout: NV issue or a STEAM one but none the less game breaking and really messed up that i had to as Administrator block off access to a folder in my computer just to get a program to work properly.

/bump

this might be useful to someone who has issues like i did

Agreed about this likely being Gamebryo's last dance. I've had to apply the DLL fix as well. I have also tried a few INI fixes as well, but for some reason it always gets reset back to default even after I save it. anyone out there know what I'm missing there?

that is the STEAM cloud overwriting your manual changes. you can search here on how to fix it thats where i found it.

How do I do this?

tweaks including the multi core work around can be found here

http://segmentnext.com/2010/10/19/fallout-new-vegas-errors-crashes-freezes-fixes/

that link should be a sticky or at the very least bookmarked by anyone who has ever played a game on the gamebryo engine, trust me it's handy.