My framerate is solid I get 60 with vysnc on but whenever I'm walking to a place and the textures for that place pop up there is a noticeable stutter as if the game is loading those new textures. It seems the game likes to load up large areas at once which I can imagine being taxing on my system.
My system:
x4 955 3.2
4gb 1600 ddr3
ati 5850 11.3

I have tried increasing the uinterior and exterior cell buffers with some success. I have also used the stutter remover mod which caps the fps to 30. With those to fixes It happens far less. Does anybody know of a fix for this issue?

Try to defrag your harddrive.

In fallout 3 i had that kind of sutter too, but it got removed when i defragged the harddrive.

Tried defrag and no success. I also played Fallout 3 on xbox 360 to see if it had the same stutter and it does not. Why the heck did I pay for a gaming computer when my xbox can run it smoother?

Defragging hard drives is a modern day placebo that has been proven to do more harm than any good due to disk thrashing. Unless your hard drive is badly fragmented - like 40% or higher (which with NTFS is nearly impossible to do) then there is little need for it any longer with a modern day OS (it helped in Windows 98 but obviously we've come a long way since then).

I'm curious what you mean by the game running smoother on the 360 when you state that it runs at 60fps for the most part on your PC. The 360 version never tops 30fps and often times dips down even lower (dropping into the teens in some places). The 'stutter' you refer to is a normal part of game when streaming in new content, especially new textures in distant land (when the game transitions the low-res background LOD textures to real textures). It IS in the console versions but the 30fps framerate masks it. It's actually pretty bad in some parts on the 360 if you're playing from the disc so I'd imagine if you kept playing it you would most definitely notice, can't miss it. All the games based on this engine 'stutter' when streaming content on-the-fly in the background and in Oblivion this was usually accompanied by a "loading" message overlay on the screen, probably so you knew it wasn't your computer's fault. Increasing those cell buffers has nothing to do with loading more cells into memory contrary to what certain tweak guides say. (if I remember, they are only tied to the ugrids setting value, but changing that will decrease performance and mess up LOD textures and water). The vanilla game is capped at 1GB of RAM usage no matter what. Hopefully Skyrim will change this for the better or maybe even Monday's patch but I doubt it. BTW - most open world games stutter when loading background items. I know WoW fans complain about that all the time and I also know that Borderlands does something similar. Perhaps a SSD drive would help, don't know though. Portal 2 is getting slammed by a bunch of whiners right now because of it's loading screens among several silly reasons. That's because users would have to put up with major bouts of instability and stuttering without them, kind of like NV.

Alright I think I have come to the gerneral conclusion that this is normal, but what worries me is that the game sometimes crashes when loading all these textures. For example I will be walking to Vault 22 and as soon as the mountains LOD start to change the game has a lag spike followed by a crash. Is this also normal? I checked my temps to see if they were good and they were, I also ran memtest to see if my memory had issues but it passed with no errors. For the record I was playing fallout 3 of f of the hard drive if it makes a difference.

I also talked with the guy who made the new vegas stutter remover mod. He said he was able to fix this "streaming" stutter in Oblivion but not in FO3 or F:NV.

It is in my game. I had a similar issue with Oblivion, sometimes just loading new texture data will crash the game. It's just one of the quirks of the engine. You do have some options for minimizing the lag though. That's all due to your hard drive, with the texture files being loaded up from it. So if you got a faster hard drive, or set up a couple into a RAID array, that would reduce the stutter considerably. I hear the newer SSD drives have virtually no stutter with these games.



He didn't "fix" it in Oblivion, he just reduced it. The Oblivion engine isn't as well optimized as the ones being used by the Fallout games, so he had a lot more options to work with in order to smooth things out. The bottom line is that a certain amount of stuttering is to be expected, it's simply a hardware limitation that only upgrading your gear will fix.

Well, it may indeed be that you are one of the unlucky guys who see the ugly side of the GameBryo engine.

You can of course try a couple of things:

Search for "Fallout 3 tweaking guide" and follow it through, there might be a few tips that help you.
Make sure you don't have too much stuff running in the background, esp. if it leads to high hard drive activity. If you bought your system with everything preinstalled, it often has lots of useless stuff on it. Also sometimes otherwise useful software installs additional junk if you aren't careful.
What's your OS? If it is 64bit you can try using the 4GB enabler, which will increase the amount of ram FONV uses.

I have windows 7 64bit. My hard drive is a Samsung spinpoint F3, from the reviews it is supposed to be a pretty fast Hard drive.

I know nothing about that HD, sorry. I hope some of this helps.

El Z is spot on. Use the FNV tweak guide and the Windows 7 64 tweak guide by the same author. I recommend you take a day to go through them, doing the Win 7 64 guide first. They did great for me.

I'm one of the lucky few that have not had any real problems. I installed FNV about a week ago, installation went smooth and is running like a champ.
This was before going through the tweak guides. Afterwards my fps went up a bit. I've left FNV running for 2 days without a crash.
Ran a lvl 3 character from Primm to New Vegas without a save, just parked my char in the middle of the Strip and let the vanity cam do its thing.
Incredibly, it is even running stable in a window.

Before I update to today's patch, I'm going to continue reading feedback on it and probably wait until Hearts is released.

Fwiw, I've always had crash issues with FO and Oblivion on this rig.
But I modded the H*ll out of Oblivion (without FMods) and I haven't uninstalled Windows Live or SecuROM yet.
Maybe someday I will get back to them...

i7 920 2.67Ghz
8GB DDR3
Windows 7 64
Samsung HD642JJ (Standard SATA drive)
2048x1152
(replaced) Nvidia GTS 220 1GB (Handled FONV on High settings and tweaks via game guide. FNV auto-chose med settings)
Nvidia GTX 550 Ti 1GB (Plays smoothly on ultra settings. I'll retweak those game settings at some point. FNV auto-chose High settings).

I get this as well OP, I'm currently playing with the ini files to see if anything helps. Sometimes my game pauses for as long as 4-5 seconds trying to load a bunch of stuff at once.

It's a 7200 RPM drive, which is pretty much the standard.10,000 RPM units are available, or you could link 2 together into a RAID array. There's the Solid State option, which is the fastest you can currently get for a single drive.

Try limiting the game to run on only 2 threads or maybe even 1 thread by using http://www.radeonpro.info/ or some other tool (like the Windows Task Manager). I don't know if the engine is multithreaded, but a background loader would make sense. When textures are uploaded to the cards memory there is some stutter (could be decreased by uploading only a few textures at a time, but that's if the engine supports it) and I think that there's no way to avoid it.

I have tried the ini files and they did not make any difference for me. If you have succes tell me which settings you changed.

I am going to try the 4gb fix today.

Whoa, definitely don't force the game to run on two threads (and most certainly not on one thread). We tested this out for the heck of it one day and it significantly reduces your framerate. Just spinning around in an area where it would be normally 60fps showed 25fps in fraps. That was on two threads. That's definitely terrible advice. Years ago people found out that Oblivion was more stable on a single core, but Oblivion used OpenMP for multithreading and FO3/FONV do not. If you open your task manager you'll see that it runs on all your threads when it needs to. Modern video card drivers utilize multithreading too when rendering 3D. Do not limit this, people who say the game is not multi-core are wrong.

The 4GB thing only potentially helps if you're using multiple texture replacement mods, especially HD texture mods. Otherwise the engine never loads over 1GB of data at a time (task manager can confirm this). I don't recommend the tweak guides either. If you've tweaked your .ini at all, go back to default and you'll most likely notice the game runs better. If you do a search you'll find many users who have said that. I used to use Windows tweak guides, and I'm sure they mean well, but just remember that Windows by default is 'tweaked'. If you bought a Dell or something, you'll want to remove all the crapware for sure but don't go shutting Windows services off. I've got 12GB of RAM and turned off my swap file but that wound up doing more harm than good - some programs refuse to run without it. Oh and the texture streaming still caused a stutter.

I know some people will disagree, but I'm honestly trying to help. Don't go poking around in the .ini file just because some guide said to unless you're experimenting. Don't trust a user that says they tweaked their .ini and got a framerate boost either, even the guide says that. I used to have a weak PC so with FO3 (and NV) I spent a lot of time experimenting with mods and tools and .ini 'tweaks'. I got all OCD about it. The best performance I got was when I reset to default values. Some items push the LOD items higher than the in-game settings allow but that can wind up making things look strange and also lower FPS (even with a good video card just because of the way the engine works). Raising the ugridstoload loads more cells and can help the 'stream' stuttering but will impact your FPS again even with a good video card. None of the 'threading' stuff does anything. Task manager shows the game using 40 threads regardless of what you have these set to. The havokthreads setting (and other thread settings) is not used by the game at all - if you use the console to dump the ini values to file there is a setting related to havok threads but it is named differently. There is a bunch of stuff not in the guide or the .ini file that you can put in the .ini. Some are related to memory but nobody has ever played around with them AFAIK.

I just finshed my playthrough of the game and decided to reinstall the game and play it with both the stutter remover and 4gb enabler thing. I did not mess with any of the ini files. Last time I did that all my saves got corrupted. To be honest there is only a marginal improvement over playing it without those community fixes. I presume most of the improvement is just from the stutter remover capping fps.

I would really appreciate it if someone could give me a definitive answer on whether or not this is normal. When people say their game runs smoothly it worries me.

Lower
Your
Resolution

Why?

Yes it is normal. It's just a result of texture files being loaded up from your hard drive, nothing more. Speed up your hard drive response time and you reduce the stuttering, it's as simple as that.