Well disabling water multi-sampling did away with that stutter for me on my GTX280. Sadly my performance seems a little subpar still.



It might be worth trying the "Fallout 3 quad core fix".

Its not the only problem with the 400 series ATM. The water fix does nothing for me. The low frame rates seem to be caused by anything that moves, eg. NPC's, windmills, flags. Perhaps there is a conflict with the Havok engine?

Again. Not saying anything about overall performance here guys. Just about the stutter FERMI cards are having. So if your running a FERMI, that will fix your issue. If your not running a FERMI, then its time to upgrade because I get NO slowdown with NPC's.

I am running dual ATI Radeon HD5770's and was having the stuttering issue as well. I turned off the water reflections and water refractions and everything runs great on Ultra settings. Hope this helps users of Nvidia and ATI cards.

Pardon me, I missed post #9 where you stated the model number. The only other Quadro 4GB I knew of was the GTX 280 based one. I have read anecdotal comments in other forums about Fallout 3, recent Nvidia cards and water quality settings. My copy of FO NV will be here today and I'll test it with my GTX 460 1GB. I know its GF104 vs. GF100, but its still based on Fermi. It never had an issue with the previous gen drivers (258.96) and Fallout 3 water - I'll see how 260.89 does with this new game. Also, regardless what you may think about your Quadro just being a GTX 480 while gaming they have a completely different driver set which may not be optimized for gaming. It might have an effect, especially on a new game.

Oops wrong thread

Just wanted to chime in. Disabling the Water does nothing to fix the problem for me.

It is definitely something about the NPCs that screws everything up. And it seems to be the NAMED NPCs that cause the problem. Generic NPCs and enemies etc don't give me any issues or lag when they are the only ones on screen.

What is this "Fallout 3 quad core fix" of which you speak?

Also, I noticed that nVidia just released new drivers yesterday, have any of you having stuttering installed the newest version?

I noticed in most cases if I sit still for a few seconds then move my GPU usage goes way up 50-90% from 10-20% and the game smooths out, until I move more than a few steps... Also while in the wasteland with 0 NPC's around me the game is silky smooth... I have tried the 260.89 and 260.93 Drivers as well... no difference...

Downloading new drivers. The NPC lag is the issue for me. Turning down water settings didn't do anything.

Water didn't fix it for me. Great. I paid $50 for something I can't use.

Worked! Thanks mate, saved me lots of effort looking for this.. I had unchecked all boxes and it had fixed the issue.. Really, you saved me a lot of time locating the source of the stutter. Thanks again.

Didn't work for me.

Oh well.

A $50 pain in the ass. Thanks, Bethesda!

I tried the water fix but it seems the NPC stutter bug still rears its ugly head.

GTX 280 3ghz quad windows 7 64 bit newest nvidia drivers.

The water fix increased my frame-rate a ton when there are no NPCs around, but it completely goes to [censored] whenever more than two of them pop up on screen. I can however, be in a room full of NPCs, and the game will run just fine if all I do is stare at the wall or the floor. What a great way to play the game.

LOL! Same thing for me! If I stare straight at the floor everything is perfect.

BTW, I'm running at 35% CPU usage and around 2 gigs of my 8 available gigs of memory.

WTF is this?

Looks like they didn't bother to test the game on multiple systems before releasing it....
Good thing game gets released 22th here in Europe, by that time Obsidian should release a patch to fix this already, so that when I play the game for the first time the patch is already preinstalled by steam.

This greatly improved my performance. Still some issues, but at least it's playable. Thanks Apachehavok!!!!!

Wow, it worked great, I guess I don't understand why, since there is not water anywhere in site.

Nope. Disabled water. Doesen't do S@#t for the fps.

You should have helped out here and named both the specific card, partner brand, graphics driver, and Windows version, with Service Pack Number.

Are you always so anol????

I experience the low frame rates associated with NPCs and multiple enemy engagements,etc. also. The water setting didn't help mine. For a testing reference point, the interior of the Vikki and Vance Casino is a good place to experience this. For me the problem isn't just facial animations (tested toggling off). As mentioned earlier by someone else, it seems to almost be more physics related.

Win 7 x64
Geforce GTX 460 1GB (driver 260.89)
Quad Core Phenom 2.6GHz
4GB RAM

Wow, thanks so much for this. My game's running smooth as a baby's ass.

Ok where do you change the water settings at?