Incresingly frequent crashing : Fallout: New Vegas

» Sat May 21, 2011 5:44 am

Hi everybody. I wanted to post this question to see if anyone else has had this issue. What happened is that for the first week or so I played F:NV with no problems at all - minimal graphical glitches, no issues with sound or anything like that. I was happy. It seemed like a brilliant game and it was eating my personal time for breakfast. Then, starting about four days ago, the game started crashing randomly. The crashes seem to be graphics-related - often, images in the pip-boy would be black squares. Also, I would completely lose sound for a few seconds and this would be the warning to quit before the game crashed. When it does crash, it'll either bomb out to the desktop, or else the computer will completely freeze, requiring a cold boot to get it going again. From a few instances, it's now happening 2 or 3 times an hour and I'm having to save every few minutes so I don't lose any progress.

My system specs are as follows:

Manufacturer ECS
Product Name G31T-M7
Version 1.0
Machine Type AT/AT COMPATIBLE
Infrared (IR) Supported No
DMI System UUID 00020003-00040005-00060007-00080009
UUID 03000200-0400-0500-0006-000700080009

Disk Space Disk C: 349 GB Available, 465 GB Total, 349 GB Free
Disk E: 25 GB Available, 186 GB Total, 25 GB Free

Physical Memory 3328 MB Total, 2623 MB Free
Memory Load 21%

Virtual Memory 5219 MB Total, 4360 MB Free

PageFile Name C:\pagefile.sys
PageFile Size 2048 MB
In use 247 MB
Max used 247 MB
Registry Size 4 MB (current), 119 MB (maximum)

Profile GUID {897f59c0-ab8c-11df-ad9f-806d6172696f}

The system clock interval 15 ms

Graphics card

CDA5A8736D944F6 (ECS G31T-M7)
Video Adapter Radeon X1800 CrossFire Edition
Code Name R520
Video Processor ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x7109)
Technology 90 nm
Adapter DAC Type Internal DAC(400MHz)
PCI ID 0x1002 / 0x7109 (ATI Technologies Inc / Radeon X1800 Series - Secondary)
PCI sub ID 0x1002 / 0x0D02 (ATI Technologies Inc / Radeon X1800 CrossFire Edition)
Memory 512 MBytes
BIOS Date 11/10/05
PnP Device Id PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_7109&SUBSYS_0D021002&REV_00\4&2E5EAC9&0&0008
Video Mode Description 1360 x 768 x 4294967296 colors
Driver Version 6.14.10.6925
Driver Date 2010-02-11 07:38:10
Core Temperature 52 °C (125 °F)
DirectX DirectX 9.0
Driver Name ati2dvag.dll
Driver Description Radeon X1800 CrossFire Edition
Video Adapter Radeon X1800 CrossFire Edition Secondary
Video Processor 41 00 54 00 49 00 20 00 52 00 61 00 64 00 65 00 6F 00 6E 00 20 00 47 00 72 00 61 00 70 00 68 00 69 00 63 00 73 00 20 00 50 00 72 00 6F 00 63 00 65 00 73 00 73 00 6F 00 72 00 20 00 28 00 30 00 78 00 37 00 31 00 32 00 39 00 29 00 00 00
Adapter DAC Type 49 00 6E 00 74 00 65 00 72 00 6E 00 61 00 6C 00 20 00 44 00 41 00 43 00 28 00 34 00 30 00 30 00 4D 00 48 00 7A 00 29 00 00 00
PCI ID 0x1002 / 0x7129 (ATI Technologies Inc / Radeon X1800 Series - Secondary )
PCI sub ID 0x1002 / 0x0D03 (ATI Technologies Inc / Radeon X1800 CrossFire Edition (Secondary))
Memory 512 MBytes
DirectX DirectX 9.0
Driver Name ati2dvag.dll
Driver Description Radeon X1800 CrossFire Edition

Is this enough information for anyone to guess at a cause, or do I need to provide anything else? Thanks either way.

» Sat May 21, 2011 6:10 am

Asking the obvious after seeing this: Driver Date 2010-02-11 07:38:10 -- have you installed the latest drivers available for your graphics card? (Assuming it's in ISO form, i.e. YYYY-MM-DD.)

Also, graphical corruption/artefacts could be an indicator that your system, the graphics card, might be running too hot.

When it freezes on you, can you still ctrl-alt-del and get to the task manager? I find that if I trip a freeze on my system, nothing wrongs (e.g. alt-tab doesn't), until I ctrl-alt-del and select "start task manager". Once there I can alt-tab and see a "FalloutNV.exe has stopped working" window from which I can "Close program". So my system doesn't need a hard reset after all.

» Sat May 21, 2011 5:43 am

Asking the obvious after seeing this: Driver Date 2010-02-11 07:38:10 -- have you installed the latest drivers available for your graphics card? (Assuming it's in ISO form, i.e. YYYY-MM-DD.)

» Sat May 21, 2011 5:45 am

Similar problem here. 42 hours and maybe three crashes. 42-45 hours there's been about 6 crashes. First 42 hours I played with exceptional framerates on ultra high settings, and now there is serious lag in some cases, and the game seems to crash due to graphical issues (all the bushes in Boomers where black blobs for about 20 minutes).

I guess 42 hours is more time than I'd spend on most games that cost me $50, but it's still incredibly upsetting. I've seen many posts like this as well. The game seems to get much worse with time.

» Fri May 20, 2011 11:45 pm

Similar problem here. 42 hours and maybe three crashes. 42-45 hours there's been about 6 crashes. First 42 hours I played with exceptional framerates on ultra high settings, and now there is serious lag in some cases, and the game seems to crash due to graphical issues (all the bushes in Boomers where black blobs for about 20 minutes).

I guess 42 hours is more time than I'd spend on most games that cost me $50, but it's still incredibly upsetting. I've seen many posts like this as well. The game seems to get much worse with time.

Just a test, I read somewhere on the Fallout wiki that there is a check in the game that checks and converts star bottle caps to normal bottle caps depending on whether or not you did a particular quest. Try dumping your bottle caps in a container (safe, trunk, desk) and see if that improves your frame rate. It's a wild guess, but cannot hurt.

» Fri May 20, 2011 6:43 pm

Similar problem here. 42 hours and maybe three crashes. 42-45 hours there's been about 6 crashes. First 42 hours I played with exceptional framerates on ultra high settings, and now there is serious lag in some cases, and the game seems to crash due to graphical issues (all the bushes in Boomers where black blobs for about 20 minutes).

I guess 42 hours is more time than I'd spend on most games that cost me $50, but it's still incredibly upsetting. I've seen many posts like this as well. The game seems to get much worse with time.

It's sad to say but only gets worse as you progress in the game. I have a higher end system and every other game I own runs flawlessly for hours on end. I think everyone just feels deceived/ripped off by Bethesda and Obsidian for selling us a bill of goods and the major review sites for deceiving us with misleading scores. There is no justifiable reason that a game with this many issues should receive a 9/10 rating.

» Sat May 21, 2011 2:26 am

It's sad to say but only gets worse as you progress in the game. I have a higher end system and every other game I own runs flawlessly for hours on end. I think everyone just feels deceived/ripped off by Bethesda and Obsidian for selling us a bill of goods and the major review sites for deceiving us with misleading scores. There is no justifiable reason that a game with this many issues should receive a 9/10 rating.

Its no surprise this company has a better business Bureau rating of F. The reason why you can play flawlessly for hours and then start getting crashes is this: Everytime you do an action like open a container, kill something level up ect, it can cause save file bloat. As you go through the game doing hundreds of little different things, knocking over items in the game world and so on, it gets worse. This problem has been present since morrowind and as far as I know, there is nothing you can do to stop this. Until the developers find a better way to help the game remember your actions, the longer you play and the more you do will cause more frequent crashes.

» Sat May 21, 2011 7:50 am

Its no surprise this company has a better business Bureau rating of F. The reason why you can play flawlessly for hours and then start getting crashes is this: Everytime you do an action like open a container, kill something level up ect, it can cause save file bloat. As you go through the game doing hundreds of little different things, knocking over items in the game world and so on, it gets worse. This problem has been present since morrowind and as far as I know, there is nothing you can do to stop this. Until the developers find a better way to help the game remember your actions, the longer you play and the more you do will cause more frequent crashes.

So there is no way to fix this problem? Good going, Bethesda...

» Sat May 21, 2011 11:22 am

mine got worse to the point of me just uninstalling it for now and calling it quits.

» Sat May 21, 2011 2:16 am

mine got worse to the point of me just uninstalling it for now and calling it quits.

I had many more crashes last night that I had been experiencing since day one and no reason as to why as nothing has changed. FO3 was a crashfest for many people and Beth did nothing to fix that engine so from my standpoint, crashes are expected.

F5, F5...keep hitting F5!

» Sat May 21, 2011 10:43 am

LOl @ suzzi

» Sat May 21, 2011 11:24 am

Same problem here. I had about 75 hours of problem free gameing before crashing and "FalloutNV.exe has stopped working". I've noticed that the game now crashes every time my companion 'Cass' starts shooting at something.