I downloaded the latest supposed "Patch" this evening and still after only a few minutes of play, CTD! I thought this patch was supposed to stop the CTDs but again it DOES NOT! When will they provide us a real fix for this problem? All any of us want to do is PLAY the game but with all of the CTDs it makes that simple effort meaningless and not worth what I paid for this game. When will a real FIX be forthcoming?

You'll never stop all CTD's, I'm sorry to tell you, but it just won't happen. Even on my new system which is pretty damned high end, I still crash every now and again.

Perhaps it's something you are running in the background which is interfering with the game. Perhaps your system is not quite up to the task of running the game at the setting you have enabled. There are a multitude of reasons why this could be happening

More info on your system and your troubles might be helpful in potentially finding a way of getting up and running.

I don't think they'll ever fix it perfectly.
None of the Bethesda games have ever been in an acceptible state by the time the final patch rolled out.

Unofficial Oblivion Patch.
Unofficial Fallout3 Patch.
These came after the final official patches for both games and both correct hundreds, if not thousands, of errors.

And don't even get me started on Knights of the Old Republic 2. Obsidian lays down a great foundation... but they have a history of releasing unfinished/broken games. Tantalizing enough to tease you.. but aggravating enough that you just wanna pop the disk out and snap it in half.

Like KOTOR 2, so much cut content. There was lots of stuff there that they cut out due to time constraints... scenes and dialogue that help make the game actually make sense... but I don't think they ever patched it officially. THere's an unofficial restoration patch that tries to piece it all together.
New Vegas is at least off to a better start than KOTOR2. The story makes sense.

Try in about 3 years.

Unfortunately there is nothing about fixing crashing in the change log. According to Steam, I've put over 104 hours into the game (kinda sad...) and I've probably had it crash around a dozen times. I'm not sure how that fares with other games, but most of the other games I've played are 8-10 hour affairs. I can and have played NV for 4 hours straight without any issues before too. Due to the engine, I doubt that CTDs will ever be fixed

You are either way off topic, or wrote a very incomplete complaint about your problem(s).

Bethesda has an official support site, but THIS is not it. What this is, as you can learn by locating your eyeglasses and putting them on, is the place where fellow game players gather to compare technical notes about the PC version. You come in here and ask for suggestions, we offer advice, it sometimes is some help, when waiting on more permanent fixes. BUT, we are not clairvoyant folks in here, really. In order to try to diagnose what is wrong, we need detailed hardware information, operating system information, driver data, and a detailed problem description.

Yeah my experience has been pretty similar to everyone else's.

It started out very badly though - but a DXDIAG and looking through some forum posts eventually helped me out a lot. At first I was constantly crashing to desktop on launch- not able to even load or start a new game. I notice my graphics driver was out of date when I looked at the dxdiag - so I installed an update from nvidia.com. Then of course I was getting NPC super stuttering and crashing every 15 minutes. D3d9.dll helped with the stutter (didn't need it after the first couple game patches though) but I was still crashing far too often.

Finally I took one last look at my diagnostics and noticed the drier being used for my audio cards (on board and creative labs w/faceplate) were both molder than my computer by a good year. I updated those and was still crashing - but this time I was receiving an error message indicating an audio device had failed and been restarted. Well that explaned why my stereo system made strange noises during the crashes. Turns out my particular model of Creative Labs overpiced trash sound card was notorious for eating itself when playing games and using the optical audio out. I switched to my onboard sound and swapped the optical cable to its output. Game runs very well now (and all the housekeeping I did tweaking and updating things has improved performance in a number of other games as sort of compensation for the pain in my ass that this has been) but I do still get CTD's about once every other day and only after seerl hours of gameplay. Oh and the in game surround effects actually work now that I'm using the cheap on board sound.

*Sigh* My early days suffering trying to deal with my god-awful IBM wavetable onboad combination soundcard+modem chipset experiences had biased me against using on board audio devices.

Tried playing for about 30 minutes. Crashed twice.


After the patch I'm crashing much more often than I used to. Getting really old....

Unfortunately, when you make a game as complex as Fallout: NV (or anything on the Gamebryo engine), it's nigh impossible to correct all bugs and release a "perfect" product. I agree that it is annoying - I currently can't use my debug console in order to correct an issue with my non-human companion disappearing - but they continue to work on it, correcting issues as quickly as they can. It's not exactly an easy task. If you genuinely want help with your issue, the best thing to do is get the detailed information for the crash/bug and send it to Bethesda's support. Otherwise, be patient and wait for them to release the large comprehensive update that they've already said they're working on.

Still getting a little stutter and bad fps. God forbid if i throw a nade inside a building. Using the same hardware i did when i played F3 and didnt have the problems.

O well, guess it's great that they fixed the quests even though i've completed most of them.

The changelog for the patch doesn't mention performance so it wasn't designed to solve any sort of stuttering

A lot of folks here use the word 'stuttering' for different purposes, there isn't a universal usage. For example, the most common 'cause' is low FPS for people that have their settings too high. Another thing people complain about is the slight stuttering caused by loading/streaming new cells every now and then. There is nothing to be done about that, it happens in all open world games the stream/load data on-the-fly in the background. Oblivion does it a lot and even has a little "now loading" prompt sometimes when walking around. Fallout 3 does it less because the map is smaller and half of it (the whole DC area) is split up in to mini-areas. A SSD could minimize this

Some folks see a sort of stutter they claim is the result of the game running at 64fps but this doesn't appear to affect everybody. Supposedly this was fixed in the last patch and with recent video drivers but I don't have it so I don't know. Then there is micro-suttering inherent to all video cards and especially crossfire/sli. If you don't notice it then you won't see it but god forbid somebody ever points it out to you because you'll notice it in every single game

Lastly, there are portions of the game that have lower FPS no matter how good your system is due to the game engine. Vault 21 and the sewers for example. This has to do with the way the level designer created it. Depending on the layout of the level, if positioned a certain way your graphics card will fully render areas that it isn't displaying. Also, for whatever reason the in-game burning barrels coupled with multiple NPCs/actors slows the game down

I have two nvidia SC version GTX 480's OCed to 850/1700/2000 and I get that "stuttering" when i am running near mountains or just out in the open somewhere and running. I also tried just running at stock speeds on my cards but still got that stuttering. Now the crash thing happens at least once every time I play which is every night. LOL, I think I have about 160 hours so far. Can someone say "Get a life dude?" Anyway, I also found if I do not go into the properties of FONV by right clicking on the name in Steam and then to the Local Files tab and then run the "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" tool there that I won't be playing for very long at all before it crashes and when I do run that I go for several hours before the CTD. Sometimes the game just totally disappears from site on me which is a crash but with no messages from Windows that it is looking for the problem. I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and although my rig is a coupe of years old now it's still no slouch with those 480's, an Intel QX9650 (quad core) and 4GB of Corsair DDR3. The QX9650 is OCed to 3.6Ghz as well. I never have any CTD when I play FO3 anymore though and for the most part this game is now the only one that does crash to desktop on me. BTW anyone that plays this game through Steam pretty much has to apply the patch before playing the game but it did surprise me that this "Fix everything" patch was pretty small. For some reason I thought that it was going to be a lot bigger of a patch.

That's the game background loading new areas. Unlike FO3, the world space is way more open so you'll see it more often. In FO3, the map was a lot smaller and the DC area was split into several mini ares So you would hardly ever see that background loading stutter. If the 'invisible walls' weren't there it would probably be a lot worse. I would guess that a SSD would reduce this but not eliminate it because it would still hiccup when copying into RAM. I wish there was a way to just force more of the game to load into RAM but there isn't.. unless you setup a RAM drive. There is some .ini 'tweaks' which claim to do that but they definitely do nothing. Some people have said to turn on all the 'background loading' switches in the .ini too, that's another non-tweak which just makes it even worse because instead of loading on the load screen it loads while playing the game!

Of course you didn't think your ridiculous overclock was to blame.

Well I do have 2 OCZ 100GB Vertex LE's I need to find the time to install. I even have the controller card as well and just haven't had the time lately. Looks like I will have to make some time eh? I will put the OS on them in a RAID 0 config and then put the games and everything else on the two WD raptors I am now using in RAID 0 since the controller card will handle to sets of 2 drives. I was going to put together a newer system but then I should actually go ahead and install them now on what I have and really wait until next year when Intel comes out with their newer offerings. Thanks for the info though as it makes a lot of sense. The stuttering I get isn't all THAT bad I guess.

I don't get anymore crashes, haven't since the first patch (without mods installed), but after this latest one I now get a really irritating strobe effect in the Hidden Valley bunker. I've been there plenty of times before, it's definitely only started happening since the patch. It would almost be neat, if it didn't make my head hurt.
NVSE seems to be completely incompatible with New Vegas now. I can't launch NV from it, and mods that required it now no longer work as they're supposed to. Which is a mixed blessing, since I've had to disable some mods that cause my game to crash.
On top of that, I've been having issues with quests that I didn't have before the patch.
Any chance that the NVSE issue will be addressed?

It solves vats crash?

Thats actually an issue of sorts with NVSE. Because it works via the exe, if version numbers don't match, it won't work. The NVSE team should have an updated version out soon enough.

edit: NVSE HAS been updated now to beta 6 to work with the new patch. Time to update it.

Most excellent! Thanks for sharing that

I haven't tried that yet. Thought I'd play through the game first and then play around with the mods next. Gotta get my money's worth... However back to the CTD issue tonight I have crashed 3 times and every time this time around has been the video driver stopped working. It's been quite a while since I have seen that but nvidia's last driver updates were only for the new GTX 580's and I believe one of the 200 series cards which was kindof strange to me. For the time being they seemed to have forgotten about us 400 series and all the rest on down type card holders.

Dunno bout you but when I'm at The Thorn it CRASHES like HEEEEEEEEEEELIOS..