Is the NPC lag NOT fixed for anybody else?

Strangely, it seemed to be fixed for me when the first patch went live (1.1) but now, in 1.2, NPC lag has returned.

I'm on windows 7 64, with an intel i7 QC720, and nvidia 330m.

I am using the ATI dll fixed, and the game is running even better than before. I still get horrendous framerates without the dll though.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I was using the dll fix, and without it, game is unplayable. New updates remedied nothing for me.

Years ago (i.e. when Oblivion was released), it was accepted that the Gamebryo engine liked nVidia cards more than ATI- I don't know if this is still the case.

Could be. I'm using an nVidia card, and the new patch has done WONDERS for my framerate. It's like it's not even the same game. Now maybe I can actually play it.

Yes it is fixed. Your video card is trash. Sorry. 330m is entry level stuff, even for FO3 and Oblivion

Isn't the 330m mobile? As in laptop? If that's the case, mobile displays generally have 1/2 the pipeline count.

what exactly does that mean? pipeline count?

yes the 330M is mobile (hence the M)

FO3 runs fine on this computer. With DLL fix I can play new vegas on high with 60 fps. Card is not "trash" for this game, "sorry." The game auto-detects my hardware on medium.

Also, earlier today (when the first new patch dropped) I played without the DLL fix and experienced an improvement in FPS drastically. After the second patch was applied (1.2) it seems like the first was nullified. I'm back to poor FPS.

Also, when trying to verify game cache, I get the following error message at 75%:

"1 files failed to validate and will be reacquired."

also it IS only NPC lag - i get no FPS drop when no NPCs are present, and the second a couple appear on screen I'm watching a slideshow. This isn't a hardware issue.

I think it may have something to do with the patch not working correctly for some people. hence the verification failing.

I thought so. Here's the thing, the ATI4670 that I use has a higher pipeline count, and higher raw throughput count than the 330m. Pipelines mean the amount of data that the GPU can pull either from memory(vram), or ram to process textures. Now other stuff, the reason why the DLL thingy works well for you is because your card while it supports 3/4.0/etc shaders, it has a very limited amount of processing power dedicated to it. So when you force an older shader version, you get more performance. This also applies to how the engine handles emotions by shaders. And so on.

The card isn't meant for high-levels of shader processing, or for heavy gaming that's all there is to it. My 4670 detects on ultra-high, and the card is pushing 2yrs old.

That 1 file is a installer file don't worry about it.

Laptop gaming is still several years behind desktop gaming.

I find it hard to believe that its my GPU causing this issue. This game is no more GPU intensive than, say, SC2 - and this GPU is more than capable of attaining consistent FPS of 60+ in that game

if it really was my GPU

why would the game world itself, including high draw distance, etc, not drop my FPS at ALL yet NPC emotions do? is that really hardware?

also, like i said - i had no FPS drop earlier. played until the second patch dropped with 60 fps +. without DLL fix.

Whether or not you believe it, is not upto me. SC2 is less intensive(except the cinematic intermissions between missions), because the overall texture size is tiny. FO3/NV use a base 512x512 texture size, SC2 uses 128x128 as it's base size. SC2 also uses a lower shader version by default.

To make it simple, to make a face move requires thousands upon thousands of points to change the facial animation, this is all done by the shader engine. That's 'heavy' on a GPU, drawing something way out in the middle of no where isn't hard, especially with a flat 2d texture wrapped 3 time around a mesh. Where the video card only has to draw the flat side.

The reason your DLL fix likely works is because it forces the game to tone down some visual effects (lower-resolution post-processing buffer seems the most obvious to me). These have a small impact on image quality, but can mean the difference between good and poor performance on dated or low-spec hardware. It's not so much that the game is running poorly, as it is that you've simply turned down some performance-intensive settings via the use of the DLL file.

The patch did not mention anything about fixing NPC lag. They only mentioned fixing some performance issues with DirectX. For the NPC lag I'd expect a mention of FaceGen and/or FaceFX in the patch notes.

Facegen isn't the problem, it's shader use by the engine to make the emotions show. That falls under a "DX performance issue".

It still had something to do with FaceGen or FaceFX. I went so far as to hex edit the .exe file so I could run D3D SDK's PIX on it. Well I wasn't entirely successful, the differences reported by my actual card and the spoofed one didn't say anything about shaders just texture color modes

The person who wrote the .dll said that all it does is spoof the D3D hardware capabilities found in an nvidia 7900gs (and all the ati versions were just hex edited, they still included the hardware capabilities of a 7900gs) which originally was intended for FaceGen to load faces on integrated graphics. Considering Bethesda never updated FaceGen (the date is still 2006 in the credits/title screen) there was most likely a handshake problem with newer cards that were causing the hiccup.

I stand by my comment that the video card is at fault here. 330m is what is in my wife's laptop. I played fallout 3 on it and could not maintain 60fps in medium. More like 30-45fps. If the .dll file enabled the game to get 60fps that would be quite interesting, but I didn't use one for FO3 and it was 30fps city most of the time with some sections (like little lamplight and raven rock and mothership zeta) going to 15fps

Just an FYI, but the 330m is roughly comparable in D3D9 performance to the minimum required 6800 desktop card