What PC *will* run this game? : Fallout: New Vegas

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 11:03 pm

I'm not trying to be snarky or critical with this thread--I'm way past that at this point. I just don't have the energy to be mad or frustrated anymore. All I want is to be able to play this game. In my case, the game CTDs every 10-30 min., with the occasional restart required. I just can't make any headway like this. Now, I'm sure that the testers didn't have this much trouble when they were testing the game. Surely it would not have been released if the game was CTDing consistently every 15 min. That must mean that the hardware and software configurations used by the testers are relatively stable. So, my question is simple:

What hardware/software configurations were specifically used by the testers for this game? Please tell us what PC configuration will run the game so we can get on with enjoying it. I'm willing to swap out some hardware or even do a clean install of Windows if that's what it takes, but I'm not going to go buy an Xbox, TV, and the game again just to play it (and even then Xbox players are reporting plenty of bugs). I think it's fair request. I'm not asking for trade secrets or copyright protected info--just tell us what machines can reliably run the game.

Sadly, I'm afraid this post will never even be read because it'll be lost in the sea of people screaming bloody murder...

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 3:34 am

Try the first option here. Some thank their deity for its existence:
http://www.ripten.com/2010/10/24/five-essential-pc-mods-for-fallout-new-vegas/

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 9:51 am

The traffic flow this week has been nothing at all to compare with what happened the first week that Oblivion was out, and is probably about equal to message traffic for Fallout 3's first week.

Two things seem paramount. Use Windows XP is number one.

Use a mainline AMD Radeon seems to be the number two favorable thing to have and not be in here to complain.

Gorath

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 4:55 am

I doubt you will get a dev response, so I'll list my PC as this is stable*.

I have a pretty standard spec:
Windows 7 x64
C2D @ 3.6Ghz
Nvidia GTX460.
4GB RAM.

I am using the D3D9 dll fix.
Nvidia 260.99 drivers
Not running any unnecessary programs.
Disabled Steam In-game Overlay
Disabled Steam Cloud
Disabled all automatic saving options (Remember to save often

)

*game only crashes every few hours (normal for a gamesas title).

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:44 am

The traffic flow this week has been nothing at all to compare with what happened the first week that Oblivion was out, and is probably about equal to message traffic for Fallout 3's first week.

Two things seem paramount. Use Windows XP is number one.

Use a mainline AMD Radeon seems to be the number two favorable thing to have and not be in here to complain.

Gorath

+1

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:57 am

Try the first option here. Some thank their deity for its existence:
http://www.ripten.com/2010/10/24/five-essential-pc-mods-for-fallout-new-vegas/

I thought the D3D9.dll "fix" only applied to Vista and Windows 7 users. I'm running Windows XP. Also, you should note the D3D9 "fix" is really more of a kludge:

Fallout: New Vegas
27 October 2010

I've been receiving a lot of emails about this, so I thought it important to finally speak out about it. An unofficial 'fix' to performance issues in Fallout: New Vegas has been doing the rounds for the past week as some sort of global solution to all problems. I do not recommend this D3D9 Fix at all, as it causes Fallout: New Vegas to falsely redetect your graphics card as a lower model, and in turn use a lower shader package. It can reduce image quality and cause a range of long-term problems. A much better solution is to use the ToggleEmotions (temo) console command in each Fallout: New Vegas session to temporarily disable facial emotions on NPCs, thereby removing the major source of the slowdowns which may occur in areas where there are several characters. This method will not reduce your image quality or cause other potential problems. This is also a good time to remind everyone that PC gaming does not involve any quick fixes. If you're having performance issues in Fallout: New Vegas or any other game, the correct solution inevitably involves properly optimizing and maintaining your entire PC, along with research and intelligent tweaking of the game, not just grasping at the first quick fix that happens to come along. Additionally, official patches and driver updates resolve many of the legitimate problems, so some patience is also involved.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:52 am

How do you add the mods if you have a Steam only download of Fallout New Vegas?

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 4:08 am

The traffic flow this week has been nothing at all to compare with what happened the first week that Oblivion was out, and is probably about equal to message traffic for Fallout 3's first week.

Two things seem paramount. Use Windows XP is number one.

Use a mainline AMD Radeon seems to be the number two favorable thing to have and not be in here to complain.

Gorath

Well, I am running XP, so I guess that should be in my favor. On the other hand, I have dual 8800 GTS cards running in SLI, which I pretty much assumed was going to give me trouble (although Oblivion and FO3 ran fairly well on this machine). I guess I'll go pick up a Radeon. Thanks for the feedback.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 6:04 am

Try the first option here. Some thank their deity for its existence:
http://www.ripten.com/2010/10/24/five-essential-pc-mods-for-fallout-new-vegas/

Damn, I want Realistic Lighting and Color but the link is broken.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 10:19 am

It's never been my feeling that dual video cards ever made good economic sense at any other level than the very highest, which would have been the 8800GTXes, not GTSes. But you're probably right, the 8800 /9800 cards are now more or less in between the Mainline Range and the High End Range, so that Radeon 5770s are equivalent in most regards (singletons at least, compared to 8800 singletons). You should see some advantage to the potential change beyond just this one game. The exception for a 5770, of course, it when running very high resolution displays, and you really need the 1 GB VRAM all the time, then the Midrange 5770 can't move the large blocks of textures in and out of VRAM in anything like a competitive fashion due to the much lower memory bandwidth.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:11 pm

Well, I am running XP, so I guess that should be in my favor. On the other hand, I have dual 8800 GTS cards running in SLI, which I pretty much assumed was going to give me trouble (although Oblivion and FO3 ran fairly well on this machine). I guess I'll go pick up a Radeon. Thanks for the feedback.

MetalJon,
You know that there is no SLI support yet, right?
So you should pretend you have only 1 vidcard for the moment, then set options accordingly.
Don't force AA, AF or vsync through nVidia Control Panel. All settings in there should be high-performance.
Select no AA, no AF, no vsync and minimal vid settings within the game - just for the time being.
I myself have nVidia and find their software far superior to ATI.

What PC *will* run this game?

Mine.
Flawlessly! 60fps minimums - avg. and max. much higher.
There are bugs and I've had my own issues...
No playing cards! Since I got rid of them all I've had no more crashing, not even one.
Regards

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:40 pm

MetalJon,
You know that there is no SLI support yet, right?

No, how could I? Nothing in the game's technical specifications says anything about SLI.

So you should pretend you have only 1 vidcard for the moment, then set options accordingly.
Don't force AA, AF or vsync through nVidia Control Panel. All settings in there should be high-performance.
Select no AA, no AF, no vsync and minimal vid settings within the game - just for the time being.
I myself have nVidia and find their software far superior to ATI.

Yeah, I was going to take another shot at digging into the gfx options. In nVidia Control Panel I have everything set to default, which in all the cases you mention is "application controlled." I suppose I need to switch over to performance instead of quality, though. I suppose running the game with low-medium quality textures and diminished details is better than nothing.

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:23 pm

Use a mainline AMD Radeon seems to be the number two favorable thing to have and not be in here to complain.

There is nothing that suggest ATI is the way to go for this game. You are being a really devoted fan; now this guy is going to go purchase an unneeded piece of equipment. Way to go!

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:20 pm

There is nothing that suggest ATI is the way to go for this game. You are being a really devoted fan; now this guy is going to go purchase an unneeded piece of equipment. Way to go!

Most people that are having problems have said they are using a Nvidia card, so if you are looking to upgrade (just for this game) i think ATI would be the way to go.

I am running the game almost flawlessly, I have had one crash with the 35 hours i have played, only real bug i have encountered is not being able to finish "beyond the beef"

i did have the distant "white box" flickering issue people with Nvidia cards have been reporting, all i did was change screen effects from HDR>none, i noticed no visual difference but no more flickering.

i7-930
GTX480
6gb ram
windows 7-64bit

settings on max, 8x AA
1920x1080

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 10:29 am

I've had a reasonably stable experience.

Windows XP SP2, Dual Core Intel 3.0 Ghz, 3 gigs RAM, nvidia 8800 GT, DirectX 9.0C I believe, and I've done no tweaking.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 5:10 am

I have not had one crash since purchasing the game on release day.

I'm just disappointed in how the game performs. I am running Nvidia GPUs - dual GTX 460s. The latest driver did get rid of the white box flicker, but I still have the major frame rate drop when encountering many NPCs.

One would think that the developers would have noticed such an issue and resolved it prior to release. It's a really damper with respect to enjoying the game.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 11:00 am

OS: Win7 x64
MB: Asus M4N82(Delux)
CPU AMD Phenom™ II X4 940
RAM: 4GB DDR2+
GPU 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 SLI 4x
Sound: Creative SB X-Fi
HD: Seagate ST3500410AS

I had to use the DLL NPC fix, and spent forever messing with codecs to get it to run. Still had to use High instead of Ultra in the Config (could be related to the DLL fix or I may just think to highly of my GPU.).

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:19 pm

Just wanted to add that with the config in my signature that it works perfectly at ultra since the 10.10c hotfix for crossfire. I did however change the FalloutNV.exe before I even played the game for the first time after reading of problems with Aero, not sure which thread it was from but if you edit the properties and check the "disable desktop composition" in compatibility it will disable Aero when launching and avoid those issues.

Best of luck to those with issues. The game is awesome.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:26 pm

I've had a reasonably stable experience.

Windows XP SP2, Dual Core Intel 3.0 Ghz, 3 gigs RAM, nvidia 8800 GT, DirectX 9.0C I believe, and I've done no tweaking.

Except for the fact I'm running two 8800 GTS in SLI your config is very close to mine. I suppose it's obvious at this point I'll need to disable SLI. What kind of settings are you running currently (i.e. video settings in the game), if you don't mind my asking?

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 6:59 am

I have noticed a lot of people with problems with this are using the GTX 460/480 cards... I'm running a GTS 360M and I'm not having any problems other than the rare occasional CTD... I did however choose to use the .dll fix and that was It no more problems other than a few quest issues.

My mobile rig (laptop)

Win 7 x64
4gb DDR 3 RAM
i5 430M @ 2.27 ghz
GTS 360M 1gb vid mem

Run on high with the land and object quality turned up to max no problems

Edit* sorry if I misspelled or typed something wrong Im on my HTC Evo doing this

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 10:36 am

I use a GTX 470 with 6 gigs of RAM, 1 terabyte and a 500 gig Hard drive, 850 watt psu, and an intel core 2 quad core 9650 all at stock speed with ZERO problems. the only problem I ever had was the NPC slowdown that was fixed with the DLL fix.

Occasional crashes happen with any game. When I played Company of Heroes I would get an occasional crash, same with Farcry 2, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and now with New Vegas. crashes and bugs with video games are nothing new, and most certainly not limited to Bethesda games. Could they do more to help ensure a more stable, enjoyable gaming experience? Maybe so, but that is also what patches are for, every modern game I have ever played has had it's share of bugs, most of the biggest ones usually get patched.

Developers do test their products before release, but they cannot test the game on every possible configuration for PC, XBOX and PS3, if they did the game would never get released. Some systems unfortunately will not be able to handle the game, while others can manage just fine.