First of all, hi everyone. I'm a huge fan of Fallout series. But I still can't believe that New Vegas was launched at retail WITH THE SAME (and very annoying) BUG THAT PLAGUED FALLOUT 3 when running on newer ATI cards (not to mention Oblivion, same bug).
Yes, I'm talking about the Vsync + frame skipping bug, specially for those people (like me) who play games on ATI (first on 4870 and now 5850. Even with a very good graphic card like mine, the XFX 5850 Black Edition the game is ruined I play it without personal tweaking on some .ini file. With Fallout 3 and Oblivion I could almost forgive the developers because my graphic card was newer than those games (the rest of my rig is not so new but could run Fallout 3 on high at 8X with that ATI mentioned above - intel core 2 duo e8500 OC 3.81Ghz, 4GB ram, asus P5Q mobo...) forgive the fact that they never released some proper fix but to arrive at home at this very great launch day and prepare myself to be blown away by New Vegas hoping to find out that finally this idiotic bug were fixed and only to discover that they weren't fixed is, at least, VERY disappointing.

ok, so back again editing that .ini file mentioned earlier (instead of editing two .ini files like in fallout 3 and oblivion, here i've discovered that is only one needed - 40 minutes lost for that, the old try & error).

1) FalloutPrefs.ini --> edit with notepad and search for the line "iFPSClamp=0"
2) change to "iFPSClamp=60"
3) now run that little saviour application called D3DOverrider (from RivaTuner / if anybody here uses ATI and still don't know this, please, google it now and start to live another life, the one that includes Vsync'ed games, since ATI still can't do nothing about it).
4) go to your Catalyst video driver and leave the Vsync option 'Off, unless application specifies'
5) now run New Vegas and under the startup options LEAVE VSYNC CHECKED. ok, this is weird and at start it didn't make sense but using that old try & error method (the one that ruins the thrill of running the game for the first time) i've discovered that it was the only way to work.
6) play the game with silk smooth 60fps (and pray for Developers, Steam & ATI FIX IT - along with other know bugs).

so, 50 dollars spent and more than an hour doing what the developers and testers should have done PRIOR TO RELEASING THE GAME. it ruined my first impressions on the game, and of course i know that i'll love it like i did with fallout 3 but MY QUESTION IS ONE AND VERY SIMPLE: HOW CAN A MILLION DOLLAR PIECE OF ART LIKE THIS ARRIVE AT RETAIL WITH BUGS LIKE THESE?! I bet many (millions actually) gamers could migrate from consoles to PC if they knew they could play games straight from their boxes/digital download without having to spent many hours searching for clues in forums! Why still does it have to be like this? Can't the game just detect the user's graphic card properly and automatic set the correct .ini file if the case is that bugged Vsync?

FINALLY IS A SHAME THE PC GAMING INDUSTRY IS NOW ON THIS SO CALLED 'BETA GAMING AGE', where 50% or more of the good games are released needing urgent patches and fixes.

Thank you all for reading and forgive my poor english!

Ok sorry to sound stupid but where is falloutprefs located ? I dont see it anywhere in the fallout new veags folder.. nore do searchs come up with it

Ummmm HD4870 here and all this does is drop me down to around 20fps....

You can find it in Fallout New Vegas folder (Fallout_default.ini). Then in notepad use Find in Edit tab.

PS: I totally agree with Spalding.
Obsidian we are not testers.

Ok i changed the files like you said, and wow.. My fps deff has gone up..

My system specs are

E8400 @ 44000mhz
4GB DDR2
Ati 4890OC

Not gonna get into more specs but those are the mains ones.. I was getting like mostly around 40fps in the starting town and it was a little jerky and kinda hurt my eyes .. Now im getting around 50-60fps constant and its smooth as butter for the most part.. However if i go to the 40's i notice a wierd slow down. Like my char starts to go into slow motion for a second. It never did that before..


Overall tho this really helped now i can look around in town without my fps spiking up and down, thanks...


EDIT: well i might actually have to go back to what it was before, because it actually seems to go into slow motion alot. When i talk to someone and im getting 40fps they even talk in slow motion lol

Tried the steps above and it just made things worse. Still get 10-15 fps in battles and everything is in slow motion.

Clamping your FPS is not a good idea. Now the game will not let you see less than 60 FPS, and so it has to make up for the FPS loss by creating more frames which is done by slowing everything down.

Yea now, i cant seem to get the game back to where it was before.. I set the clamp back to 0, and turned off d3doverrider and my game is still in slow motion

I uninstalled Rivatuner and also deleted the .ini's in my steam folder. That got me back to square one. Sigh.

So your stuck in slow motion also ?? I cannot keep the clamp to stay at 0... Its now stuck at this 60 and my game wont stop running in slowmotion.... This fix just made it worse and i cant get it back to what it was before.,,, how do i fix this...

well... just went outside Doc's house for the first time only to discover some horrible frame rate.

i quit. have to work tommorrow, it's very late in the night here in brazil and i'm going to sleep sad for spending almost 15% of my salary on a game that i've dream so much in the last months. wich is for now on just one more broken game.

you guys should have more care about YOUR CUSTOMERS. things are already hard here in this 3rd world sink hole and one of my fewest joys in life (gaming) happens to be broken right now.

please, somebody on bethesda/obsidian/steam/ati read all of our cries AND DO SOMETHING.

WERE IS THE QUALITY CONTROL?!?!?!?!?!

goodnight and good luck all. may god help us see the light in this dark times of gaming industry.

cheers.

You have to go into your Steam folder and delete the falloutprefs ini file

For example:

C:\program files\steam\userdata\YOUR ID # HERE\22380\remote

Then i delete the .ini's in My Documents\My Games\FalloutNV folder


That will reset your graphic and control settings.

The frameskip isnt an ATI only issue. It affects everyone. Like in this Nvidia forum threadhttp://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=44984&pid=288668&mode=threaded&start=#entry288668

Not everyone notices it and most of the people replying in this thread think the op is talking about low fps or fps spikes. Heres a youtube vid. The same stutter occurs when moving. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G375cUecgQ

Having this exact same problem. It's not FPS lag (things aren't "slow" for me, it's just a micro-stutter. Not moving or turning everything is fine (no slow motion or anything of othat sort, fps are fine).


Hoping something is fixed soon.

Dont hold your breath. This has been an issue with every game that uses this engine. Either the devs dont care, its too hard to fix or it has to do with the engine being designed to run at 30 fps on consoles. The console versions run like crap but they dont have the frameskip issue.

Very true. The engine itself is just garbage. I'm sure they will wait until next Elderscrolls to build a new engine (Which we will all need to upgrade our computers to run mind you) Which svcks but thats just how it's gonna go. Oh! An the console versions do indeed have microstuttering. Least on the Xbox 360 version which i eventually tried playing because i found it hard to deal with microstuttering in PC.