My game now crashes every 1 to 10 minutes, sometimes only running 2 to 10 seconds before crashing. Crashing is more likely when running than walking and as the level of my player character increased so did the frequency of crashing. Both of these features may be significant and may be partly explained below. At this time the game crashes so frequently as to be virtually unplayable, it is nearly impossible to actually walk anywhere which is the 'soul' of this game. What is the point of having an open world when my player can only walk about 20 paces before a crash?

These are some of the collected crash info:

Win 7 (now at 265+ hours Win XP too) - very frequent
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x001df674

Win 7 (now at 265+ hours Win XP too) - most frequent <-- dozens and dozens of these
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x001dfa5c

Win 7 only - less frequent
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x001df796

Win 7 only - rare - crash when Quicksaving
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00361b2a

Win 7 and Win XP - very frequent in XP, moderately frequent in Win 7
Exception code: 0xc00000fd
Fault offset: 0x00a692cb

Computer info: q6600, 4Gb ram, GTX275 @ 1920x1080, X-Fi Platinum Pro, retail Win 7 Pro x64, retail XP SP3 x86.

The hardware is the same for both Win 7 and XP, the computer used is dual-booted to Win 7 or XP. As much as it can be equal the software installed in both OSs is similar and of course the hardware is identical. Crashing in Win 7 is much more frequent than in XP and a particular error only seems to happen in Win 7 - the 0xc0000005 errors, which leads me to believe that those errors are specific to Win 7.

Casually looking at these might lead you to think that it is just a hardware problem. The 0xc0000005 in particular is a generic memory error usually cause by a bad pointer. This can sometimes be caused by bad memory, overheating or a too overclocked system, in this case the system is not overclocked. This particular computer was taken apart and cleaned and checked for problems. An intensive memory test was run over several hours with no failures, a videocard test was run with no errors and a cpu test was run over several hours with no errors. In operation this computer does not overheat and lately I have been running monitoring software to record operating temperatures of the CPU, northbridge, memory and videocard and all seem to operate within nominal temperature ranges. I conclude that the hardware is not the source of the obscenely frequent crashing. In comparison Fallout 3 running on this same hardware very rarely crashes.

The 0xc00000fd error, which happens in both Win 7 and XP, is a stack overflow or stack unwinding error. This could happen when the program stacks are too small to handle the number of objects being managed.

An observation and possible explanation of the crashing problem:
While playing I have noticed that bodies and objects laying on the ground seem to randomly disappear. On returning to that same place those bodies and objects will often reappear. What that means to me is that those objects are actually there but the game engine is somehow randomly missing those objects and not drawing them. This may be significant later.

Now for an example: I happened to be walking across the desert near Searchlight with Arcade Gannon. I has just shot a Ghoul and was looking around for more targets, no enemy markers were displayed on my compass. Suddenly Arcade pulled out his melee weapon as if to attack, there was nothing there. Seconds later he again pulled out his melee weapon, still there were no enemy markers. I began walking and within 5 steps the game crashed. On reloading there was a ghoul standing about one foot away from my player character. I conclude that the Ghoul was there all the time prior to the crash, Arcade could sense the Ghoul but the game engine was not drawing the Ghoul.

Another example: I was returning to Camp McCarran from the west. Crossing the overpass just west of the El Rey Motel are two sandbag barricades, there is usually a soldier at the one on the eastern side. In this case the soldier was missing, as soon as I passed the barricade the game crashed. On restarting the soldier reappeared. At the Camp McCarran entrance on the right side of the door is another sandbag barricade, there is usually a soldier there. In this case the soldier was missing. As soon as I got within about 200 feet of the door the game crashed. Again on restarting the soldier reappeared. This all means that the game is not drawing all the NPCs in the game, they're there but they're not being drawn causing the game to crash.

Another example (I'm getting really cheezed off now!): Simple task to find Morale's body. Start at McCarran, crashed 4 times walking about a mile to the destination. Found the body, crashed again. What's worse is that the body is embedded in the surface, you are supposed to carry the body back a short way to some soldiers. Fixed the embedded body with the console. Went to look for the traps, you guessed it, crashed again. Disposed of the body, went back to McCarran, crashed once on the way, crashed again approaching the gate. So I thought this would be a good time to revisit Crimson Caravans to start the recruit Cass thing. Fast traveled to Crimson Caravans, did my business there, fast traveled back to McCarran and, lo and behold, crashed again. I am so angry at this point that I cannot continue with the game tonight. This kind of performance is obscene and makes for a horrible game experience. I would never recommend this game to anyone in its present state.

Now at 265+ hours of gameplay I am getting frequent crashes in BOTH Win 7 and Win XP, note that the crashes in both OSes are at the exact same code locations. Today, 1 Jan 2011 (what a nice way to start the year), in about 4 hours of gameplay I had 12 crashes all in Win XP. What's worse is that toward the end of this crash session Win XP itself seems to have begun failing, on restarting XP the system hung and required a power-off cycle to restart. I am not certain that these FNV crashes caused this problem but it is very likely. I will note that my system is otherwise extremely stable so this system hang is a very rare thing that I am going to blame on FNV. I have experimented with setting the CPU affinity to use only 2 cores (on a q6600), this may have helped but it's too soon to tell. Next I will try 2 cores in Win 7 to see if I can get good results.

I believe now that the game engine is failing in managing the AI and/or failing in managing the objects and that is what is causing the crashing. Objects that are really there are not being drawn and somehow that results in a crash. When the object is a NPC then managing the AI fails because the NPC is not being drawn again resulting in a crash. Some of this seems to be time dependent, if my player walks a crash is less likely than when running. Running causes the game engine to get too far behind in managing the objects and AI resulting in very frequent crashes. It also seems that a higher level player is more likely to have constant crashes possibly because there are more objects and AI to manage.

So what's the problem with the game engine? It's possible that there is some major error in managing lists of objects in the game, either the lists are too large or possibly some of the lists are being overwritten by some buffer overflow error. This could be a classic example of a failure caused by a memory leak causing essential parts of the game data memory to be overwritten.

Is there a solution? I believe that only the developers can fix the problem. The code locations I have listed above can be used to help find the particular location that the crashes happen at which should help to determine just exactly what is failing.

OMG! I'm getting exactly this problem. The exception code: c00000fd problem that is.

I only just got the game in the steam sale so haven't had enough time to notice the engine bugging out on things (though I did once fast travel and e-de had totally dissappeared), but I didn't have this problem with FO3 on the same system. My system is very similar to yours. Whenever this crash happens (often after 15-20 minutes play - making me hammer the autosave after every few steps), I also get an error saying my display driver has stopped responding. I'm running the latest NVIDIA drivers and I'm on Win7 x64. I've also got a GTX260 instead of your 275.

It's really frustrating because I haven't seen any other mention of this problem anywhere online so was starting to think maybe some of my components were on the blink!

Just a heads up to anyone who's getting frequent (every 10-20 minute) crashes. Try the fix in this post: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1151476-how-i-stopped-crashing-vegas/page__view__findpost__p__16849720

It worked for me! Now I can play Vegas for hours on end on my GTX260 without any crashes.

To clarify: Go to your Nvidia control panel (by right clicking on your desktop and selecting it).
Go to 'Manage 3D Settings' then choose the 'Program Settings' tab.
Click 'Add', then browse to your New Vegas folder (Usually in your Steam\Steamapps\Common\ folder), and add FalloutNV.exe
Scroll down to the 'Power Management Mode' option, and set it to 'Prefer Maximum Performance'.
Click Apply, then Yes.

Fallout New Vegas should hopefully not crash for you (at least not with the same frequency) anymore!

What type of case are you guys using? Might sound silly, but sometimes a lot of crashes happen due to heat.

I'm already running a monitor program (EVGA Precision) that monitors the GPU clocks and the clocks never fall below the max 3D performance settings (all stock clocks - not overclocked) even if the power mode is set to Adaptive. It makes no difference in frequency of crashing when the power mode is set to Max Performance. If anything, if you do that, it may just be a placebo effect. It is however possible, depending on the card, that there might be some difference in performance. But not on my GTX275. I do not think that any of these particular crashes have anything to do with the videocard, I believe the crashes are only the fault of the game engine.

I do manually set my videocard fan at 75% though, the GTX275 tends to run just a little hot with this game - about 57C to 62C - but that's not nearly hot enough to cause a problem, the max allowed by the manufacturer is 110C and the videocard hardware will automatically step down the clocks if the temp goes really high. Besides, videocard errors have different crash characteristics than what is happening with this game.

Sorry to hear it didn't work for you!

I can guarantee that it is not a placebo though. Without my fix, using a GTX260, the game will never play for longer than 40mins without throwing up the exception code: 0xc00000fd error and crashing to desktop while windows complains of a kernel mode graphics driver failure. Now I can actually play for hours on end without crashing.

Also 57-62C is incredibly cool for a card under load. I have a friend who gets 90-95C under load on his stock GTX460s.

Hope you manage to sort out these issues. Seems like they just haven't made a very robust engine with this game.

An update:
The game (now) seems only to crash when in the exterior environment, it seems to run fine when in an interior. I spent 2 hours exploring a large cave without any crashes.

Sunday I had 6 crashes in about 2 hours of gameplay.

Monday I had 17 crashes. 17? What is wrong with this game? Why hasn't it been fixed? I am completely unable to walk anywhere in the Wasteland without constant crashing. This is totally unacceptable.

Tuesday I had 8 crashes trying to finish the Boone quest at Bitter Springs. This should have taken about a half hour or less, it took me 4 hours with all the crashing (and swearing and taking breaks to chill out).

All these recent crashes are of the following two types fairly equally represented:
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x001df674

Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x001dfa5c

Win XP SP3 is now no more stable (with FNV) than Win 7 so I have gone back to running FNV in Win 7.

Experiments:
Removed Sharky's Codecs, made no difference.
Reinstalled newest Sharky's Codecs for Win 7 x64 (v2.71 and v2.75), FNV did not crash less nor did it crash more - no noticeable effect.
Now running CPU affinity for core 1,2 and 3 leaving core 0 unused for Windows. Seems to eliminate other crash types but these two crashes, 0x001df674 and 0x001dfa5c, continue to happen no less frequently.

I have noticed that crashing seems less likely to happen if my player does not run, and even less likely to happen if my player crouches when running (sneak mode).

The game now is almost totally unplayable. I am thoroughly disgusted. Where is the patch to fix this?

YOu know how common that exception code is for people with crash issues. Something in fallout 3 new vegas memory space is trying to access memory location it doesnt own.
A bad pointer is one reason but there are others. What troubleshooting have you tried? I can tell you the game runs perfectly fine on my system and has from day 1. With the exception
of stuttering which the patch and performance mode change fixed.

Some people have tried the d3d fix from fallout nexus with success.
Have you tried a clean boot?
You seem to know your way around computers. You could try a memory dump to shed some light on the issue. Debugdiag from microsoft isnt a bad program.

If your trying to get bethesda to answer your p osting in the wrong place.

I do know what that particular exception means, I though I had made sufficient explanation of that in my first post.

The key difference in the case of FNV is that the error ALWAYS happens at the same place in the code, that is what is significant.

I am more than capable of finding the cause of the error and even patching the program code to get past the error. That is not an acceptable solution. First of all I have no idea what I might break by patching the code and secondly, were I to patch the program, Steam would not allow that and would replace the patched code with the original version. Yes, I know that I can run 'offline', that is also not an acceptable solution.

It is the responsibility of the developers to fix such errors. It's not a problem with my hardware, it's not a problem with my game configuration. (Well, I'll admit it might be something about my game configuration.) But I do believe it's a fundamental error in the program code.

Why do I post here? If the developers are not reading these forums then that is a big mistake. What should I do then? Say nothing and quit playing? I don't think so.

Thanks bud - seems to have done the trick tbh

2 Hours solid not even a murmer of a crash :whistling: Shall play more at the weekend to really bench test it

Might be worth getting the Admin's to PIN this solution as one of many

Again thanks

same issues. I am definitely not buying skyrim or any other future Bethesda product if they cant make this game stable. It's not as if they lack the resources to fix fundamental code flaws for this game. Only excuse for this game is a lack of integrity on the gamesass part.