I downloaded the game from steam after I bought it and it set me to high quality. My computer had NO problem with the settings being on high quality for fallout 3 so I thought that was normal. When I enter the game, it also seemed like I was getting decent frames. But the second I woke up in the doctors bed and faced him, it started getting bad frames. When I went outside it was pretty good as well, but the second I looked at any NPC my frames went way down.

Logic says that when you have bad frames, turn down the quality of the game. Well I turned it to the lowest possible settings and turned EVERYTHING off, and the frames just got worse. I now have bad frames no matter where I am or what I look at. My brother is having the same problem as will, I have a nvidia 9800 GT video card and he has a nvidia 9800 GTX.

Is it a problem with the game or with our video cards? I'm not a computer guy so I have no idea :/

try this

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1123460-potential-fix-for-npc-slowdown/

Good luck,
Sleeping

The Gam4ebryo engine is old, creaky, and contrary. An ordinary $75 Mainline video graphics card has all of the renedering power than an old engine like this one can use. Many of today's and even yesterday's rather mundane business graphics cards have neen gradiually improving while this game's old engine has gone unimproved, so that "slow" hardware such as HD 45xx and HD 55xx, and Geforce "20" cards can run the game at Medium.

Almost four years ago now, the card design you have was among the fastest you could buy, however, the entire Geforce 8n00 generation had a very serious firmware defect built in, that was particularly bad for the mobile cards and the high end 8800s, so nVIDIA rushed through an update to the 8800s as soon as they could, and a generation refresh came sooner than usual, though moving the 8n00 designs to the new thinner die wafers that were intended for the GTX200 GPUs. They corrected the firmware problem that caused overheated video cards to overheat even more, and renamed everything to a new 9n00 set of names, including the 9800s.

AMD's Radeons had been unable to match the 8800s without becoming little space heaters (HD 2900 XTX), so the HD 3870 staked out a place below the 8800 GTX and 8800GT, at a price point that nVIDIA couldn't afford to meet until they had the GTX260 ready. And of course AMD had the newer HD 4870 that would run with the GTX270, and a 4870X2 that woukl run with the GTX295. Before nVIDIA could move with their GTX400, AMD had also followed the HD4n00 cards up with the HD 5n00, and this time, the 5870 was aimed way above the GTX280.

From being a gangbuster card when it was the 8800, your 9800 slipped to the second rank a year later, then to the fourth rank, and it is now techically just another "Mainline" game card like AMD's Radeon 5670, and nVIDIA's GTS250. Is that slippage description helpful to you?