Some anecdotal observations after upgrading: The stutter on quick turning/movement is greatly eliminated for me with the combination of the new 260.99 drivers and creating/enabling an NVIDIA profile for the falloutnv.exe and falloutnvlauncher.exe executables. This enabled my 3x SLI GTX 260 setup to carry what appears to be around a 70-75% peak load on each card instead of running the GPU 0 card at around 25%, as measured with EVGA Precision. All graphics settings are maxed at 1920x1080.

With the older drivers, my GPU 0 temp used to peak around 72C when working hard on FNV, with the other two cards not getting much hotter than their normal 52C-ish idle temp. With the 260.99 drivers GPU 0 peaked at 69C and the other two cards peaked at 65C and 62C after a one-hour continuous FNV session.

My completely unscientific, wild-ass guess on this is that FNV is now finally using all three cards to render and doesn't have to skip frames to keep up with movement.

However, I still have to use the d3dx9.dll, otherwise the movement stuttering and NPC slowdown is back to the usual abysmal performance if it is removed. So, another SWAG on my part is that this game engine still hates DX10/11.

Rig: i7:920 stock clock; 3x SLI GTX260; 6GB RAM; Win 7 64-bit; Samsung 27" monitor

Disclaimer: this works for me to improve my FNV experience. I share it in hopes that it may help someone else. If it does, great, if it does not, then you're no worse off than you were before so there's no reason to lash out at me. Thanks!

That phoney d3dx9.dll is to be avoided.
It just dumbs down your settings, so you can still brag about running 'everything ultra'... but you're not getting ultra.
Simply use all the latest everything (including d3dx9.dll) and turn down settings, disable AA etc. until you get smooth performance.
Important to have correct settings in nVidia Control Panel before starting!
Make sure no forced AA, no forced AF, no forced vsync, and all settings on maximum performance
I'm getting MINIMUM framerates around 60fps on my rig, with the excellent new 260.99 drivers.
Very smooth and fluid. Nice. Looks great too,
Regards

D3dX9.dll just spoofs the video card, according to rendererinfo.txt the only difference is that with the .dll it tries to load nvidia's older driver file versus it's newer one. The older one doesn't exist on my PC (nv4_disp.dll) but the game still runs. Although I thought there was a visual difference, stills are identical. But facial expressions do look different, difference is subtle though

Zuzax, I have greatly improved overall performance (with the .dll file still) as well. I'm actually using nvidia inspector to force the game to use FO3's profile cause for some reason the default won't allow my to override or enhance AA. I never experienced and stutter problems, but now the game runs at a constant 60fps unless it's loading something. Used to dip down at some points.

No....it doesn't.

I do not wish to turn down all my settings to get a smooth game when I have the hardware to run this aging engine at max. If I didn't care about near perfect visuals I would have bought the xbox version. I'm not being payed to play I payed. The game itself recomends settings when you launch it If this feature is not accurate then it's yet another bug that demonstrates that this game is still in beta. You can dumb down your settings but I'm not a jerk for not wanting to do that.

Yeah, the settings are identical to FO3's so if that ran on ultra, no reason this should not. The launcher settings effect things like shadows (engine uses shadow maps and you can turn these up on modern GPUs with lots of vram for no performance hit) water (also, water at max settings will not affect modern hardware), effects like depth of field / blur, textures (again, with lots of vram even a entry level modern card will have no problem with bluring or the textures), and LOD settings which, you guessed it, do not incur much of a performance hit when maxed out on modern hardware. If you turn these settings down and run the game without the 7900gs dll spoff, you will still get lower performance around NPCs. Anisotropic filtering for the last couple of years should always be set at 16x, no difference in performance any more. And 4x AA at the very least should be free on most medium to high end cards.

Well something is wrong with this game. I get it bad if I try to spin around. I am sure my hardware is up to the task of runnin NV on max settings.

480GTX SLI
I7 920@4.5GHz
6GB DDR3 1800Mhz
Raid 0 256GB SSD

Plus I am running Oblivion witha [censored] load of mods that make it look way better than NV and it runs fine.

How/what d3dx9 does is of less concern to me than finally getting FNV to recognize and utilize more than one card in an SLI setup.

What did you actually do in the Nvidia Control Panel? I have 280 SLI and I have the fast turn stutter bug and it's practically unplayable outside (260.99 drivers). Inside buildings and caves its smooth.

I added a profile for Fallout New Vegas since the NVIDIA CP won't recognise Steam games as being installed. I set it up for both falloutnv.exe and falloutnvlauncher.exe since I didn't know which to pick, but I'm guessing you just need falloutnv.exe. Then I verified in the settings that it was set to use all three cards in SLI. I'm not at that computer right now so I can't tell you exactly what the settings are, but they are on by default for the profile. I plan on experimenting with the AA settings and such tonight.

One thing I noticed is that inside a building with water (like the submerged areas in Vault 3) yields a major performance hit. Vault 3 is a good test. It has three levels, but only one with water - flooded corridors. The two levels without water are super smooth now, but the one level with the water-filled corridors causes the entire level to have massive stutter, even if you cannot see the water. It uses the same art assets and Fiend models as the other two levels, but it has rendered water on that level. I'm going back there tonight to see if changing the water settings impacts the stutter on that level.

Has anyone else seen this interior water behavior?

Tracking this stuff down is like a game within a game.

I still can't make the game run properly even after playing around with the Nvidia control panel settings. When I turn water reflection or something low the turning frameskip/stutter decreased a bit but it still occurs when there's those sandtwisters around. Vats also frameskips too much. Might try to rollback a few drivers and see. 18x-drivers worked best for Oblivion and FO3, might try those.

Running through a 9800GTX+ 512 on Win XP pro - my only performance problem with 260.89 drivers was AA related - movement stutter.

Now with 260.99 4xAA stutter is completely eliminated - performance is perfect inside and out -

looking forward to seeing that Vault water however -

so far its just been puddles and cisterns, neither of which impact performance w/ water settings maxed.

I too am using the 260.99 drivers and noticed an increase in performance after. I'm still getting a little skip when turning around quickly outside but everything else is smooth. Also, I did not use the downloaded dll file because it made my experience worse. I used the dll from my system32 folder and that helped a lot.

In Control Panel I set up a profile and the only difference made so far is changing my power from Adaptive to Maximum. All launcher settings at max.

Phenom II 955@3.4 Ghz
2x GTX 260 Black Edition SLI
6 GB @1333 Mhz

Temps peaked at 72 and 79 respectively but that was with Auto Fan Speed. Might change and repost but played about 4 hours and LOVE THIS GAME despite it's initial flaws.

Are you guys not using the 4GB/stutter fix from New Vegas Nexus? It fixed all my stutter.

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35262