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Fallout 3 lags when turning around

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pong lenis

Member
In fallout 3, if I turn around(move the mouse 90 degrees for example) the game will hang for maybe 0.5 seconds, meaning it will stutter for an instant. This doesn't happen every time I turn, but it happens frequently enough to become very annoying and a game-breaker.
Here's something that might help: when I turn down the graphics settings, these hangs disappear, but I don't want to play on low settings since my GPU can give a constant 60fps on Ultra without ever going above 30% usage.

I've tried the fallout 3 stutter remover, which helped get rid of the lag when entering new areas, which I was told was "loading lag"(which people on other forums said was a result of the game loading data from the hard drive into the RAM and that it's something that occurs in all open world games and that it cannot be fixed, which all turned out to be complete bullshit).
But the stutter remover didn't help with the lag while turning, and neither did the advice on other forums(which was similar to the bullshit "loading lag" advice). I also used the RAM booster which makes the game use 4 GB, didn't help either. Anyone know what could be the problem?

Specs:
GPU: GTX 580
CPU: i7-2600k
RAM: 8GB
HDD 2 TB
 
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Have you used Afterburner to see the VRAM usage and how much your GPU is utilized? If you have a lot of texture mods and not enough VRAM (or just enough), then it would try swapping into and out of regular RAM.
 
Check your GPU memory usage.

Oops, didn't see Truthslayer.

That's what I think, you're running out of video memory and having to reload textures.
 
Truthslayer said:
Have you used Afterburner to see the VRAM usage and how much your GPU is utilized? If you have a lot of texture mods and not enough VRAM (or just enough), then it would try swapping into and out of regular RAM.
Click to expand...

Just checked it, it goes up to a maximum of 800MB, and my total VRAM is 1.5GB. And I'm not using any texture mods.
 
Something strange is definitely afoot.

I don't get any turning lag on a 7950 GTX from around 2007.
 
Microstuttering is different from loading stuttering and is caused by Bethesda's game engine not handling modern GPUs. I think Tweakguides addressed this, there's a mod to fix this on Nexus, and Gopher addresses this in his excellent mod series on Youtube. (Only exception I've found to my rule that there is no wisdom to be found on Youtube.)

Search for Gophervids mod Fallout 3 on Youtube. You'll be glad you spent the time and effort as his series on loading mods (some of his own, most by others) can make Fallout 3 more fun, prettier, and more stable than its default of Lindsey Lohan on crack - something Bethesda proved to be unable to do.
 
werepossum said:
Microstuttering is different from loading stuttering and is caused by Bethesda's game engine not handling modern GPUs. I think Tweakguides addressed this, there's a mod to fix this on Nexus, and Gopher addresses this in his excellent mod series on Youtube. (Only exception I've found to my rule that there is no wisdom to be found on Youtube.)

Search for Gophervids mod Fallout 3 on Youtube. You'll be glad you spent the time and effort as his series on loading mods (some of his own, most by others) can make Fallout 3 more fun, prettier, and more stable than its default of Lindsey Lohan on crack - something Bethesda proved to be unable to do.
Click to expand...

Yes I already read the idiot's guide to pointless tweaking. That guy just makes stuff off the top of his head, he's in no way reliable.

And as for the youtube guy, I also watched his videos long ago, all he advised on was using the things I already had(fallout 3 stutter remover), and the rest is just mods unrelated to peformance. And what is the point of downloading beautiful texture mods if the game will stutter even more? The only way this game will get fun and prettier is if I fix this stuttering.
 
pong lenis said:
Yes I already read the idiot's guide to pointless tweaking. That guy just makes stuff off the top of his head, he's in no way reliable.

And as for the youtube guy, I also watched his videos long ago, all he advised on was using the things I already had(fallout 3 stutter remover), and the rest is just mods unrelated to peformance. And what is the point of downloading beautiful texture mods if the game will stutter even more? The only way this game will get fun and prettier is if I fix this stuttering.
Click to expand...
You have to find at least at little interesting that THEY are the idiots and yet YOU are the one with the problem.

I had the same problem. I went to Nexus, did some research, added the mods, and it went away. Later I went through the entire Gophervids set of videos and now everything runs butter smooth and looks better. If you listen, Gopher specifically differentiates between loading stuttering and micro stuttering when you look around. But YMMV.
 
You guys giving suggestions, i'm assuming you all played fallout 3 completely? You're all giving the wrong answers.

The answer is, the engine sucks. It stutters. For everyone, period. It does pause and stutter on occasion when you pan the camera quickly with the mouse, if you play with an xbox 360 pad it may hide the effect somewhat. But yeah....mouse panning quickly will stutter on anything and everything at times. For further proof simple google those keywords, fallout 3 stutter and you'll get 17 billion search results from people with similar queries.

Again..it's the engine. You might be able to find a mod that helps but otherwise just put up with it.
 
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werepossum said:
You have to find at least at little interesting that THEY are the idiots and yet YOU are the one with the problem.

I had the same problem. I went to Nexus, did some research, added the mods, and it went away. Later I went through the entire Gophervids set of videos and now everything runs butter smooth and looks better. If you listen, Gopher specifically differentiates between loading stuttering and micro stuttering when you look around. But YMMV.
Click to expand...

If you had the same problem and you fixed it, then would you mind telling what these mods that fixed it are please?
 
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I remember some really weird bugs in the original Fallout - 3/4 overhead FTW! And Fallout 2, I literally couldn't finish because of a terminal bug at 3/4 point in the game - that was incredibly disappointing.

Good luck OP!
 
Turn the HDR and water qualities down to min. Those were some of the settings that were causing my issues in FO3.
 
Hmm... I'm not sure how much you can take from my experience in Skyrim but I had a similar problem. Whenever I side stepped or did aggressive turning, I got micro stutters. How I got around it was turning off in game Vsync but using a 3rd party program to cap the fps to 59(I forgot the exact number, sorry it's been a while since I last played/tweaked Skyrim settings).

Supposedly Beth engine was notorious for having issues whenever the game crossed the 59/60 fps threshold. I don't know the technicalities but for whatever reason the workaround stopped all stuttering.

Maybe you'll have luck with the same.
 
slpnshot said:
Hmm... I'm not sure how much you can take from my experience in Skyrim but I had a similar problem. Whenever I side stepped or did aggressive turning, I got micro stutters. How I got around it was turning off in game Vsync but using a 3rd party program to cap the fps to 59(I forgot the exact number, sorry it's been a while since I last played/tweaked Skyrim settings).

Supposedly Beth engine was notorious for having issues whenever the game crossed the 59/60 fps threshold. I don't know the technicalities but for whatever reason the workaround stopped all stuttering.

Maybe you'll have luck with the same.
Click to expand...

Tried it, didn't work.
 
Odd answers for a tech forum.

Do some digging to find where your bottleneck lies.

Multimonitor while gaming and keep a task manager on the other monitor. Notice what hardware is being taxes to 100% during stutters. Focus on that.

I vote RAM or HDD. Either the speed, latency, etc. From what you described, it sounds a lot like it's delaying loading graphical assets, not delaying in the processing of them.

Download 3DMark11. Compare your scores with scores of similar set ups; 3DMark also has focused tests for GPU thoroughput so you can be sure your video card is working fine.

Good luck
 
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