Fallout 3 Problems

[Andrew1990]

Hey guys I am having some problems with playing Fallout 3. So heres the problem

Every 15-30 minutes or so when playing the game, a End Now process tav will pop up during the game which brings a black screen. When I hit End Now, the computer locks up and gives a black screen. Every time it does this I am required to restart.

When I try to Alt Tab out of the End Now process it will show the taskbar and it seems that windows goes into 8 bit mode as a low resolution which leads me to the conclusion it is most likely the Display Driver.

I was wondering if any other people are having this problem and if not, what drivers do you use. As of now I am using the most up to date drivers from Nvidia with my 9800GT.

 

[Quizard]

I am having problems and I have a ATI card, I have the latest drivers and latest patch for Fallout and it crashes randomly except I don't have to restart my PC like you do.

 

[aka1nas]

I had massive freezing/crashing problems with FO3 until I disabled the built-in profile and made my own manually-activated one. Just use the AA/SLI flags for Oblivion and it works great.

 

[Andrew1990]

ok I will try that right now. Thanks

 

[Alptraum]

I've been using the 180.48 drivers with no trouble. Using "ultra" detail and max AA/AF at 1680x1050. Haven't had a single crash.

 

[Zenoth]

I have lots of crashes with Fallout 3, and freezes as well, sometimes the nv4_disp.dll file will crash (GPU drivers), sometimes it's the game's executable being pointed at by the windows errors messages, and sometimes it doesn't give any error messages, the screen freezes and Alt+Tab doesn't do anything and Ctrl+Alt+Del neither which forces me to hard-reset the system. I tried the official WHQL drivers, no go, then modified ones, no go, then Betas, no go.

But the game is too fun so I just deal with those instability issues and play it anyway. It was the exact same problem with Oblivion, although the frequency of the problems in Oblivion was much lower than Fallout 3's, at least I could play up to five or six hours non-stop in Oblivion before something happened. In Fallout 3 it takes about one hour, sometimes two, then it either freezes or crashes, all the time. I've also tried with my system under no over-clocks, everything default, and under Clean Boot mode, and it still crashed, I don't even have custom codecs installed at all.

It's one buggy mess to play but I assure you, it's the best one I've played in many years.

 

[Andrew1990]

Ya, its a fun game when I am able to play it. The recommendation aka gave me did not help at all so I was searching and I was pointed to a 3rd party patch that may fix it but I am not expecting it to work miracles.

 

[Zenoth]

Originally posted by: Andrew1990
Ya, its a fun game when I am able to play it. The recommendation aka gave me did not help at all so I was searching and I was pointed to a 3rd party patch that may fix it but I am not expecting it to work miracles.

Meh, in terms of community-made fixes I tried everything but nothing worked, from registry tweaks passing by .INI tweaks and special codecs analyzes softwares up to the ultimate "solution" of formatting and re-installing the OS, nothing worked. And strangely enough ever since I updated all of my .NET Framework versions I can play around two hours before it crashes. When I only had the .NET version installed by the game's installer I couldn't play more than 30 minutes. It's the only thing so far that really made a tangible difference (installing .NET 2.0, then 2.0 SP1, 2.0 SP2, re-installing 3.0, then 3.0 SP1, then 3.5 and 3.5 SP1).

The one very frustrating thing so far about Fallout 3 (and Oblivion) issues is the fact that a number of players come and say that they've been able to play without a single issue whatsoever of any way, shape and form for weeks non-stop, and those guys got very similar hardware, a few literally had the exact same stuff that I do, with the same software, etc, but "somehow" the game refuses to be stable for me and it gets stable for others. I don't get it and quite frankly I don't even want to know what might be wrong. In my book playing Bethesda games with crashes is part of the normality ever since Morrowind was released (which also had problems, in my case that is).

I always like to point at the GameBryo engine's oldness as the primary cause, but then again those people around who experience no issues whatsoever will say that it's my system, and those who experience the same issues as me know for sure that it's not their system being the cause (when you play right after installing the OS and updating it with the official fixes and then updating the DirectX and even go in Clean Boot mode with no over-clocks at all and it still crashes you know something is wrong on the software side of things). As a side note I still sometimes play Oblivion, and I installed the 3,000+ bugs-fixing un-official patch and it still crashes after all those years of new hardware and drivers coming out since it was released and after the dozen revised versions of the un-official patch and two official patches, and even back then when I had another motherboard and CPU, memory and GPU it was still crashing.

But, as I said, they're great games. I swear some of the most stable games I've ever played are some of the worst. As if near-perfection games had a price, instability.

EDIT: By the way, to anyone with crashing/freezing issues in Fallout 3 you can always try your luck and read what the following thread has to offer in terms of "fixes": http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsfor...p?showtopic=920596&hl=

 

[TheKub]

I do believe the version of .net framework that came with the installer was a beta version so its likely updateing it could fix some issues. I also read that there are some issues with ffdshow codecs (like from various codec packs) but in its properties you could add exceptions for specific exes.

 

[zerogear]

No problems here, 180.48. Only crashed once, but that was because i was using cheat codes

 

[Andrew1990]

Ok I solved the hard lock problem where I had to reboot. All I had to do was up the page file allocation to 384mb. The game still crashes but it will crash to the desktop instead. I reinstalled the game and am now going to try and patch it with the official patch and see if that helps.

 

[Zenoth]

Originally posted by: TheKub
I do believe the version of .net framework that came with the installer was a beta version so its likely updateing it could fix some issues. I also read that there are some issues with ffdshow codecs (like from various codec packs) but in its properties you could add exceptions for specific exes.

I know where that information comes from, it was basically FUD, it has been investigated most notably by very well known modders from the Oblivion's modding scene (and now more recently from the Fallout 3's), and we know now that the information was nothing more than a mere opinion and not actually a fact.

The .NET Framework version that is being installed by the Fallout 3's installer is the official and final release of regular 3.0 .NET (non-SP), and not a Beta. But Beta or not it is recommended even by Microsoft to at least update 3.0 to SP1, if not to SP1 and then 3.5 and then 3.5 SP1 as well, since .NET's various versions are incremental starting from 2.0, and sadly not cumulative.

 

[Andrew1990]

Ok after the patch, I played for a straight hour with no crashes. An hour straight is good enough for me I guess until a better patch comes out.

 

[1ManArmY]

patched the game last night and so far so good. I was having issues with nvidia 181.20 drivers but reverted back to 180.48 and have had no issues whatsoever. I running Vista 64 with an 8800 GT

 

[KIAman]

I guess I'm just lucky. Never crashed once and put a good number of hours into the game. Running 2xHD4850 on a very overclocked system. Cat 8.12

 

[flashbacck]

Finally played a bit of Fallout 3. It crashes randomly for me. It also gave me the first BSOD I've ever seen in Vista. I'm using ATI HD4850 w/ 8.12 drivers.

 

[Quizard]

Originally posted by: flashbacck
Finally played a bit of Fallout 3. It crashes randomly for me. It also gave me the first BSOD I've ever seen in Vista. I'm using ATI HD4850 w/ 8.12 drivers.

Make sure you have the latest patches

 

[cheapherk]

New Nvidia drivers out (January 22nd)- 181.22

 

[Zenoth]

I've tried those new drivers and it makes F3 crash actually more often than before for me.