Fallout 3 woe's..

My copy was crashing every time I went inside a building in some areas. Turned out to a problem with the third thread crashing, so I promptly turned my i7 into a dual core in the bios and it worked fine.

I has crashing all the time on my tri-core but this fix from the Bethesda forums sorted it for me (be effectively doing the same and restricted to 2 cores)
In Fallout.ini:
Find and change: bUseThreadedAI=1
Add this line below it: iNumHWThreads=2
 
I never got this game running with Vista 64, it sat on my shelf for 6 months. I installed Windows 7 64 on the exact same hardware, installed the game with the latest official patch and it runs almost perfect, has the very occasional crash.
 
Mine worked perfectly fine until I updated also. After uninstalling and reinstalling using the unpatched version the game again worked fine. Although I keep getting owned everytime I go out into the wastes, and for that reason I haven't gotten very far yet. :(

I'm trying to find tasks that I can level up to a decent amount before I venture out to do some exploring. :D Great game so far.
 
Not sure if it's of any use to the op but all my crashes were caused by me incorrectly setting up the Alchemy settings for the game, that and the stupid dog companion. Once I fixed the Alchemy settings and killed the dog my game ran perfectly.

If you're using a creative sound card then that might be the source of some of your problems.
 
Only just got round to buying this and runs on spec below with no major issues patched to 1.7. Only bug I've encountered is that the key "assist" prompts reset to the joypad defaults on restarting, even though I've set up for KBM.

That aside, it's a cracking game, probably the best I've played since GTA SA. After just one weekend I've fallen in love with the whole experience. Only scratched the surface of the main quest, keep getting sidetracked by the other things to do though I probably need to seek out better equipmwnt as encountering Spuer Mutants or Fire Ants in Vault Armour with a 10mm pistol is a bit optimistic. And I resisted the temptation to blow up Megatron...
 
Had this running rock solid stable on both a Core i7-965 & Q9450 both with GTX260-216 for 8-12 hours at a time without any crashes whatsoever and using either 4 or 8 cores with nothing disabled + max gfx @ 1920x1200.

When I had ATI cards (4850 + 4870) it was very unstable and crashed a lot. Those problems went away when I bought Nvidia GTX260-216's as replacements.

ATI make great hardware but their drivers for a lot of games are just not stable enough as they lack the driver resource teams Nvidia have and Nvidia also work closely with many developers in their TWIMTBP program which makes a huge difference to stability. ATI do make great hardware probably much better & much faster than NV but they have always had issues with drivers so if you want a more stable gaming experience go NV.
 
the main issue i have is when going into an enclosed area (houses, vents etc) it causes my game to freeze and lockup, making me have to task manager out and restart. i know the issue is with my soundcard (audigy 7.1) but all soundcards have this issue and the less space there is in the game the faster it locksup. patchings pleeze!
 
Not sure if it's of any use to the op but all my crashes were caused by me incorrectly setting up the Alchemy settings for the game, that and the stupid dog companion. Once I fixed the Alchemy settings and killed the dog my game ran perfectly.

If you're using a creative sound card then that might be the source of some of your problems.

what alchemy settings are you using?
 
sorry for the double post but I wanted to add an update on my problems and resolution with fallout 3.

I was encountering crashs, stuttering and sound problems on a freshly installed vista x64 ultimate system, the specs are as follows:

Fallout 3 patched 1.7
All settings max 4AA 10AF

Windows x64 ultimate
i7 920 overclocked to 4GHZ
gigabyte x56 UD5 motherboard
Sparkle GTX 260 216 OC
x-fi fatality pci soundcard
6 gig ddr3 @ 1200mhz

now to begin with I had a problem with the radio music stuttering badly, this is with all the latest sound drivers, I fixed this by installing creative alchemy and adding fallout 3 via reg path with "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Bethesda Softworks\Fallout3\Installed Path" and setting:
Buffers: 6
Duration: 5
Voice Count 128

This restored 7.1 sound and cured the radio music (sounds perfect now)

For crashs and stuttering I have the latest nvidia forceware installed (190.62) manage 3d settings\global settings I changed:
Multi-display/mixed-GPUacceleration to: single display performance mode
Vertical sync: Force on
Threaded optimisation: on

in the fallout.ini I changed to:
bUseThreadedAI=1

and added:

iNumHWThreads=2

this allows fallout to only use 2 cores

Finally I made fallout3.exe run in xp sp2 compatibility mode

my game now runs stable for hours with the only stutters to load objects and textures when in the wastes, interiors run smooth without any hitch, just to remind you I am running on a fresh Os install so no problems with codecs and such, if you really cannot get the game installed or run fallout atall it is worth trying this if your really want to play and own a similar setup to mine.

All of these tweaks where found through searching other boards and google, most of you probably already tried these but I thought id post this to help anyone who was not aware.
 
Thanks for updating us on this. Did you narrow down the main problem to a specific fix here, or did you just make all the changes at once and it worked?
 
what alchemy settings are you using?

Taken from Fallout wiki:

32Bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Bethesda Softworks\Fallout3\Installed Path
64Bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Bethesda Softworks\Fallout3\Installed Path
Buffers: 4
Duration: 10 or 15
Maximum Voice Count: 128

Might also be of interest to the op if using a realtek card that I just noticed at the bottom of the page.

For Realtek HD Integrated Soundcards: If you experience problems like choppy radio music, get Realtek 3D SoundBack (Beta 0.1 at the time of this writing) from Realtek's site, and your problems should be fixed.

The Realtek 3D SoundBack Is used only to restore sound to OLDER games. Anything created after 2006 will not be improved and will most likely suffer from having SoundBack on. Using Soundback with Fallout 3 will cause crashes almost instantly when the game is loaded.
 
Thanks for updating us on this. Did you narrow down the main problem to a specific fix here, or did you just make all the changes at once and it worked?

well I added fixes as I went along, I would then test it for stability, some of the fixes helped the problems but didnt cure them completley, for example alchemy is known to cause instability but when used in conjunction with the other fixs these problems where ironed out, on my system I dont think it was down to any single fix, rather a compilation of many. by any means those settings wont work for everyone but if anyone wants to give them all a go at once let me know your results.
 
Don't mean to bump the thread but have just tried to boot it and it now works (same install as before). Only changes since I last tried have been a few W7 updates and uninstalling ASUS OSD.

All good :)
 
i found this game very poor

How come, did you rush it through?

I'm in progress at the moment since August I think. I've just levelled up to 15. Although quite annoying at first it does grow on you and it's only when you feel the immense size of the game do you appreciate the work that's gone in to it. You have to feel the experience rather than just going out to get it ticked off the done list. If I had done just the main mission I would have been seriously disappointed but I'm exploring areas that don't necessarily have a quest associated to them.

As for install problems, I had to update both my video and sound card drivers to get it working.
 
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