Awuful performance in New Vegas

[Audley]

Hey Guys, Audley here! This is going to be a bit of a long post due to me having to explain what I have worked through. So please bear with me. And I would like to thank you in advance for any help in this matter.

 

First off, let me get my specs out of the way:

 

i5 4670 @ 3.4 (Stock; no OC)

GTX 760 SC (No further OC)

8 GB of GDDR3 RAM

60hz 1920x1080 Monitor

Windows 8.1 64 bit

 

So in a nutshell: I get frame drops nearly constantly throughout the game. This makes the game very uncomfortable to play. I have spent a lot of time trying to play the game and trying to mod it but I have never actually played the game all the way through. I follow F&L pretty much down to the letter. With a few exceptions for personal taste. However, I have tried to play the game completely vanilla and I keep having the same bad performance. I have spent about 50 hours trying to play in short bursts but I always end up getting frustrated over the performance issues. So right now I am stuck after you leave Goodsprings because I am about ready to give up on trying. I have spent a lot of time testing some mods and stuff but sitting down to enjoy the game for an hour or more at a time is a nightmare. I used to own the game on my Xbox and even at 30 fps it was much more fun to play than on my computer. I would probably just play it on there if I hadn't have sold it.

 

So let me go into a bit more detail. In several locations in the game my FPS goes from a solid and smooth 60 FPS to around 40. Sometimes even dipping to around 30. But only for about five seconds or so. Then the game goes back up to 60 again. This would probably be more accurately described as "hitching" or "jerking" or maybe even "macro-stuttering" but not micro-stuttering. When the game does decide to be smooth, it is fine. But when I walk around and the game is loading into another cell, or when I am around NPC's, my fps goes all wack. It's almost as though my rig isn't quite powerful enough to run the game. But in theory I should be fine.

 

Now, the obvious solution would be to turn down my settings or cap my frame rate. However, regardless of visual detail this happens. Even on the lowest settings, with all the sliders set to the lowest they will go, I still have slowdowns. With AA off, with AF off, with or without HDR, even with V-Sync off this still occurs. Even capping my frame rate to 30 this still happens. Regardless of settings, this hitching issue still occurs.

 

I was beginning to think it was my hardware. But I have been able to run several games at 1080p 60 fps with zero issues. The only known solution I have to somewhat solving this problem is to set my resolution to 720p. But it doesn't get rid of it completely. It only lessens the drop. But the jerkiness is still there; when your game goes suddenly from 60 to 40 and back again all in about 5 seconds.

 

I got to tell you it is a real bummer. So let us recap: Vanilla game, default .ini files, default settings, I get FPS drops all around. Fully modded game following F&L I get fps drops. This makes me think I have some sort of bottleneck going on with the game but I have no idea what it could be. I have scoured forums like a maniac trying to find a solution. I have posted similar posts on the bethsoft and Nexus forums but with little success.

 

If I cannot find a solution for this then I may give up on modding and just save up to buy another Xbox. If anyone has any ideas about what might be causing my performance issues then I am all ears.

 

Cheers, audley

 

[Adonis_VII]

It will always be difficult to diagnose without having the computer in front of me, but I'll try giving it a go.

• Have you gone through NVidia inspector and added FalloutMO.exe and FNV4GB.exe to your profile, and set Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration: Single display performance mode and set Power Managment Mode: Prefer amximum performance  ?
• Have you tried MultithreadedAI=1? I have found it adds no instability and the author of FNV4GB.exe finds the same.  This should help with AI heavy areas
• Have you tried switching from v2.0a to v3.0 shaders? Open Renderinfo.txt in your my documents\my games\falloutnv\ folder.  There will be a line for Shader Package: [Number]  Now go to you Data/Shaders/ folder, and renambe shaderpackage[number].sdp to shaderpackage[number].sdp_backup.  Make a copy of shaderpackage019.sdp and rename it to shaderpackage[number].sdp In your inis. set bAllow30Shaders=1.
• When the FPS drops occur is there alot of noise? Have you tried upgrading the Vorbis engine?

Also, do you have NVidia Geforce Experience? It has been known to cause issues with certain games including both Fallouts.

 

Also 2, when you say vanilla, is that still with the utilizties such as 4GB, NVAC, NVSR?

 

EDIT: Added 3.0 shaders tweak ini line.

Edited June 7, 2015 by Adonis_VII

[Audley]

hey Adonis! Thanks for the reply. Sorry I couldn't get back to you earlier; had a busy day. 

 

Anyways, I noticed that I did indeed have Geforce Experience still installed from when I was using it to do some recording. However, since I did not use it anymore I went ahead and uninstalled it. And you were definitely right on that one. I was startled at just how much of a performance boost I got from uninstalling it! A significant amount of hitching went away. While it is still not perfect, the game went from being barely playable to being a lot more comfortable. 

 

I suppose it did make a substantial difference as I was able to play for about an hour. While the frame drops can be annoying at times, the game is a lot more playable for certain. I think that the Geforce Experience was causing me most of my issues. 

 

Then, while I was skulking around on some forums wondering if I could perhaps boost my performance anymore, I saw that one guy was having problems with the Full Scene Reflections option turned on. Even near areas without water. So me not wanting to rule anything out, I turned it off. And to my amazement about 90% of the fps problems went away. I never thought to check this option since I didn't think it would affect areas without water. 

 

My game is running at a smooth 50-60 fps with Adaptive V-sync turned on and I only get frame drops in a few areas of the game like the strip. I even managed to get Enhanced Shaders up and running. Overall I am pretty happy with the performance. 

 

Thanks a lot for the help Adonis. Hopefully someone can find this thread in the future and perhaps see that Geforce Experience was causing their game issues. I did try your suggestions and none of them made a real difference except the first one; which I now run with.

 

Cheers, Audley

[Adonis_VII]

Yea, it really depends on what your bottleneck as to which of those changes will effect your game.  I'm glad I could help though.  I plan on making a FAQ/Troubleshooting page at some point for FNV with some of these as different people have issues with different parts of the engine.

[oqhansoloqo]

 

• Have you tried switching from v2.0a to v3.0 shaders? Open Renderinfo.txt in your my documents\my games\falloutnv\ folder.  There will be a line for Shader Package: [Number]  Now go to you Data/Shaders/ folder, and renambe shaderpackage[number].sdp to shaderpackage[number].sdp_backup.  Make a copy of shaderpackage019.sdp and rename it to shaderpackage[number].sdp

Is this required also in one of the .ini files?: bAllow30Shaders=1

 

EDIT: And are you suggesting that you are supposed to change the "[Number]" in Renderinfo.txt from "13" (that's what my number says) to "19" (will doing that actually affect anything)?  Or are you supposed to change the shaderpackage019.sdp filename to "shaderpackage013.sdp" (or whatever number was listed in the Renderinfo.txt file)?  I'm confused with your instructions.

 

EDIT2: I've read that the game engine does not support v3 shaders and that it's not a good idea to try to enable them because it will end up with missing textures: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/fallout-new-vegas.122096/page-21#post-2071871  Is this true or not?

[oqhansoloqo]

Also, do you have NVidia Geforce Experience? It has been known to cause issues with certain games including both Fallouts.

 

Would simply exiting the program, GE Force Experience (GEFE), before running the game suffice?  Also, does this affect the game even if you have GEFE installed and running in the background, but don't launch the game through GEFE or select to optimize the game through GEFE (I have a message in GEFE for FNV that says "Game is not optimized").  I had assumed that GEFE was thus not doing anything to the game.  Same goes for Skyrim, which is also recognized by GEFE.

[Adonis_VII]

Yes, I missed that important part about changing the ini file. I suggest changing the number of the actual shader package, not in renderinfo.txt as renderinfo.txt can be rewritten.  Those d3d9.dll fixes for New Vegas that used to be all the rage were actually hard codding the shaderpackage path to choose 19. Again though, it depends on your computer, as some people get large improvements in fps, and some don't.

 

I have not tested exiting the process vs uninstalling in regards to performance.  The hit for me is much smaller than for others, as again its rather hit or miss if it wrecks a game or not, which makes it difficult to convince them to fix.