Fallout 3 Freezing/Crashing?

[Jules]

Anyone have issues with random freezes?? i just started playing fallout 3 again and i started out playing the pitt and operation anchorage. Didn't have any issues at all. I started playing the main story and im about an hour or so into it and i just get random freezes. Anyone have any advice?

 

[Zenoth]

Your PC is over-clocked, so try stock frequencies and voltages first, the GameBryo engine is very sensible to over-clocking, maybe your OC is just unstable. So I'd say start with that and see if playing at stock (everything) for a few hours end up being stable. If not then it's something else obviously, but you need to start somewhere.

 

[Jules]

Originally posted by: Zenoth
Your PC is over-clocked, so try stock frequencies and voltages first, the GameBryo engine is very sensible to over-clocking, maybe your OC is just unstable. So I'd say start with that and see if playing at stock (everything) for a few hours end up being stable. If not then it's something else obviously, but you need to start somewhere.

Don't think its that since i already logged 10 hours into it before it started crashing

 

[GaryJohnson]

What are you temps and voltages doing during a freeze? You can log them with speedfan, or some such app. Also, might want to try a couple passes with memtest to see if there are any problems there and try running the game without any overclocking going on, see if the problem persists.

 

[zerocool84]

Fallout 3 has always crashed randomly on me.

 

[leckley]

Originally posted by: GaryJohnson
What are you temps and voltages doing during a freeze? You can log them with speedfan, or some such app. Also, might want to try a couple passes with memtest to see if there are any problems there and try running the game without any overclocking going on, see if the problem persists.

So a lockup due to overheating, that would ring true if the system locked up, but since it isnt, you can rule that out.

As for the issue at hand, did you change video drivers or anything of the sort since prior to seeing the issue?

 

[Jules]

Originally posted by: zerocool84
Fallout 3 has always crashed randomly on me.

Yeah its funny how it played for 10 hours and now its just being a bitch. It will freeze sometimes right when i load it up or 10 mins in. Only game that does it.

 

[zerocool84]

Originally posted by: Jules

Originally posted by: zerocool84
Fallout 3 has always crashed randomly on me.

Yeah its funny how it played for 10 hours and now its just being a bitch. It will freeze sometimes right when i load it up or 10 mins in. Only game that does it.

I'm going through my second play through and right when I got to paradise falls it crashed.

 

[Jules]

Hey zero you know how to fix the radio stuttering problem?

 

[zerocool84]

Originally posted by: Jules
Hey zero you know how to fix the radio stuttering problem?

It's studdered on me many times but not constantly but AFAIK there's no fix.

 

[Jules]

Originally posted by: zerocool84

Originally posted by: Jules
Hey zero you know how to fix the radio stuttering problem?

It's studdered on me many times but not constantly but AFAIK there's no fix.

Crap. Think i might just wait for the GOTY edition and get it for the 360. Never had any issues with it on the xbox.

 

[zerocool84]

Originally posted by: Jules

Originally posted by: zerocool84

Originally posted by: Jules
Hey zero you know how to fix the radio stuttering problem?

It's studdered on me many times but not constantly but AFAIK there's no fix.

Crap. Think i might just wait for the GOTY edition and get it for the 360. Never had any issues with it on the xbox.

Every port I've played that's been on 360 has been horrble. Mass Effect, GTA4, Fallout 3, not one has been stable and they've all had tons and tons of bugs.

 

[Elcs]

Originally posted by: Jules

Originally posted by: zerocool84
Fallout 3 has always crashed randomly on me.

Yeah its funny how it played for 10 hours and now its just being a bitch. It will freeze sometimes right when i load it up or 10 mins in. Only game that does it.

Yup.

That is Fallout 3 for you. When its stable, it is very stable. When it is not, it is a very naughty boy!!

 

[Bateluer]

None of Bethesda's games can really be called polished. Ambitious, large, open, and occasionally fun, yes. But without exception, they are buggy, unstable, prone to random crashes, and never get the patch support they need.

 

[AstroManLuca]

Originally posted by: zerocool84

Originally posted by: Jules
Hey zero you know how to fix the radio stuttering problem?

It's studdered on me many times but not constantly but AFAIK there's no fix.

I got the radio stuttering problem after I installed shark007's Vista Codec Pack at the recommendation of a particular guide and used it to disable ffdshow for fallout3.exe. Supposedly doing so was supposed to fix some of the crashes, but it also caused the stuttering.

You can temporarily fix the stuttering by going into your Pip Boy, then hitting the Esc key twice. But the stutter will come back the moment the radio changes songs. It wouldn't bother me except I added an assload of older songs to my GNR soundtrack and I wanted to be able to hear them.

The permanent fix came after I got rid of the Vista Codec Pack and switched to K-Lite Basic. The latest version of K-Lite Basic already has ffdshow disabled for fallout3.exe by default, and it ended the stutter.

Supposedly there's also a fix if you have a Creative Labs card using something called ALchemy, but since I'm just using onboard Realtek sound, I never looked into it. Saw it mentioned a lot, though.

I still get tons of crashes, though. I'm thinking of giving up on it. Thing is, I already played through once on my 360. More recently, I bought the PC version for really cheap off Craigslist, so at least I'm not out much. I figured I'd have the chance to use some of the mods and get a new experience. But after endless tweaking, it still crashes every 5-30 minutes for me. It's seemingly random. Oh, and this is after increasing the paged pool size to the maximum, also at the recommendation of a guide. It seemed to help somewhat, but it's still very unstable.

Like I said, I'm thinking of just saying F it and go back to the 360 version. I'd just miss out on some fun mods like the extra radio music, higher weight limit (I'm a pack rat), new weapons/armor, texture improvements, and simply the added versatility of having the PC version of a game.

 

[Dorkenstein]

I fixed the radio chop by installing the MAD filter. I'll try to find a link. Worked a treat though.

 

[GaryJohnson]

Originally posted by: leckley

Originally posted by: GaryJohnson
What are you temps and voltages doing during a freeze? You can log them with speedfan, or some such app. Also, might want to try a couple passes with memtest to see if there are any problems there and try running the game without any overclocking going on, see if the problem persists.

So a lockup due to overheating, that would ring true if the system locked up, but since it isnt, you can rule that out.

As for the issue at hand, did you change video drivers or anything of the sort since prior to seeing the issue?

I, and most of the forum posts that talk about 3D apps freezing, equate freezing to locking up. Somehow you've managed to infer that's not the case here?

 

[Zenoth]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
None of Bethesda's games can really be called polished. Ambitious, large, open, and occasionally fun, yes. But without exception, they are buggy, unstable, prone to random crashes, and never get the patch support they need.

And you know what I never understood? Is that some people out there do play their (Bethesda's) games without a single crash ever nor a single freeze and they themselves wonder what is everyone else talking about when they refer to instability and the likes. I've seen that all the time on the official Bethesda forums. I myself have never been able to play Morrowind, Oblivion nor Fallout 3 without eventually crashing out of nowhere, or freezing. I actually quit Fallout 3 due to the random crashes, I haven't played it since more than a month and I deleted all my downloaded mods and saved games, I will never install it again.

And Oblivion as well as Fallout 3 do crash and freeze on the console versions, which as we all know are optimized to the last component for gaming purposes and each consoles have the exact same hardware, but they still experience the same issues than most PC players have (although some, as I said, don't). I pointed to the OP that the causes might be due to his system being over-clocked, it is a possibility, but I do know deep inside me that he might be just one of the countless Bethesda fans who will eventually realize that it is a lost cause while some seemingly rare people out there are playing their games without a single issue.

I wish the best to the OP, but I wouldn't hold my breath too long.

 

[Jules]

Originally posted by: AstroManLuca

Originally posted by: zerocool84

Originally posted by: Jules
Hey zero you know how to fix the radio stuttering problem?

It's studdered on me many times but not constantly but AFAIK there's no fix.

I got the radio stuttering problem after I installed shark007's Vista Codec Pack at the recommendation of a particular guide and used it to disable ffdshow for fallout3.exe. Supposedly doing so was supposed to fix some of the crashes, but it also caused the stuttering.

You can temporarily fix the stuttering by going into your Pip Boy, then hitting the Esc key twice. But the stutter will come back the moment the radio changes songs. It wouldn't bother me except I added an assload of older songs to my GNR soundtrack and I wanted to be able to hear them.

The permanent fix came after I got rid of the Vista Codec Pack and switched to K-Lite Basic. The latest version of K-Lite Basic already has ffdshow disabled for fallout3.exe by default, and it ended the stutter.

Supposedly there's also a fix if you have a Creative Labs card using something called ALchemy, but since I'm just using onboard Realtek sound, I never looked into it. Saw it mentioned a lot, though.

I still get tons of crashes, though. I'm thinking of giving up on it. Thing is, I already played through once on my 360. More recently, I bought the PC version for really cheap off Craigslist, so at least I'm not out much. I figured I'd have the chance to use some of the mods and get a new experience. But after endless tweaking, it still crashes every 5-30 minutes for me. It's seemingly random. Oh, and this is after increasing the paged pool size to the maximum, also at the recommendation of a guide. It seemed to help somewhat, but it's still very unstable.

Like I said, I'm thinking of just saying F it and go back to the 360 version. I'd just miss out on some fun mods like the extra radio music, higher weight limit (I'm a pack rat), new weapons/armor, texture improvements, and simply the added versatility of having the PC version of a game.

Yeah im about to do the same. I kind of rather wait till the GOTY edition comes out for the 360 before i buy it again.

 

[Jules]

Originally posted by: Zenoth

Originally posted by: Bateluer
None of Bethesda's games can really be called polished. Ambitious, large, open, and occasionally fun, yes. But without exception, they are buggy, unstable, prone to random crashes, and never get the patch support they need.

And you know what I never understood? Is that some people out there do play their (Bethesda's) games without a single crash ever nor a single freeze and they themselves wonder what is everyone else talking about when they refer to instability and the likes. I've seen that all the time on the official Bethesda forums. I myself have never been able to play Morrowind, Oblivion nor Fallout 3 without eventually crashing out of nowhere, or freezing. I actually quit Fallout 3 due to the random crashes, I haven't played it since more than a month and I deleted all my downloaded mods and saved games, I will never install it again.

And Oblivion as well as Fallout 3 do crash and freeze on the console versions, which as we all know are optimized to the last component for gaming purposes and each consoles have the exact same hardware, but they still experience the same issues than most PC players have (although some, as I said, don't). I pointed to the OP that the causes might be due to his system being over-clocked, it is a possibility, but I do know deep inside me that he might be just one of the countless Bethesda fans who will eventually realize that it is a lost cause while some seemingly rare people out there are playing their games without a single issue.

I wish the best to the OP, but I wouldn't hold my breath too long.

I think im just gonna end up giving up. Don't know what else to do. The music stuttering sucks ass. When i played it on my 360 i used to love hearing galaxy radio all the time. Now i can't even enjoy it at all.

 

[Qbah]

I had the random freezing out of the blue on my PC too. And it stanrted happenning several hours after I left the vault. EVERYTHING was stock - Q9450, HD4870, 4GB RAM - so yeah, must've been me

However, I found a way to, for the most part, solve the problem. There's an option in one of the .ini files that makes the game use up to 2 cores (and not the available 4). It solved the issue almost compeltely for me (and for MANY other people too with quad core CPUs - either from AMD or Intel). I can see you have a Q9400, might be worth a shot. And sorry, I don't really remember which option it was... I bought the game again for my Xbox (it's so much easier to do gaming on it... like DLCs). Game did hang several times though Mostly after finishing a DLC. Ohh and the ending of Broken Steel had horrible FPS issues and random lock ups too. So yeah, it must be the Xbox! No way Bethesday is at fault here...

The game is a lot of fun though, well worth the effort to make it run good on a PC (or accept the lockups on my Xbox...).

 

[Jules]

Just picked up Point outlook off live. Played for about an hour and now its back to freezing again. WTF! This is pissing me off.

 

[ShawnD1]

A few things that I know for a fact cause Fallout 3 to crash on my system:
1). Antialiasing causes crashes on Nvidia generation 7 and 8 video cards. I think it's only transparent antialiasing that causes the crashes, but turn AA off completely just to be sure.
2). Running the game windowed instead of fullscreen causes crashes.

Some other things I've heard but can't verify:
-set the controls and interface back to default (custom HUD colors causing crashes)
-force the game to use more threads than there are CPU cores (lots of other programs do this, such as the Folding@Home SMP client)
-disable any Folding@Home CPU clients

Another thing would be to disable all of your addons. Steam or Games For Windows may have updated the game to make it suddenly not work with one of the addons that worked fine up until now.

edit:
Make sure you back up your config files before you change anything. It's a bitch to change them back if you can't remember all the changes you've made. Sometimes a slight change will cause the game to not work properly. When I disabled diffuse lighting, the lockpick screen didn't show the lockpick so it was virtually impossible to pick anything

 

[Lord Banshee]

After fixing the audio stuttering all my random crashes/freezes went away (i know how strange) but it worked.

My audio problem were fixed by using creative alcamey (for my x-fi)

 

[Jules]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
A few things that I know for a fact cause Fallout 3 to crash on my system:
1). Antialiasing causes crashes on Nvidia generation 7 and 8 video cards. I think it's only transparent antialiasing that causes the crashes, but turn AA off completely just to be sure.
2). Running the game windowed instead of fullscreen causes crashes.

Some other things I've heard but can't verify:
-set the controls and interface back to default (custom HUD colors causing crashes)
-force the game to use more threads than there are CPU cores (lots of other programs do this, such as the Folding@Home SMP client)
-disable any Folding@Home CPU clients

Another thing would be to disable all of your addons. Steam or Games For Windows may have updated the game to make it suddenly not work with one of the addons that worked fine up until now.

edit:
Make sure you back up your config files before you change anything. It's a bitch to change them back if you can't remember all the changes you've made. Sometimes a slight change will cause the game to not work properly. When I disabled diffuse lighting, the lockpick screen didn't show the lockpick so it was virtually impossible to pick anything

Tried all that and i still have the issue. sometimes cant even get in there for 30 secs before it freezes.