FPS boosting with higher graphics quality

[omgitsns9]

Hey,

 

I have at one time had Fallout 3 and Oblivion both installed on my laptop. On Oblivion, I could have Oblivion on the HIGHEST graphics setting with minimal tweaking. I had a multitude of mods installed, quite a few of them being hi-rez texture packs, and other graphics boosts.

 

Now this weekend I reinstalled Fallout 3. My dilemma, I can only have Fallout 3 on the low setting without lagging. Medium has a bit of lag, high has moderate lag, and Ultra High has unbearable lag. I don't know why, as far as I can tell, the requirements for Fallout and Oblivion are relatively the same. Here are my specs

 

HP Pavilion Laptop

Windows Vista Home-Premium 64-bit

4Gb RAM

222Gb Harddrive

AMD Turion X2 Dual Core Mobile RM 70 - 2.00 GHz Processor

ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics Card

 

Should this be enough to run Fallout on at least high setting with little to no lag or is this not even close?

[fap6000]

Fallout 3 renders 4 times as much content on screen than past games at the time it was launched. So you'll have to adjust yourself a bit. Focus on two things.

 

1. running around in the wasteland, if you can run across it about halfway an it's smooth the whole time yer good

 

2. combat situations, both player vs a few NPC's an then areas of very high combat like player vs 10 NPC's an 20 NPC's vs 20 NPC's

 

 

Basicly you install fallout, an then you run a tweeking, testing, and settings phase, which gives you a baseline of how well it will run, then you install the DLC's an do it again, an then when your system an fallout install is smooth an ruled out as a future cause to any problem you might face. You start installing mods. Which if you ask me, only install a few at a time, an then fix them, then test it. Otherwise anytime you have a problem you'll be looking at one problem in a list of 100 or 200 mods. Rather than looking in the last 4 mods you just installed.

 

Texture packs are great, however, they are way too big to be used in a performance way. The same thing goes for just about any player made texture. For some reason folks think that the bigger it is an un-compressed makes it look better. Well yah it does if you don't mind 3 FPS in combat areas or Frame stutter. Most modders end up shrinking an encoding any player made texture. A pretty simple concept. You take a texture map like a 4096X4096 an shrink it to 2048X2048 from a resize done @ 96 pixels per inch (or screen native) in super sampling, then encode it in DXT. Anything about the size of the player charicter at the most only needs a 1024X1024 map, then if it's something big a huge map. Anyhow if you do it correctly then 99% of the detail is kept inside the texture while shrinking it's raw data size down to 1/4 or 1/2 for purely performance reasons in mass chaos. Like for example 250 raiders in a certian area of the wasteland, say the south east part of the map. If the armor they wear is max res from some dufus player/modder then it's going to drag your system down no mater what the situation is. Just walking, running, and certianly fighting.

 

It's no big deal though. Basicly when we all started at this the thinking went backwards (the wrong way). You need totally huge texture maps in order to create tiny maps with max detail. This is because when you shrink a texture the sharpness goes up, but when you stretch one the sharpness drops. What most folks don't realize is that the actual resolution is whatever the pixel per inch is in the end users computer screen's native res. 1600X1200 is about 96 pixels per inch, hence why I use it. While it's advanced stuff, it's also the largest performance gain one can get. DXT encoding/compression for example is a compression language developed just for computer video cards and 3D games. Then about half the population of fallout 3 modders don't even know what it is. There's an article on it, in fact most of the stuff you need is in articles, nobody knows that either. http://fallout3nexus.com/articles/article.php?id=208

 

The second most powerful impact on performance is directly linked to your AA an AF settings. Fallout 3's AA an AF stinks though. You can force whatever AA an AF you like inside the grapics card control panel if you really wanted to use it. Turn off fallout 3's AA an AF an set AA to override any application setting inside your grapics card control panel. AA an AF puts extra tax on the grapics card leading to half life. So I turn them both off. In fact the only reason I would use either at this point is to take a high res screen shot.

 

Everybody says update your driver, blah blah blah, well that can lead to just as much trouble as not updating it. I tend to use whatever came in the box with the video card, or whatever Bethesda Support tells me I should use. Pfft the driver I'm using now is probably a few years old.

 

 

The Tweek guide is your best bet for overall set up of your vanilla game. http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_1.html As well as understand what each setting means, an advanced tweeks to bring out the true awesomnez of fallout 3.

 

I use my default resolution, which is the native res for my display, I had to look that up. It's on a custom build gamer rig, and even then I choose lower than high settings, because I know I'm going to chaos the poop out of the game.

 

VSync is on, HDR, Texture quality high, Radial Blur quality low, Depth of field is off, Transparency multisampling on, decal cap 30,

 

Pretty much all the water stuff is turned on or on high

 

Shadows are off

 

Then the distance sliders are 1/4 to 1/2

 

 

 

Radial blur is off, because it's stuipid, an only really used when you are hit by a bullet, the whole idea is to make it look like crap, why you would need high detail crap is beyond me.

 

Depth of field is off because it's stupid an only really noticed when you are in a dialog with a NPC while you are also outside

 

Shadows are off, because it's stupid an only really the player charicters shadow or NPC shadows, easy to ignore, because the shadows are build into the game via other ways, like normal maps an HDR lighting for example