Odd framerate problems

[beatsnpieces]

I have been noticing some strange framerate issues every now and then. First off I use iFPSClamp=55 to eliminate the microstutter problems I and many others encounter, now the downside to using the FPSClamp is that when the framerate drops below the setting, in my case 55 fps, the game slows down (as in movement speed slows, firing speed slows, enemies move slower etc.), but only when the FPS drop below 55 and the further it drops the slower the game goes.

 

I am fortunate in that these slowdowns are few and far between but what is strange is that these only happen in specific places and follow a very specific pattern. Now this is not related in any way to graphics detail or how much is going on as I've yet to have this happen during even the most frantic battles with multiple enemies and explosives going off and cars exploding. From my troubleshooting I've found that it seems to be related to rendering certain objects.

 

The first place I noticed this was in the Red Racer factory, when you enter you are facing the middle of the map and the frames immediately plummet and I get slow-mo due to the clamp. As soon as I turn my view to the left or right so that the main factory floor area is out of my FOV the frames shoot back up to 55, now the odd thing is that this happens from anywhere in the factory floor map. I can be on the bottom level of it right up against a plain wall and if my map marker is pointing towards the center of the map I get the fps drop. Also when I go into to CEO Offices part of the factory (a new map) the FPS is silky smooth throughout. As far as the Red Racer factory goes it seems to be something to do with rendering the parts of the conveyor belts where they go into the machines or into the wall (the gate things with the red lights on them) as I can turn Object Fade all the way off and that completely eliminates the slowdown until one of those gate things comes within the fade range, and the more of them that are within the fade range the more the FPS drops.

 

Another place this happens is in LOB Industries (I think thats where it was anyhow) though it seems to be more centralized as I don't get the slowdown until I go to the second floor and I can even locate the exact spot that it causing it. There is a lunchroom area with a pillar in the middle and a light shining from the ceiling right beside it and there are doors on either side of the room. I can enter from either door and as soon as I look at the center where the pillar is my frames drop and it starts chugging away, I move across the room and as soon as I cross the center and the light and pillar are out of my FOV the frames are right back up to 55, I do a 180 and face them again and the frames drop right back down. Again, the slow down happens whenever I face that room from any point on the map.

 

There are a few other places where this happens as well, one of the Metro stations though I don't remember which one, approaching the Fairfax Ruins from the west (the slowdown stop when you cross an invisible line just inside town), in front of the Evergreen Mills gate (again stopping when you cross an invisible line) and one of the wings of the Vault-Tec HQ which was just this morning but I ran out of time before I could figure out which part of the map was causing it.

 

I did find one thing that completely fixed these issues but that had some very undesirable side effects; I found that going into the FALLOUT.INI file and changing the line bDoSpecularPass=1 to bDoSpecularPass=0 (thus turning off specular lighting) did eliminate almost all slowdowns and had no noticeable effect on overall graphics quality aside from making things a little less shiny. However that change seems to screw up the way some areas are lit up as illustrated by the screenshots here and here.

 

 

The problem still occurs with the original un-tweaked FALLOUT3.INI and all mods disabled. It is not caused by graphics settings either as it will still occur at 800x600 with all settings on minimum. I have tried Nvidia driver versions 175.16 to the latest 182.50 with the same results on all versions. Disabling all extra background services and programs, the Steam Overlay and Network Connection all made no difference. I tried using my onboard audio instead of my X-Fi card, no change. I have experimented with Vsync, Triple Buffering and Max Frames to Render Ahead settings in the Nvidia control panel all with no impact whatsoever. I also changed the fallout3.exe priority and affinity settings with no change. I also tried different combinations with my RAM sticks trying configs of 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 gigabytes again with no change.

 

At this point I have no idea what the hell else it could be aside from the game itself.

 

CPU: Q6700 Core 2 Quad 2.66

MOBO: Asus P5QL-E

VIDEO: BFGTech 8800 Ultra 768mb

RAM: 3GB 800MHz DDR2 (2x1gb Corsair, 2x512mb OCZ)

HDD: 150GB WD Raptor X 10,000RPM

AUDIO: Creative X-Fi Extreme Gamer

PSU: 850W ThermalTake ToughPower

OS: XP Pro SP3

 

My Fallout 3 Settings:

Aspect: 16:10

Resolution: 1680x1050

AA: 4 Samples

AF: 8 Samples

Vsync: On

HDR: On

 

Detail:

Texture Quality: High

Radial Blur: Low

Depth of Field: On

Transparency Multi: On

Decal Cap: 10

 

Water

Refractions: On

Reflections: On

Reflection Quality: Medium

Soft Reflect: On

Full Scene Reflect: Off

Full Detail Reflect: Off

Water Displacement: On

Depth Fog: Off

Water Multisample: Medium

 

Shadows

Quality: Medium

Filtering: High

Max In: 4

Max Ex: 2

 

View Distance

Object: 15

Actor: 15

Grass: 7

Specularity: 2

Light: 21

Item: 9

Shadow: 4

 

Distance LOD

Tree: 26

Object: 50

Land Quality: 125

[tommynastie]

I had a similar problem around the Meresti trainyard/Scrapyard area. There seemed to be an invisible line, once I crossed it, my game would become a slide show. It was really annoying as I had entered these locations earlier on with no slow down whatsoever. I have a High-end gaming rig, so I know that hardware was not the issue. Don't know if it was 1.5 patch that had messed things up. Anyway after avoiding those locations for awhile, I decided to travel to the Meresti trainyard and my game became lag city to my frustration. Left my computer for a couple of minutes to make a cuppa, when I got back the frame rate was back to normal! It seemed the computer needed a few minutes to sort itself out. That seems to be the only problem area so far, and when ever I enter that lag zone I just leave it for a couple of minutes to come good. It works, but it's far from ideal.

[Wandik]

have similar problems from time to time, only oudoor in wasteland. for few seconds, game looks like frozen, then it returns to normal state... never tried to solve it, i just think it's due to textures loading, and better card and cpu will solve it :)

 

using clocked GTX8800 and 6400+ X2