Fallout 3 starts crashing when I upgraded my Graphics card

[Danish_4116]

Hi all

 

I recently upgraded my graphics card from Nvidia GeForce 7600 to a Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX and now Fallout 3 crashes constantly on me.

 

It runs fine for a couple of minutes and then I start seeing some graphical glitches.

i.e. The screen going black for a second when I open my pipboy, crates turning rainbow colours etc

 

Then a couple of minutes after these glitches start the game completely crashes on me.

 

I dont think it has to do with the graphics card itself as I can run games that are more graphically intense (such as Crysis on high settings) but Fallout 3 gives me these weird graphical glitches and crashes.

 

 

It runs fine until I leave the vault then it just acts up randomly.

 

I am using patch 1.5 and I already tried reinstalling and using optimal video settings.

 

 

My system:

Video Card: GeForce 9800GTX 512mb

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.20GHz

Ram: 1024MB

DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

 

 

Thanks in advance for any help

[Wandik]

hope you upgraded your drivers as well right? allways use lates graphics drivers (with exceptions, of course - there might be situations, when older drivers suits to some games better than latest ones...)

[Danish_4116]

Yeah, i upgraded all my drivers, like i said i can run more system intensive games than fallout 3 no problem

[wolf421]

What os are you useing?

WindowsXP or vista?

If its vista you need more ram than 1gig on it.

 

Another thing is did you use a driver cleaner to remove all the old windows registery enteries for the old Nvidia drivers?

If not that can also be the problem.

 

When I bought a new video card I had the same problems and had to do some searching to fix the problem.

 

Heres what I did.

1. downloaded Driver Cleaner from Guru3d.com

2. uninstalled all my Nvidia video card drivers

3 ran driver cleaner and had it get rid of all the windows registery entries for my old video card.

4. reboot

5. installed the new drivers. reboot.

6. ran fallout3 launcher and set my video prefs. and launched the game.

 

My system specs:

O/S Windows Vista ultamate 64bit with SP2

Video: BFG 9800GTX+512mb

Ram: 8gig OCZ sli memory

Hard Drives: 3 with almost 2Tbs of space

[Wandik]

My system specs:

O/S Windows Vista ultamate 64bit with SP2

 

... do you experience any errors in gaming with SP2? i'm planning to upgrade from XP, so i'm looking for every info i can get :) sorry about the offtopic

[Danish_4116]

Thanks for the help wolf, i will try it out next weekend as I will be away for the rest of this week.

 

I have windows XP, professional, I can run other games just not fallout 3 for some reason.

 

Unfortunately, i am going on a school camp until the end of the week so I wont post back until at least Friday night, but please keep the suggestions coming.

[wolf421]

My system specs:

O/S Windows Vista ultamate 64bit with SP2

 

... do you experience any errors in gaming with SP2? i'm planning to upgrade from XP, so i'm looking for every info i can get :) sorry about the offtopic

 

With other games no with fallout 3 yes.

Unlike other games the graphics engine they used for fallout 3/oblivion has problems from the word go. I have both games and have the same problems with each of them. When oblivion came out I bought it and couldn't play it until the first patch was released because of the bugs with it.

The same could be said for fallout 3 execpt they fixed most of the bugs before releasing fallout 3 to the public.

IMHO, they screwed the game by rushing to get it out the door and on the shelves. Instead of taking another couple of months to fix the problems with it. But now here it is almost a year later and the bugs in the fallout 3 engine are still unfixed and don't look like they will ever get fixed by BS.

Oblivion uses the same graphics engine and they never fixed the problems with that one, and its a year older than fallout 3.

The real differance I have seen is this.

Retail store version of Fallout 3 = major problems bad dvd or some other reason... (which is the version I own)

Downloaded from steam = no problems with mods or the dlc's (my brother in law bought his copy from them and runs great)

 

So your guess is as good as mine, My system and the one my brother in law has are identical in every way same motherboards, memory, hard drives etc. We built them both at the same time with new parts. The only differance is my cpu it's a dual core and his is a quad core (I couldn't get the money for the quad core at the time) We even or using the same o/s.. Now go figure, two systems built at the same time with the same parts besides the cpu. And his runs fallout 3 on ultra high settings and asks for more to do with no problems. Mine won't run ultra high settings and still chokes graphically when I run fallout 3.

 

Later

[bben46]

The newer graphics card may need more power. What is the rating on your power supply? Many OEM boxes such a s Dell and HP put in a weak power supply that is just sufficient for the factory installed parts. When a GPU hog like FO3 is run on a good Video card it needs more power than the Power supply can put out - When the 12 volt power line drops either the Video card shuts down or the computer shuts down.

 

The 9800GTX draws a maximum of 140 Watts by itself and Nvidia recommends a MINIMUM power supply of 450 Watts. More would be better, especially if you have something else added that draws extra power.

 

Listen for changes in fan pitch. That can be an indicator that you voltage is dropping. Also, check the temperature on the video card, make sure the fan is running and nothing is blocking the air channels.

[Wandik]

Later

 

thanks :) obviously, the quad is much more gamer-friendly then the dual... do you both use same driver setting for your graphic (i mean the sliders between performance and quality)? they can make a huge difference...

 

i'm going to build my rig around i7 core, with 6gig DDR3 and GTX295 - hope this will be enough to play new games for a year and a half at least :confused: my old rig is about 20 months old (was allmost on top when built), and i'm limited at quality in new games (although i have to play @ DX9, which is the reason the ultra-high quality is disabled for some games - but the PC won't be able to run this quality at decent framerate either...)