Fallout 3 Video harcdware and Video options setting's

[Craigsters]

Fallout 3 sets my Video hardware and video options to Ultra High Quality, should I allow this? or once in the game set it to default?

 

 

Does having it set at Ultra High Quality cause in game freezes?

 

My video card is a 1gb GDDR3 Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 video card which I bought and installed last October along with a 500watt power supply which it needed during it's upgrades!..

 

My PC also has 4gb of DDR2 Ram and Windows XP Pro SP3 32bit Processor:Intel® Core2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13 GHz

[phoneyLogic]

I dont think that there is a problem. Just try it and if it should start crashing then you still could lower the video settings.

 

XP SP3 is awesome, 4GB Ram is more than enough ( it would probably used maybe 2-3 GB at all ), 4GHz should work too and a Radeon HD 4850 is quite OK

[mechine]

uh isn't 3Gb the max RAM you can use on XP?

 

 

Anyhowz, what you do is set it to ultra an then follow the tweek guide http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_1.html

 

 

Install fallout, patch it, tweek it, then do a bunch of in-game test runs, try to make it crash an stutter, adjust the settings and tweeks until it's real smooth, install the DLC an do it again, then mods later on, this way you get a good base to start from.

 

Now the Dev's came out an said that Fallout 3 is rendering about 4 times as much when they released it, so that's probably why you can turn the sliders down to 1/4 an not even notice. Reasons you would want to do that would be from the added chaos from other mods, namely MMM, but other mods will bring down FPS as well, most of the modders think like a duffus would, which is why you see texture maps that are 16Mb in raw data size. So basicly to keep fallout running as good as it would in vanilla form, you can either adjust settings for the extra chaos, or get your hands dirty adjusting the files being used in the mods for performance.

 

Also the grapics card control panel settings can be used to make fallout run smoother. For some reason the AA an AF inside the fallout 3 3D application stinks. If you grapics card has the settings to override any application setting for AA, then you would probably notice that you can pick much higher AA an AF by using them, rather than using the AA an AF settings inside the falllout3defaultlauncher.exe which you put to off (performance) It's not just performance either, the quality is much higher by keeping AA an AF on the card. But this is opposite of every other game, which is weird...

 

 

I'll change the settings depending on what I was doing from time to time. Sometimes you wana run around on max, other times you want to have things past 50 meters culled somewhat, maybe you don't want to run AA an AF sometimes. Say I was going underground an MMM-feralGhoulrampage (which makes feral spawns X5) An I knew I would be down there for a while, well I'd turn off AA an AF to start, maybe even shadows because groups of 30 ferals running around really fast after you is going to cause stutter, among other things.

[phoneyLogic]

uh isn't 3Gb the max RAM you can use on XP?

Yes, with 32Bit.

But it's also a question of the amount of data, that would be needed to run constantly in the ram.

Fallout is installed round about 7 GB big.

Only a little part of it is being loaded into RAM.

In fact you would hit the 3 GB if you open 2 (vanilla) games the same time.;D

SO the RAM itself wouldn't be the problem. Its more a question of bottlenecks.

[evilneko]

3 GB is available to applications. The OS itself will make use of the remainder. Note that to even have 3GB for applications, the /3GB switch must be set in the boot.ini file. When I tried this, Fallout 3 did not run well for some reason. In fact, it was horrible.

 

With your specs you should be able to do pretty much whatever you want with the settings though. I recommend turning off grass though, it's hella ugly. ;)