Good ol' VATS lag

[Lextsy]

That huge block of blue text hurts

 

I can give details however. I used to run a 8800GT and it didn't have the 2 second pause. Then I flashed it up to a 9800GT and then Sli'd it with another 9800GT and it wasn't a 2 second pause but actual FPS drop. Un-SLi in settings fixes it. Then I bought an ATi Radeon HD4890 and the VATS 2 second pause appeared. I sent the 4890 back in (for other reasons) and used the single 9800GT and it didn't have the pause. I Bought an ATi Radeon HD4870 and the 2 second pause reappeared.

 

There's more information. I can run more tests, I have a spare ATi HD5450 and can get my hands on an older ATi Radeon X1650.

 

It is directly video card related. Under what circumstances, no clue. All the video card configurations were ran under an Intel Based Dual-core and 8Gigs of ram.

 

On the side note, Running a single 9800GT runs very good. Upon SLi, turning on Anti-aliasing would eat my FPS at over level 4. WIthout SLi, Level4 AA was OK.

[fap6000]

Well first FO3 doesn't even really need AA, turn that off, an you just nulled half the issues you might run into. System tax in times of chaos, like combat for example, AA just drags things down, this promotes coruption from that same system tax. This is further backed up from many games AA an HDR post processing effect directly conflicting, but that only potentialy fries you grapics card, as fallout 3 is somewhat designed to run AA an HDR, that don't make it right though. The AA settings might only be there for people using bloom or no lighting, this is all a mute point as you don't really need AA in the first place for FO3. There's certian conditions where AA will help, but these are pretty rare. It's pretty hard to determine the difference when viewing a side by side of a 32XQ SLI FO3 image, an one with zero AA. After you turn off AA for a while you end up not missing it.

 

Then Fallout 3 was designed to run on high settings on a 8000 nvida card. Most people use the wrong settings. Our friend here just proved that VATS lag is locked inside the save game somehow, just like opening container lag is. This backs up the already known fact that some game starts go better than others. Which boils down to how clean the install is, more messy with a messy install, more clean with a clean install/build. That all depends on how much the person has worked with this stuff, plus the longer you end up working with fallout 3, the better choices you make, from them being based on experience. For example use simple mods so that you only end up dealing with simple problems.

 

AF is a different story, you can live without the AA yah, but turning off AF means you would have to replace most of the textures in the game, because they are pretty poopy looking. 2X AF will clean this up, but that's subjective. Maybe you want more or can get by with none, which would be ideal if you ask me. However using AF is much better performance without having to switch to a global texture pack, like say for things like landscape textures. There's methods to shrink those HD textures down to the vanilla size, you know as to make them have the same performance, but it's a lot of extra work to do so, so AF seems to fit in nicely.

 

SLI unless you set it up to do otherwise will render content on one card, then control physics on the 2nd card. Which is pretty much the same set up as a Non-SLI, only in Non-SLI Nvida's PhysX puts load on the CPU, how much of that ends up even being a issue is subjective. You don't really even notice much performance gain from using physX or not using it, I kind of think it's going to load the CPU either way. But Fallout 3 is one of the games that has added support for SLI systems. So you would get a boost from it. However fallout 3 flags the configs for SLI when you first install, you could set it up manually from editing it, but most people would just backup then delete their my documents/games/fallout 3 folder, then launch the default launcher to get that "auto-detecting game settings" which creates those config files