Fallout 3 Crashes not linked to any mods

[Khet]

Never had any issues in the past with Fallout 3 crashing like this without mods. The game randomly, and I literally mean randomly with no rhyme or reason, freezes up on me. During loading screens, during conversations, checking the pipboy, walking, combat, it doesn't matter what I'm doing, it'll freeze. sometimes it's minutes after starting up the game, sometimes hours, sometimes it freezes on the main menu. As far as I know, nothing has changed with my system to warrant these freezes. I hop on one day and voila, freezing. I've reformatted, I've reinstalled drivers, I've threatened with hammers and other bludgeon devices, and nothing seems to work.

 

6GB RAM

3.6Ghz Quad core processor

Windows 7

EVGA Geforce 9800 GTX

DirectX 11 (have tried 9 and 10 to with no success)

 

 

Like I said, zero hardware changes since the time before random freezes and now, definately not software issues since I've reformatted twice and reinstalled all drivers. I'm out of ideas.

[phoneyLogic]

After you reformated, did you install codec packs K-Lite or DirectShow filters?

If so, install an updated version of k-Lite.

 

There also might be codecs in other applications causing crashes.

Does it happen with other games as well?

[Khet]

Nope, only Fallout. Mass Effect 1-2, Dragon Age, Global Agenda, L4D2, TF2, Borderlands, even Oblivion are all fine.

 

Like I said, all drivers, and codecs, are up to date since I only keep a list of drivers and codecs used and recheck everything every so often to ensure latest versions. All drivers and codecs were downloaded after the reformat, which was this past weekend, so they can't really be much more up to date than they are.

[phoneyLogic]

It's not only being-up-to-date, some codecs just tend to cause truble an d even crashing. You can try to deactivate some codecs like described here

[Ihoe]

did you update the game? if so, after a certain patch, the game no longer supports quad core cpus. Open up the fallout.ini file in: My Documents\My Games\Fallout3

Find the line:

 

bUseThreadedAI=0

 

change it to:

 

bUseThreadedAI=1

 

Add another line after it and insert:

 

iNumHWThreads=2

 

This will limit the game to 2 cores and prevent the engine bug from causing the game to freeze.

 

also, you could try using "Large adress aware enabler" which will allow the game to use more than 3-2 Gigs of RAM, a longshot at fixing this bug.

[Khet]

Y'know, I think that might be it Ihoe. I did update, and completely forgot about that quad core issues. I'll test it after work.

[phoneyLogic]

@Ihoe

good catch

[Khet]

Looks like that was it. Haven't gotten a freeze yet. Thanks guys, completely forgot about that little bit.

[wolfsoft]

It's not only being-up-to-date, some codecs just tend to cause truble an d even crashing. You can try to deactivate some codecs like described here

[wolfsoft]

It's not only being-up-to-date, some codecs just tend to cause truble an d even crashing. You can try to deactivate some codecs like described here

Thx i forgot that