Sudden Massive FR loss after entering Dead Money

[catbird]

New to this forum, please forgive me if I don't construct this plea for help properly. It has been a long time since I have been on boards, it looks like things have changed for the better as they years have gone by! I have been playing FPS games since the days of DOS, and so far from an expert in computers it isn't even funny ,but I do ( kinda ) know my way around the basics. I only say that to let all of you know that with the following problem, I have already followed most of the obvious things one would check first, something a little ( well, lets face it, WAY outta ) my league has hit I fear and I turn to you kind folks for help. I have asked Steam for help in the past on a few issues, and I am not knocking them at all, but they were very slow in responding each time ( understandable ) and unfortunately never able to solve the issues. A few quick replies from forum members solved what had been pending for over a month with Steam support. But, in all fairness, they must have a huge backlog of request for help. Still, not sure why their tech support always gave incorrect information that was eventually easily solved by members.....

 

Having said that, here is my system specs. This is my first post on this board, if I have done everything correctly, my system specs should show up in my signature, but I may have well messed that up as well, so I will list them again, at least this first time.

 

I7-940 @ 3.5GHz

6 Gigs DDR 3

WD 300 Gig Raptor

WD 750 Gig Black Edition

AMD HD 6970 2 Gig Current driver 12.1, tried rolling back to 11.12 and way beyond that, no change.

Monster NIC

Creative SB X-FI

32" HDMI LG display

Windows 7, 64 bit

 

Since I am disabled and unable to leave the house very often, I am at the computer or TV all day ( and night, sleep is fleeting, at best ) and I have about every FPS shooter I can think of that I feel is worth playing , and I am not picky either and have over 30 of them in my Steam library, many others located elsewhere. All the games play excellent, I check with Fraps occasionally just for fun, but games like Crysis, Warhead, Crysis 2, Metro 2033, Rage, all of the COD, MW series, Battlefield 3, Deus Ex, ETC, you get the point, many of these can be very tough on a machine to push smooth frame rates without any hesitation at any point. But I have been extremely lucky, my computer has always played all these title and many more without incident and very, very smoothly.

 

I run every game I have at 1920 X 1080, 32 bit with most games set to "max setting, "ultra" or "high" ( well, certainly not the original Crysis or Warhead, both of which have to be set one notch down ) and the same is especially true for Fallout, New New Vegas. When I got the game, as soon as it came out, I was expecting some trouble since I had read a lot of issues with poor FR, etc, however, I set it to "Ultra" mode, the bumped up the slider bars where possible if needed all the way to max, and loaded up Fraps and gave it a shot. Played ( and looked ) great, it did not even push the video card hard enough ( MSI Afterburner, great tool ! ) to gain 20C over idle state, which is 35C. Same with CPU, temps run 10 to 15C lower than some other FPS games like Warhead, etc. In any event, neither the GPU ( max temp 55C ) or the CPU ( max temp 52C ) ever even broke a sweat, and, I think importantly, STILL remains that way today, despite the fact some form of a staggering blow has hit New Vegas, and managed to affect at least one other game....Rage.

 

Specifically, I have been playing New Vegas again now for about 3 weeks, every day and all has been great. I am a terrible player, always have been and that, along with a horrible ISP keeps me always playing single player mode, so I spend a lot of time just wandering around, not trying to finish the game at all. I bought all the DLC a long time ago for it, but never played any of it, never got that far in the game. I checked with Fraps a week or so ago, I was over 100FPS average when I decided to answer the "Dead Money" radio call. When I enter through the door, I could tell that I had taken an instant hit, a BIG one, for the first time in over three years I remembered what it was like playing on a Pentium 60. Of special note, when I open up my Pip Boy, the mouse becomes so erratic I cannot even hold it on an item the lag is so bad. Fraps showed an average that dropped to 28FPS!!

 

I immediately ran detailed virus scans, Malware scans, hard disk and memory for errors, un installed and reinstalled several drivers for the video card, system restore, all to no avail. I got out of Dead Money of course only to find that ALL of New Vegas is now basically unplayable. Strangely, further testing revealed that even if I set every single setting to the lowest possible number there is, the FR for low, med, high, and ultra are nearly identical, there is NO performance gain by setting everything from the normal "ultra" mode all they way down to "low" mode, they all spit out about 28 FPS average. A loss of over 80FPS. In one second! With one click! Further testing of random games in my Steam library revealed that Rage also took a significant hit, while not as bad, ( V sync always on for this one, and it was usually pegged at 60 ) did suffer a loss of 25FPS, making it difficult to look at, vs the normal smooth gameplay.

 

I have tried the "verify the integrity of the game cache" and it did find three files missing, which it downloaded, but then I checked other games and it seems that most games are missing a few after playing for awhile. In any event, it made no difference. I realize that I can, of course, just uninstall the game and re install it, but unlike the "old days" when I had everything on a disk, nearly all my games have been delivered over a very long painful 10 to 20 hour download and this game, with all the DLC might take longer than this 60 year old man has left to live if I have to start all over.

 

I am so sorry for the WAY to long post, i have lost my manners. It has been to long, I guess the one downside of having everything go so well for so long? For many years I used to build gaming computers for all my friends and tried my best to see if I could put them together and get them to run as fast as the 6000 dollar one's on the market at the time for a third of the cost. A few times I managed to beat them, a lot of the time I could tie them, and some times I fell short when benchmarking week was over. But I did manage to always come in a 1/2 to 1/3 of what I would have to buy one for. I did learn a lot about trouble shooting during those years. Mostly what I learned is that I will ALWAYS need to ask for help and I am never to proud to ask for it. And, that is what I am doing now. What else am I missing here folks?? I am open to any ideas. I did forget to point out that NO other area of the computer has been affected by whatever happened, all other games ( with the exception of Rage ) and all programs run normally.

 

Again, sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

Edited February 28, 2012 by catbird

[kevkiev]

Hey Catbird, welcome to the forum.

 

Geez, though I'm not totally up to speed on all things latest hardware, I'm thinkin' your specs are more than enough to run anything FONV/DLC in style. I think my specs are roughly similar and my performance is fine with the eye candy cranked pretty good (specs in my profile; I have a 30" NEC that I run at 2560x1600)

 

There's a ton of way more technically-able members here than I but, fwiw, I'll just pass on the few performance tweaks that have helped me:

 

2 mods:

 

4GB enabler

 

or, if you're running NVSE, you'll have to got to silverlock.org and DL the NVSE version - not sure of the actual web addy, just google silverlock nvse and you'll find it (the 4gb loader is in the FAQ section of the main NVSE page)

 

and New Vegas Stutter Remover

 

And 1 INI tweak. I found this made a huge diff when I started running a bunch of hi-res texture mods, maybe it'll help you too:

 

find the line "iPreloadSizeLimit=26214400" and bump it up to something bigger. I just add another zero at the end. I only edit the main one in My Document/ My Games/ Fallout NV (ie the one right above "FalloutPrefs.INI") and it seems to ovewrite the other 2 (ie that FalloutPrefs one, as well as the Fallout_default.INI that resides in your main Fallout New Vegas folder under steamapps/ common), though I've heard of peeps having to edit all 3 to make it stick.

 

That's all I got.

 

Hope it helps - good luck!

Edited February 29, 2012 by kevkiev

[catbird]

Thanks kevkiev, I must admit my ignorance on most ( nope, gotta be straight here, ALL of what you just said ) so I will research your links and try and go from there. I have never modded myself, I clearly do not possess the skill ( spell check enabled me just to spell the word "modded" correctly ) so you can see how clearly I am out of my league here. While I have installed a great many mods to LFD2, they were simple clicks of the mouse and that was it, all correctly installed for me. I have installed a few mods to New Vegas, recently the "Warhammer 40K conversion " and all went well with it, as well as a few other mods. The game was not affected in any adverse way by these mods, which was the first thing I thought of, and unloading them from both the Fallout Mod Manager and in the Data Files of the menu of New Vegas did not change the way the game acted. I played the game after the few mods I did install, ran Fraps and reviewed the CPU/GPU temps, all were great, no change in the 100+ average FR so I THINK I can eliminate the few mods I installed as a source of the problem but if not, perhaps I need some guidance on how to completely remove/uninstall each mod to totally eliminate it as a possible source of the problem?? If so, I will need some pointers on this if possible. Pointers as in someone that loves to catch huge fish or hunt big bucks and turkey come out here in the woods in Missouri and do it in front of my face type of pointers ::))

 

I am struck by the fact that this computer has been running this very game, from the first day it hit the street for sale, until less than a week ago, humming along at over 100FPS average on "Ultra" mode, and it took less than a second to take it to its knees. Even Warhead and Metro 2033 run without any stuttering of any type at all.... albeit on high and not very high or ultra, both those game require me to back off one notch if I want other eye candy turned on and still run flutter free. But they are known computer killers. With New Vegas unable to cause this one to even break a sweat in either the GPU or the CPU department, and with a solid history of being able to run the game at a blistering pace, only to see the performance dropped faster than last summers love, well, I am usually able to root out the normal culprits such as a virus or Maleware, bad driver, etc. But none of my normal troubleshooting efforts paid off, including system restore.

 

I keep thinking that somehow the DLC "Dead Money" HAS to be involved in some way. Everything was fine since the day I bought the game. I played it for a few months, went on to other things but bought all the DLC packs as they came out but never played any of them, and then after finally learning how to install mods to Steam games ( not as easy for the " slow on the draw" types such as myself ) became interested in the game again and had been enjoying it very much for the last three weeks. But as I stated, the issue occurred the INSTANT I entered Dead Money.

 

I will try and figure out how to use the links you have given me and I appreciate it very much. I am not as skilled as I need to be in this area, that is clear. If this problem began when I bought the game, it seems to me that it would make much more sense and even easier to figure out possibly, It could be a matter of not have the right horsepower or proper setting to unleash the beast for example. But with a well established record of the opposite, I am unclear why I would need to do anything to adjust settings when they were not an issue for so long. Could it be that perhaps something has occurred that "altered" some of these? Isn't a loss of over 80FPS in a single click that is not reversible by backing out of that apparently caused it odd? IF it was Dead Money, why would it then destroy the entire game? And, really puzzling to me, why would whatever happened have an adverse effect on Rage?

 

Sorry for my ignorance. I really, really hate playing catch up at my age. My fear is that I will finally start to get a handle on things.......and then, of course, start to forget it faster than I learned it ::))

 

Thank you again, I will try my best with what you have given me, it is appreciated!

[kevkiev]

Yeah, the DM-specific thing is a bit weird when the game ran perfectly before for ya but, who knows ,maybe the 2 mods will help.

 

Oh, sorry, but I just realized you have to have NVSE to run New Vegas stutter remover. It's been so long since I installed NVSE I can't remember the steps atm. Hopefully you can work your way through that. I'd imagine they have some good instructions on the silverlock.org page. (NVSE isn't hosted on Nexus, you have to get it from silverlock) Tho I guess, If you want to avoid NVSE for now, you could always try the non-NVSE 4gb enabler without NVSR and see how that goes. (But, personally, I find NVSR is a HUGE help and alone is worth getting NVSE.)

 

Anyways, installing the 2 mods I mentioned should be easy-peasy. I'd recommend FOMM or some other mod manager for "mainstream" mods (ie esp/ esm files) but you don't even have to go there with 4GB and NVSR.

 

For NVSR, just download the mod it into a separate folder and unpack it. Then (I think this is covered in the readme) create a folder named "NVSE" in your data folder (in steamapps/common/fallout new vegas) then create another folder called "plugins" in that new NVSE folder. Copy the sr_New_Vegas_Stutter_Remover.dll file from wherever you unpacked the mod into that plugins folder. Done. Once it's run once, an INI file will be created in the "plugins" folder. Some peeps, me included, have got even better performance by changing the "Max FPS" line in the INI file to something above 30. NVSR caps your FPS in order to smooth out FPS transitions, and your rig can likely handle something well above 30. I personally use 55.

 

For the 4GB enabler just download/unpack the 4GB enabler as above (the DL link is in the silverlock FAQ section) , then copy the .exe and.dll files along with the "source" folder into your main Fallout New Vegas folder. (i.e. the folder that holds the "data" folder. For me, notwithstanding the readme directions that it doesn't matter where you install, I found it had to be in the main FNV folder or it wouldn't work.) Done and done. Just launch the game from the fnv4gb exe file rather than the steam launcher. (Probably best to run as an administrator).

[catbird]

Wow, I sure appreciate all the detailed instructions for me. I have nothing to lose, and certainly willing to give it a shot. I am glad your instructions are step by step, even with that, it will be an accomplishment akin to personally being able to program the space shuttle for re entry with the little I have ever done other than "double click" !! If I botch this, I probably have no business with my fingers on a keyboard anyway with this great of direction to follow. You would think starting out with a Pentium 33 and DOS back when long hair and the draft were both active at the same time would have allowed me to absorb a lot more than I have, if nothing else just by accident! BTW, always carried my draft card, just couldn't see myself with long hair.

 

Thank you and I will report back in a day or two and let you know if it had any impact. Least I can do with the time and effort you have put into trying to help me! Assuming, of course, my computer will boot after I get my unwieldy fingers into action...........

[kevkiev]

Lol, best of luck to ya! But, really, if I can do it...

 

I mean, heck, I still freak out a bit when I update my video card drivers. Still weirds me out, after uninstalling the old ones, seeing the monitor go all crazy. I'm always convinced I'm going to screw up and my monitor will be that way forever. But it always works (whew!)

 

You know, I just thought I'd mention something, and this is subject to my own damn fading memory since I've been running 4GB and NVSR for so long, but when I thought about it again I really seem to recall that my first playthrough (maybe first couple playthroughs) of Dead Money was very stuttery too. (That was, like, 5 DM playthroughs ago - I LOVE that DLC. Such a captivating story.) And I wasn't having that problem in the Mojave. So now I'm even more optimistic that those performance fixes will indeed work for you, notwithstanding that at first blush it seems crazy Dead Money alone could cause such a performance drop without something else nefarious at work.

 

Again, good luck!

[catbird]

I probably would not have freaked so much if when I got the heck out DM after spending a couple of hours playing what appeared to be a "slide show" while in there if it were not for the fact that whatever the heck demon seized upon me in there and drove Ol Betsy to her knees managed to piggy back on me when I got out of DM and managed to wreak the same havoc on all of NV....

 

Funny you mentioned the drivers, since we have the same card, we have driver updates every 5 or 6 weeks, so I know exactly what you are talking about. I am also wondering if whatever caused this issue has interfered with updating driver also. I mentioned that I had rolled back and tried other drivers to solve the problem, all to no avail. What I failed to mentioned ( I had already worn out my welcome with to long a post ) was that for the first time ever, while trying to try different drivers, I did it exactly the same way I have been doing it for years, ( and as AMD suggests ) by removing all traces of previous drivers in the control manager, reboot, and then install new drivers. However, this time, on three occasions, while trying to install drivers, before I could even do so, the process of uninstalling the old drivers, at the last step, did exactly what you were concerned about: the screen became so corrupted it was completely unreadable. Reboot did not help. I tried everything. The only thing that worked was to F8, use "last know good configuration" or system restore....the ONLY two way that I was ever able to get a picture again. When I checked the driver version, It is always 12.1, newest one. Weird that it happened at the same time I am trouble shooting issue with massive FR loss in a game....

 

I have been reading all the stuff from the links you sent me. To be very honest, which I always am, even at my own expense, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that it appears that I may not be able to pull it off. I know it must seem very simple, and I am sure it is, but my only experience with computers for all these years is building them and then testing, as you know that does not take a lot. After that, it is playing games, Installing mods has been limited to just those that can be done with a double click. I have so many on Fallout 3 that it is "mod Heavy" and I have to be really careful what I load or even it will begin to slow down with all the high res stuff, texture mods, etc I put on it. But after that accident 11 years ago, I have to take 9 pills 4 times a day, all of them are very serious major league class 1 narcotics and one of the nastier of the bunch is a very high dose at noon of Dilaudid , much more potent than Morphine, but the real deal breaker ( assuming you want to actually try and "do anything with your mind like follow simple instructions " is 100 Mc patches of Fentanyl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl, which is 100 times more powerful than Morphine. At times, I wear up to FOUR of the 100 mc patches and change them every 2 days, the pain Drs from two states say there is no recorded example of any person ever being able to have that much Fentanyl on them at once, ESPECIALLY in combination with so many other drugs. I don't want all this to sound like excuses, but to be honest, that is exactly what they are. I have to trade something in order to even function for a partial escape from the pain, to do that, these drugs, which after 11 years I have developed such a tolerance to the dose may well be instant death should anyone stumble into this mecca of pain meds, and that trade off is any semblance to the person I was before I found out I was not really able to drive to work in my sleep as I had told everyone after all those years ::))

 

Mind you, I have not given up. In fact, since I had to travel 125 miles to the Drs yesterday, we went into Best Buy where I decided that my keyboard and mouse were ACTUALLY the culprits behind my poor, sub par, 6TH grade...check that, 2ND grade abilities on the computer and promptly plopped down a small fortune and bought a Razer Black Widow Ultimate and a Cyborg R.A.T. However, my bubble was soon burst this morning when I opened them up and discovered I will need bout a week to figure out just how to program all the stuff on those two items!! Well, I did need some quality replacements for my ageing one's....but I might have gone a bit into overkill. At any rate, as "lucid" moments grab hold of me longer than a few minutes, I really am gonna try to accomplish what you have laid out for me: should I hose the system, one thing I have discovered this week is that system restore is alive and healthy so I am not to worried.

 

Again, thanks for your kindness and patience with me, I see from your profile you have much more interesting things to keep involved in than helping an old gamer that, with the help of his meds, clearly cannot get the elevator to reach the 13TH floor any longer. Your effort has been very much appreciated!!

 

On an unrelated note, this is so odd for me, the last 11 years of meds. Before I got hurt, despite being a teen raised in the 60'S, I had NEVER in my life had a cigarette, any kind of pot, grass, any drug of any type that was illegal, never had a drink of any booze, I was not against any of it, never judged people for it, most all of my friends did some or all of it, for some reason ( suspect strong feelings for military father who was same way ) I just never even got "curious" about any of it. Might have made me weird. Probably did. Accident sure changed all that! Just thought I would point out an odd little fact, a fact that many ( except all those that grew up and latter worked with me all my life ) have a very hard time believing. I don't blame them.

Edited March 2, 2012 by catbird

[kevkiev]

Damn, it bites that your whole game has caught whatever mysterious malady reared it's ugly head in DM. Wish I were more techno-competent myself so I could give some insight into what's causing the problems. Alas, other than 4gb and NVSR, I don't have much to offer.

 

I guess, maybe, it might help just to reinstall the game? You probably know this, but you could copy your save games (in the my documents/ my games path) so you wouldn't have to start over. Can't say I've heard of a wonky install (or, rather, an install that's gone wonky) manifesting in bad performance though. (I think the usual symptoms are crashes, freezes and other show-stopper issues.) But, again, that comment is from someone rather tech-challenged himself.

 

I really hope you can work it out somehow and, yeah, wish I could be of more help. And don't worry about the length of your posts. Geez, especially considering all the high-powered meds you're on (yikes!) your writing is quite excellently clear. Makes it a breeze to digest all you're sayin'.

 

Good luck cb!

[trog69]

Good evening, Catbird. I'm another shut-in, though my case is mental-severe depression, and I am on-line whenever I'm not sleeping, and since my rig was only "mediocre" for Skyrim, I built a gaming rig similar to yours, and I, too, am never in a hurry to finish a game. In fact, I've only finished one game in a few years-Planescape: Torment. ( A must-finish game!)

 

Anyway, hopefully someone with the same graphics disorder as yours will come in and reply, but it kinda sounds like the Dead Money glitch might have been coinkydink, and your problem could be in your system, rather than the game files. Certainly try KevKiev's suggestions, as well. Great good luck.

[catbird]

Well, you were kind enough to try and help me so I thought I would let you know what has transpired. I was simply unable to pull off installing the required files for a possible fix, as I said, I won't be launching the space shuttle anytime soon.....so, I tried Ol faithful, I "deleted gamel content" and got rid of the game, as well as the four DLC. That has always been the "nuclear" option that is ( or has been I should say ) always pretty much a sure thing when something has goofed up the file system.

 

However, I must have been using tactical nukes and not the big boy stuff because much to my surprise, after a very long 15 hour download of all that stuff again NOTHING changed! I noticed that "continue" was still an option, my saved games were stored elsewhere, I forgot to ditch them, but I cannot think a "saved" game could still be the culprit.

 

That is the most extreme example I know of, short of formatting the entire hard drive, so what went wrong here? Did I not uninstall the game properly to actually get rid of the offending file/setting/etc? I did not want to simply delete everything in windows explorer, and I do not know of another way to completely remove all traces of just one game in a rather large Steam package full of games so I need some advice again, perhaps I went about it the wrong way. I did not see another option to remove the game other than the "delete game files", is there a tool I can get that will do a better job designed just for Steam? I have several aftermarket uninstall programs but even they will not single out one game withing Steam.

 

I was sure this extreme option would do the trick, it has been correcting my screw ups for 3 decades, I was quite shocked to see no change, makes me think I did NOT get rid of everything. Normally at this point one would also begin to think it was time to look elsewhere, possible hardware/driver issues, but I have been doing that non stop since this happened and can fine absolutely no adverse effect on the computer in any way, and I have fun a great many tests of all kinds, even to the point of running Prime 95 for 24 hours and yet even with that cannot get the GPU/CPU to even begin to get hot or stutter, neither will exceed 70C in the torture tests. All 3D Marks, PC Marks, etc remained unchanged. With the exception of Rage, ALL other programs and the 70+ total games on the computer remain unaffected. I have ruled out hardware issues....for now at least.

 

I guess I can try the two files again, I fully understand the logic behind ( although the 4 gig one warned that a LOSS of FPS would occur, it was normal, could be turned off if desired, but that is my problem to begin with ) those two helpers and from what I read, they were basically written to assist computers that never were able to run the game well, perhaps a little anemic or a little older, etc, and I am still confused by the fact that I got over 100FPS from the day it came out on "Ultra" to 28 in one second, but I have taken drastic steps and drawn a blank so I will try one more time to see if I can figure out how to install those two. Installing NVSE is actually the first problem! Any ideas on why the uninstall did not work and/or if there is a better way to do so?

 

Once again, thanks so much for all your time and trouble on this, it is appreciated.