Game used to run great. Now it's unplayable.

[theridingwriter]

Hello all. This is my first post about my first issue, so take it easy on me, as I'm nearly at my wits end at this point.

 

Let's get the system specs out of the way so someone doesn't say, "lol get a new pc:"

 

Intel i7-7700k

Nvidia GTX 1080

16GB RAM DDR4 3000mhz

750W 80+ Gold Certified PSU

Gigabyte z270 gaming k7

Samsung 960EVO SSD (500GB)

Windows 10-64bit

 

As you can see, this is a pretty hefty machine. Now, to the actual problem.

 

So, when I initially bought the game and ran it, it was flawless. Buttery smooth 60fps, no matter where I was or what I was doing, no lag whatsoever; everything was perfect. I never had a single problem. Then, on March 9th I believe, I exited the game and went to bed. I didn't touch my settings or download any new content, literally just shut it off and went to sleep. When I got up the next morning and went to play the game, there was a HUGE drop in performance. My game was wildly jumping around in fps, usually between 20-60, every time I moved just a hair. It was not a spike in random locations or the GPU chugging in a cluttered area. Literally, all I had to do is move my mouse, and the framerate plummeted. It was absolutely infuriating, and I tried every single fix I could find online and in these forums. Steam, Reddit, tomshardware, they were no help; nothing worked, no matter how hard I tried.

 

Then I got the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION error code. Followed the most well-known and successful fix for that error: changing the IDE ATA controller to the Standard SATA AHCI. And that seemed to fix the issue. Everything was running just as it did before. I was ecstatic.

 

Then, I got the error again yesterday. Game performance is back on the fritz, as Valentine would say. FPS all over the place, laggy, the whole shebang. Did some more reading on the error, discovered it was likely from some kind of incompatible driver somewhere. So I updated every. Single. One. One by one, I updated them to see what was causing the problem. Even got a program to tell me which ones still needed it, in case I missed something. Nothing has changed. I even tried rolling back the drivers to see if it was an update that caused the problem in the first place.

 

Nope. Still horrific performance.

 

Performed a disk check. Came back clean, everything repaired. Game still won't run like it used to.

 

Ran a malware/virus scan. Nothing.

 

Every online fix I could find that seemed feasible, I tried it. All of them. Even the ones where I nuked my graphical settings to absolute minimum, even though I'm 99.99% sure it's not my hardware at this point; my computer is MORE than capable of running this game on maxed out settings. I was before. I verified the game files, I reinstalled the game, all of my drivers are up-to-date. I tweaked my .ini's, I downloaded performance-enhancing mods, I did all that V-sync crap. I cleared out my saves folder. Checked CPU/GPU % usage while the game was running, monitored my temps like a hawk. If you can find a "fix" online for this, I've tried it.

 

My husband got under the hood and went into Event Viewer to see what errors were piling up. Checked the memory dump. Manually went behind me to check my drivers. This guy's an engineer, and everything he knew of to do didn't work.

 

Nothing. Fallout 4 just refuses to run like it used to, and I'm about to lose my mind. At this point, I'm considering reformatting the OS, although even that doesn't work for some people I've seen. I suppose if worse comes to worst, downgrading back to Windows 7 might fix the problem, as I'm fairly certain it's still the WATCHDOG error that's causing this issue and it's primarily an 8/10 complaint. But at this point, I'm just spitballing. I'm all out of ideas.

 

Everywhere I've looked, I can't find anyone who's had this exact issue. Someone, anyone, give me some ideas. No one on Steam could help me, no one on Nvidia's site had this particular issue. My BIOS is up-to-date, I've done everything I can possibly think of.

 

tl:dr; WATCHDOG violation screwed stuff up. Thought it was fixed, it's not, and now I don't know what to do.

 

 

 

 

 

[jones177]

Hi

 

 

There are a few things I have learned about the game.

 

Heat can be an issue on an old save. My i7 6700k would hit 95C before I went to a Noctua NH-D15. I am glad the read that you check your temps.

 

As your save games get older they take more resources. Fallout 4 is a building game. It is easy to build & mod past the capabilities of any hardware. I have some old saves that only run smooth on the i7 8700k. The i7 6700k is not powerful enough.

Some save get bad performance baked into them. I test with a new character save to see if the problem is in the save or in the game.

 

Fallout 4 does not like to be overclocked. The overclock it hates the most is what come as default on some motherboards. I am talking about multicore enhancement. My overclocks can pass 3dmark stress tests but not my heavily modded old saves.

The only overclocking it does not mind is memory, but there is zero difference in framerate whether you overclock it or not.

 

I have Fallout 4 on a Windows 7 system with a i7 7600k, GTX 1080 ti & on a Windows 10 system with a i7 8700k, GTX 1080. They booth run fine most of the time. With Win 7 the game runs smooth on most boots. On some boots it will be rough & I have to reboot.

I have only had success with Win 10 when I do a clean install from a CD. When I did upgrades I had WATCHDOG violations all the time.

 

Both my computers use a custom ini setup to run smooth. When I use my old i7 2600k system it required no custom setup to run smooth. I use the setting on this page https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/808/

 

My GTX 1080 has never liked SKyrim/SE or Fallout 4. All three games where unplayable on it for almost 6 months. The only reason I did not get rid of it is that it played the rest of my games perfectly. I have had to go back to older drives twice & in the end It took a GPU bios reflash to get it to work properly with Fallout 4. It is number 2 on the worst cards I have ever owned list. It is working ok for now.

 

Fallout 4, Skyrim/SE are the only games that can take down my computers to the point where it takes a system reset to get them going again. The last game to do that was MS Flight Sim 2000 & that was a very long time ago.

 

The only thing that has stopped me from going nuts with this game is that I have it on 2 computers & it is usually running ok on one of them.

 

Later