Painfully slow gamplay

[unarmedtoe]

When playing fallout, my FPS dips down to the 20s, and sometimes the teens when I am either moving forward or turning around.

My system specs:

Intel i3-2100 Dual-core Processor
ASrock z68 Motherboard
550w OSZ PSU
4gb 1600mhz Ripjaws (2 x 2gb)
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1GB

I am uncertain why my game is not functioning well. I have played crysis, metro 2033, and many other games without a sub-25 drop during combat.

After playing for about an hour, TechPowerUp's GPU-Z tool gives me the following maximum readings.

GPU Core Clock: 850MHz (overclocked from 775)
GPU Memory Clock: 1150MHz overclocked from 1000)
GPU Load: 68%
Memory Usage (dedicated): 887MB
Memory Usage (Dynamic): 152MB
Power usage: 
1.20v (increased from 1.15)

All Temperatures remained sub-60

MODS:

I have the following mods installed:

FWE (fallout wanderer's edition)
Mart's Mutant Mod
RH_IronSights
FWE-Combat Overhaul
Fellout
Darnified UI
CASM
Fallout Stutter Remover
NMC's PERFORMANCE texture pack
FO3 Enhanced Shaders LITE

Edited May 12, 2012 by unarmedtoe

[GrindedStone]

Which NMC pack did you use?

[davycrockett]

whats the clock speed of your i3 ? the games minimum req is 2.4ghz and have you tweaked the .ini's at all cos it sounds like taxed hardware , FO3 is both CPU and GPU intensive due to a bad game engine

 

 

but for more detailed info on fps hit from a old hand try tweak guides .com lots of geeky goodness there .

[GrindedStone]

Yeah it's NMC along with the enhanced shaders. The core i3 2100 an 6850 O/C are a good combo, but there isn't power to spare. It's a second generation sandy bridge CPU, but even at stock clocks a 6850 is starting to bottleneck the CPU. Then you're probably running 1920 x 1080 or 1920 x 1200 high resolutions on a 1Gb card making things worse. So now when you ask it to run player made high detail textures/shaders, it's too much.

[MichikoUnknownFox]

The CPU may be your bottleneck. I'm playing with the full NMC pack with uGridsToLoad=7 on an HD 6850 too and my FPS seems like it's going well over the FPS Clamp of 60. I've tried uGridsToLoad=9 and 11, and my FPS is still alright but my HDD became the bottleneck because it had trouble loading all those things into memory, so uGridsToLoad=7 is the best choice for me.

 

In fact, monitoring the GPU usage, the GPU isn't even using 60% most of the time when I'm playing. This is only slightly overclocked (800 MHz Core, 1090 MHz Memory) at standard voltage settings, because I haven't even needed to really overclock it.

 

One thing I have to mention for you to try. Don't use Fallout Stutter Remover if you're on a decent machine. It might do more harm than good. It's designed with older machines in mind. It has some effects like switching around the timing of your processor thread scheduling and stuff, which are detrimental to modern processors as it forces your machine to sleep (stop processing) once in a while to allow other processes to go through.

[GrindedStone]

Well if you got 8Gb of ram or more you could disable the page file. The engine setting for disc cache still works if set to 0 to a degree if windows is using one. The engine setting is for forcing disk caching, not disabling it. Then if you knew how large the 5 grid was you wouldn't change it to begin with. You're basicly enabing full detail on areas near 500 feet away in any direction. Then even the lowly i3 2100 doesn't really bottleneck until 6950 in benchmarks.