Lags and crashes

[Flatchester]

Recently my computer has had trouble running Fo3 and FNV, it ran them fine before with hardly any lag when I had the graphic settings on high, but now I have to resort to having it on normal quality and it randomly crashes more than it used to. I've tried the stutter remover, large address aware enabler, and casm but those don't seem to be helping. Is it just that my computer is getting old?

 

I have a Windows 7 Home Premium with an Intel® Core i5 CPU with 3.20 GHz and 8.00 GB with an ATI Radeon HD Series 5450 graphics card with 512 mb memory

[prensa]

Flatchester - Hello!

 

Have you added any large texture replacers recently?

 

They really eat into your performance.

 

High settings of anti aliasing will gobble up FPS too.

 

Balancing anti aliasing & resolution is important, you can lower anti aliasing on higher resolutions, or try lower resolutions with moderate anti aliasing.

 

You may be pushing it with too high a resolution, try a step down to the next resolution. You might surprised how little it affects the quality but how much more you gain in performance.

 

Have you defragged your hard drive recently? It may seem obvious but it's amazing how many people don't take care of that.

 

Fallout 3 can really get spread about after you add in mods. Fragmented meshes & textures will slow down Fallout 3 (or any game).

 

You use MMM I know, make sure you're not using too high a spawn setting. Massive spawn settings can really slow you down. Modest spawn settings in MMM can be just as much fun. I use quite a low spawn setting in MMM, Slightly increased spawns 1 - 2 & have plenty of enemies to fight but with smooth gameplay.

 

Make sure you're not running loads of programs in the background, browsers are particularly bad to run while a game is going I find. Anything that access the same hard drive as Fallout will cause delay.

 

If the game ran fine before & you haven't added in too much new, are you getting louder fan activity during play than you used too?

 

I recently started to get a very noisy fan not long after just starting to play Fallout 3 when before it was quiet. I checked my graphics card temps in CCC during play & they were bad.

 

Turned out my graphics card was chock full of dust, on the inside where it was not viewable.

 

Only found it when I took out the card, took it apart & cleaned it. If you know what you're doing it's worth giving your computer a good dusting. Increased dust means icreased heat which means poor performance.

 

Even just opening up the case & giving it a basic dust out can help.

 

Other than that, it's possible your mod list has grown very large. If that's the case you may want to go through the list & make sure you need everything on the list.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Prensa