Resetting graphics

[jaosals42]

Oftentimes, when I go randomly wandering in the wastelands of Fallout 3, my graphic settings in the game will at random set themselves at a reduced (maybe minimum) quality. I play this game at max possible settings on Windows XP and it runs great on my system. I also don't touch any of the video setting in the menu (Not like there are many to change anyway) and this still happens again and again. Is anyone else having this resetting graphics issue, is it possibly caused by an easy-to-insert, key-combination, and most of all, does anyone have a solution? It is unpleasant to have to reset the game constantly to retain the original graphics. :confused:

[jansonmercenary]

Are your setting sliders actually changing and resetting? Or do the graphics just generally degrade over long periods of play?

 

If it's the latter, then you're not the only one with that problem. The LOD in my game also tends to get sluggish when I play for longer than an hour. My settings are fine, but to it seems as if my PC gets "tired" of running the game with high quality textures and far-off asset fading and starts doing lazy things; like not deleting the crappy LOD texture boxes (they look good from far away, but really blocky and ugly close up).

 

I'm not a programmer, so I can't tell you exactly what causes this, but if I had to guess, it could have something to do with increased RAM caching. This game uses a lot of resources, and I can just imagine with all the decals, corpses, and free Havoc-enabled items floating around in the virtual world, memory allocation starts to become problematic. Quickest fix: restart the game.

 

And to be on the safe side, make sure you don't have anything else running that could eat up resources. If you're running Vista, you may want to turn off Aero and all the other fluffy Windows FX and see if the freed resources make any difference.