Over the Thanksgiving weekend I purchased Fallout 3 for the PC, my first time having the PC game. (Always played it on the XBox 360 before that).

When I loaded up the game on my new PC, and the game scanned my equipment and automatically set itself at "Ultra" graphics - I was ecstatic! Couldn't wait to see how different the gameplay would be in Ultra!

It did look great, and was unbelievably fast going through doors/fast traveling (I tested it, though usually never use it).

Although the visual aspects of the game were like night and day better than they had been on the XBox 360; the game was almost unplayable for all the CTD's.

So I Googled that CTD problem, and learned that Multi-core PC's/64-bit/Windows 7 = these all came out after Fallout 3, which was made during the Windows XP era.

These PC's purchased to play our beloved games on "Ultra" settings - cannot play them because of those same powerful assets that make it capable of playing them.

The cure is out there on the internet; you have to access the ini and limit the cores used down to TWO, (or one if you are still having CTD's). There is also a .dll file you have to place in your Fallout 3 folder with the launcher; and you have to change the compatability to Windows XP 2.

Okay, so when you limit your PC to two cores, then you go to play the game: The game sees the difference immediately; and re-scans your set-up to determine the best settings your rig can handle.

Guess what? The game determines that your PC is no longer capable of playing Fallout 3 on Ultra, it is now only capable of playing the game on MEDIUM graphics !!!!!!


So after all that, and this huge rig ... I have to play the game on medium graphics?



GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!!!!!




So NOW, I am wondering if this is exactly what the issue was with my old PC and Oblivion! My old PC was customized specifically to play Oblivion on the highest settings, but could only play it on medium graphics. It was also Mulit-core (and Windows Vista); and had more than ample power for Oblivion.

So why it had to be put on medium graphics (and still stuttered all the time) really bothered me. So now I wonder if this is what the whole problem with my old PC was; that it was Multi-core and Oblivion was not capable of being played on that many cores.

I've never seen it discussed on any of the Oblivion forums; never seen any fixes for it (there were numerous posts about the Fallout 3 CTD problem).



And now that makes me really begin wondering if I will have the same issue with Fallout: New Vegas. Does anyone know?

I have never had to add any special .dll file to play Oblivion, FO3, or NV with my multi-core processor computers. For FO3 and NV all you have to do is put the following two lines in your Fallout.ini



I never even had to do that with Oblivion.

You are not stuck with the game at Medium settings. You can manually set everything to max if you want. In the Launcher just click on the Advanced button, and there are bunch of tabs for different settings. Turn everything up as much as you want.

Well, that is good to hear, and worrisome at the same time! I wonder what that .dll file was the guy on YouTube had everyone download and add to the Fallout 3 launch folder? Urk, I hope it wasn't something bad.

Whatever it was, my game played without a single crash afterward - until tonight, that is. Tonight it started showing an odd screen when entering doors (like a screen of skulls), and when talking to Moira it froze up repeatedly and then just now crashed - first time since the fix.

Thank you for your answer, SubRosa, I have a high regard for your advice and judgement, especially on these matters!

Yeah, you can always crank up the settings manually. That´s what I always did with Oblivion... before lowering it all again in order to even load a game! But now I can play it all on max and life is good

That ini tweak in FO3 was all I needed to do too but in my case I couldn´t even go through the tutorial before the puter froze on me, again and again.


Wish I could play Star Wars: Rebellion on it too but for that I can´t find a fix..

I was thinking this morning at work, perhaps that that .dll file might be part of the Fallout Script Extender? That has a bunch of .dll files - all named fosexxx.dll - along with a bunch of other files.

Just to be safe, I would get rid of that .dll file until you are sure what it does.

Good suggestion, I most def will!



By the way, the name of the .dll file is:


d3d9.dll

From what I read on the internet just now, it is supposed to fix a Direct X 11 missing dll file. (I didn't know, the guy said to download it along with those ini changes and compatibility change; and a bunch of people had commented that vid and said it worked great, so I just did it)

Really stupid of me, and now I'm wondering if that is what gave my laptop that virus that crashed it - and I already installed it on the new PC !!!! Urgh

Ok, I know d3d9.dll. It is part of Direct X. Is this the one you used?

That guy is right, copying it directly to your game folder can help people with Direct X issues. Then again, it might not make a difference at all. It's probably not your virus carrier, though it never hurts to run a scan on the file itself. I would get rid of it, and see if that makes a difference. If the game runs worse without it, then put it back.

It wasn't that site, the comments below the youtube vid had a link to a site I wasn;t familiar with.

Here is the youtube instructions I followed, beneath the vid in the comments is the link:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iuTE8-4lNU

That is a good vid. The maker was very thorough, and covered just about everything one might do to improve performance. Most of it is not needed by most people. Like I said, I have Windows 7 64-bit, with a multicore cpu, and never had to do anything except edit the two lines in the .ini file. But if you have persistent problems, you want to try everything.

I was having crashing problems and just jumped on this first - I would rather do less if it isn't necessary, so will remove that .dll file and see if there are no problems; and the compatibility was set on Windows XP 3 before I changed it to Windows XP 2 due to his instructions; if you did not need to do that, I will change that back too. I really appreciate your help on this, SubRosa. Don't want to ruin the new PC before I get to play it, lol.

I never had to change the compatibility settings for FO3 or NV, nor Oblivion or even Morrowind. The two .ini line tweaks are literally all I had to do to fix the crashes in FO3.

Just so you know, you usually do not have to deal with even making .ini tweaks to play games on computers. Fallout 3 is weird, in that it is literally the same game engine as Oblivion and Morrowind (and for that matter Skyrim), and it is the only one of those four that you have to do that with. I am not really sure if you need the ini tweak with FONV. I just added it to play it safe when I first installed NV.

Most games - even old ones - you just install and play. The ones that cause problems are the games that are really old, from before Windows 95. Those ancient games made for Dos - like the original Doom - are the ones that require a lot of effort to get working. The good news is you can often buy again cheap from Gog.com. They include brand new installers made for them to work on new computers, which removes all the hassle. I have rebought many games from Gog this way, like the original Tomb Raider, Pirates Gold, Pod, and so on.

That is really good to know, thank you!

I may look them up and see if I can get Chips Challenge. I was going to make a partition just to have Chips again. I think it is DOS based, but it played on the Windows XP on my previous old PC (the one before the one I just stopped using).

I still have my old disks for Windows 95 and Windows XP OS's, plus the two disks for Microsoft Games they pre-installed with the OS's, (not just the card games, but some really interesting games like Chips Challenge, some tomb exploring game, something like Tetras, etc. - Really fun games that I miss them bundling into the newer computers. Did anyone but me get hooked on all those games you had to find a list of items in a very cluttered room of stuff? I loved those!