Fallout New Vegas – Fix Crash, Freezing, FPS Improve, NPC Slowdown, Mouse & Audio

After a long wait, Fallout New Vegas has finally hit the streets. New Vegas is the latest installment to this long running RPG franchise and is without a doubt one of the most anticipated titles to be released this year. Fallout 3 in my opinion was a great game – however it had its share of technical issues, bugs and glitches which sometimes proved to be annoying. New Vegas is built on the same game engine as FO3 and seems to be an equally enjoyable gaming experience. Unfortunately, New Vegas has also inherited some of the bugs it’s predecessor had. This is not to say the game is bugged to hell, but there seem to be a lot of folks who have run into various issues including performance woes, crashes and audio issues. If you have run into problems with New Vegas, check out the list of fixes below – they will help you improve game performance, avoid crashes and in some cases, get the damn game to run :)

Fallout 3 New Vegas freezing & random freezes mid game, BSOD errors

Random freezes including BSOD errors can occur on certain multi core hardware environments due to incompatibilities with the game engine. You can try to avert these issues by limiting the game to use only two cores.

  1. Open fallout.ini file in My Documents\My Games\FalloutNV with a text editor such as Notepad.
  2. Look for the string bUseThreadedAI=0
  3. Change it to bUseThreadedAI=1
  4. Add another line beneath the above, iNumHWThreads=2
  5. Save and close this file.
  6. Repeat steps 2-5 for fallout_default.ini file in installation dir (default C:\Program Files (x86)\Bethesda Softworks\Fallout New Vegas)

Improve FPS, fix NPC slowdown, stuttering issues and increase framerate

I’ve got to say, this is an awesome fix and a godsend for those who are plagued with performance problems. Download and place the dx9.dll file as directed in instructions below and you may notice a significant performance increase with your Fallout New Vegas installation:

  1. Download dx9.dll file from http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34778
  2. Place file in ../steamapps/common/fallout new vegas (or wherever your falloutNV.exe is located)
  3. Restart steam and the game. Game will now use Directx 9 Render Path instead of the backward computability DX9 API with DX10

This fix was originally found here.

This is also known to resolve some crash at launch issues with Fallout New Vegas.

Fix Jerky framerate issues, low FPS in Fallout New Vegas

Sometimes, particularly if you are using low end video hardware, you might find the game to be lagging in performance with stuttering and jerky frame rates. If you encounter this issue, try setting the water multisampling setting to low. I’ve found this to be killing lower end GPU and disabling this gave a noticeable performance boost.

Fix New Vegas mouse acceleration issues

I don’t know about you but I find the sudden mouse accelration annoying as hell. I’m not sure if this is a feature or a bug but if you want to disable it, follow the steps below:

  1. Open FalloutPrefs.ini located inside My Documents\My Games\FalloutNV with a text editor.
  2. Find the [Controls] section in this file.
  3. Add the following lines to this section: fForegroundMouseAccelBase=0
    fForegroundMouseAccelTop=0
    fForegroundMouseBase=0
    fForegroundMouseMult=0

      Save and close the file (it’s assumed that this file is not read only – if it is, remove the read only attribute from file properties). Restart the game and mouse acceleration issues should hopefully be resolved. Repeat steps 1-3 for Fallout_default.ini located inside Steam\steamapps\common\fallout new vegas\ folder.

      Fallout New Vegas crash after intro video

      1. Download dx9.dll file from http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34778
      2. Place the file inside your game' installation directory.
      3. Restart the game.

      If the above still does not fix your crash and launch, try running the game in windowed mode.

      Fallout 3 New Vegas crash to desktop at intro or launch, black screen issues, audio issues

      Above can happen if you have FFDShow codecs installed on your machine. Fallout 3 engine seems to have incompatibilities with these and is known to cause crashes as well as audio issues. You have to either uninstall the codecs from your system or add fallout3.exe to FFDShow audio and video decoders exceptions list.

      1. Launch the ffdshow video decoder configuration window. You may access this through the start menu. If you have installed any codec packs, check the start menu entries of those. If you can’t find it on the start menu, right click the ffdshow video decoder (red) icon that appears on the taskbar when a supported video file is playing, and select ‘ffdshow video decoder’ option from the menu.
        ffdshow_icon
      2. Tick the ‘Dont use ffdshow in’ checkbox if not already checked
      3. Press the edit button that is next to the text field. A new dialog box will pop up. Press the Add button. The ‘Add incompatible executable file’ dialog box will be displayed. Browse to the Fallout New Vegas installation directory and locate the main game exe file. Select it and press open. Close all dialog boxes currently open by pressing ok.
        (OR you can simply type falloutnv.exe at the end of the text field next to ‘Dont use ffdshow in’ checkbox)
      4. Repeat steps 2-3 in ffdshow audio decoder configuration (the blue icon in taskbar) window as well. It is important that you add fallout3.exe to both ffdshow audio and video decoder’s exceptions list.

      This is a bug that’s been there since Fallout 3. We posted a separate article on how to fix this issue back in 2008, which you may find here.

      New Vegas audio issues, lagging, stuttering or noisy audio

      First of all, try the FFDShow fix (above) if you are having issues with New Vegas audio. If the problem persists, you can try the following:

      • Disable surround sound output in your computers sound properties. Try to use  Sterero speaker setup.
      • Lower your sound card’s audio sampling rate to at least 48000hz (a screenshot and detailed steps on how to do this may be found in this article)
      • Try running the game in Windowed Mode. Strange as it may sound, this seems to fix lagging audio for some.
      • Update your sound card’s drivers.

      Update your graphics drivers and DirectX

      Again, this is pretty basic stuff buy many people seem to ignore this – always update your video card drivers to the latest build before running the game. Update your video card’s drivers – if latest drivers do not work, try downloading and installing latest beta drivers (do this at your own risk).

      As for DirectX, you may download the latest monthly runtime from this location.

      This article is a work in progress – it will be updated as more solutions are found.

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