Fallout 3 on Windows 7 w/quad core

A freind told me that I need to install it using the device manager, so I'm trying to figure that out. He said when he installed it that way it played with or without the patch. He owns A dell quad core with 7 ultimate.

it works for me, thanks!

Hmmmm...

I have a Core 2 Quad, and like many of you was having frequent lockups while moving in game. I made the changes to the fallout.ini suggested in the first post, and it actually made the problem worse! Now instead of locking up after 5 minutes or so of play, it would freeze as soon as my character took a single step!

So I entered these settings instead:

bUseThreadedAI=0
iNumHWThreads=1

and it seems to have helped. Though I am getting strange images on screen after loading. What would normally be a black screen for a few seconds between the load screen and game now has white shapes from the pipboy!

I have no clue what caused that, and can't really describe it without taking a screen shot!

happycamper said:

Vista SP2 with a dual core worked fine. After upgrading to a quad core and Windows 7, I was lucky if I could play more than 5 minutes without a freeze.

A fine gentleman named Nicholas Head posted this solution on his blog. Along with several others, I can confirm this fix works! (YRMV)

Fallout 3: Video/Display Freezes, sound keeps going

by Nicholas Head 7. February 2009 00:35

Ever since Bethesda came out with the 1.1 patch for Fallout 3, I couldn’t play the game anymore. Once I got into the game and started wandering around, I’d randomly “freeze” up… the video would stop updating, but the sounds/music would still play. Keyboard clicks and mouse clicks did nothing, requiring me to ctrl+alt+del and kill the task manually.
It looked like I was SOL until the next patch, but I found some help online:

The game engine has some issues with processors that have more than 2 cores. You can force the game to only use two of them and it will stop the freezing. I haven't had it freeze once since I did this several days ago.
Open up the fallout.ini file in: My Documents\My Games\Fallout3
Find the line:
bUseThreadedAI=0
change it to:
bUseThreadedAI=1
Add another line after it and insert:
iNumHWThreads=2
This will limit the game to 2 cores and prevent the engine bug from causing the game to freeze.

Surprisingly, this worked like I charm. I do indeed have a quad core processor, so it sounds like this was the culprit. Why 1.1 broke the game for me.. I have no idea. It sounds like Bethesda needs to do some better testing on multi-core processors.


Hopefully this helps someone else out there!

This is the only solution I've found to stop the constant crashings (some occurring as soon as I load my game up and some occurring randomly after 5-10 minutes of gameplay)

I tried this solution before but found it didn't work.. This is because I edited the fallout ini in program files and NOT in my documents/games/fallout3

If you use this fix in the right ini, the game will work! Edit the ini file in my documents and NOT programs!

You do know/realize that the latest patch for Fallout 3 is 1.7?

Fallout: Welcome to the Official Site

Not saying the above fix doesn't work, but it does say the fix is based on the 1.1 patch

Gamebryo's quad core issues have never been truly fixed.

Original post was at 8-10-2009, when the current patch WAS 1.1, while the newest patch has obviously changed. i found this information helpful (it worked), and wanted to thank you and to point out the timing difference to the people posting about different versions of the game nearly a year later.