[Westwood]

Hi all, thought I'd better share this piece of info with everyone possible as it took me 2 days of the crash to desktop scenario to figure out.

This fix doesn't involve much at all & it sorted my problem out without any decrease in graphics, after I'd removed all traces of nero, a virtual drive, ffdshow & tried every set of drivers for my FX7950 from 2007 up to the most recent which were already on before I started Fallout 3 & updated using both updates ...15 & ...35

Click your Start menu & in "Run" type "dxdiag", when the DirectX Diagnostic Tool window appears click the "Display" tab at the top.

In the DirectX Features click "AGP Texture Acceleration" to "DISABLED"

That's it!

As I said, it took me 2 days of trying every suggestion on the internet to fix this desktop crash. All of them unsuccessfully, before that "eureka" moment.

Hope this helps. Especially to those that have been reduced to a gibbering wreck! As I'm sure there'll be a few!

PS: I'm using XP Sp3 with an Athlon64 3200 & 2 gig of RAM with a PCI-E FX7950GT 256mb

[White Raven]

Westwood,

I just wanted to say THANK YOU!

I spent too much time over the past couple of days trying to figure out why Fallout 3 was having MAJOR crash issues. Not just CTD, but Blue Screen Of Death! So bad I had to turn off my comp to get it to reboot.

Finally came across your fix, and Fallout 3 has worked for 4 hours straight with no crashes so far!

Thanks,

--WR

[Luche]

I'm finding a little snag in implimenting this fix.



As you can see from the screenshot I've provided, there is nowhere on DxDiag that I can actually select the AGP Textures. The same situation applies if I swap to my 64 bit mode, just text with nothing selectable aside from the buttons at the bottom.

So how do I turn the setting off?

Thanks.

[Mark H]

I've been chasing this problem all over the internet and it's pretty amazing the number of "answers" that are out there.

I've tried them all, on at a time, to no avail.

So, I spent three days manually chasing it down using a spot in the game that repeatably caused a crash to decktop. I could play all around this spot, but when I activated a button, 30 seconds later, it would crash.

Looking into Event Viewer led to error 0xc0000005, a Sharing Violation. This can be related to several things which is probably why there are so many "answers" out there from compatibility, installing older DirectX distributions, changing the number of threads in play, to holding your nose with a clothespin. But, the "study" done by the college students is probably the best clue.

Bottom line:
If you have multiple cores, fallout 3 will attempt to use them. If you have default windows drivers for multiple cores, you will likely be more prone to crashes. Update your chipset drivers, or use the ones that came with the mobo.

I went from a predictable crash, (or a random crash every five to 30 minutes), to no crashes in five days.

Good luck.

Phenom II x4 940 3.6GHz
8 GB Corsair memory
M4N72E

[Trotter]

I wonder if setting the core affinity to a single core would work the same way? I remember having to do that with Battlefield 2 when I first went dual core.