More than 2 cores in your machine? Play fallout 3? Then read on!

Ok, so one of my friends bought me Fallout 3 – Game of the Year Edition through Steam for my Christmas (the same one who bought me Fallout 3 Collectors Edition for my birthday last year interestingly enough) and I thought “cool, that would be good to pick away at over the holidays”. After I installed it through Steam I spent some time faffing around trying to enable the downloadable content (check the “Data Files” option on the launcher I started a new game (lost all my old save games anyway).

Every time  I would get a few minutes in and the game would just freeze, I spent quite a while searching the internet and the possible things I considdered were:

• Graphics drivers – Nope, update to date nVidia drivers for Windows 7
• Windows 7 – Nope, this is reported to happen on XP, Vista, 2008 and 7
• Background Changing – (Windows 7 feature which has messed up other games in the past) Nope, disabled it and it still froze
• The ffdshow Audio/Video fix – (Add Fallout3.exe and FalloutLauncher.exe to the list of applications that ffdshow excludes), Nope

Then finally, after hours of searching and finding nothing I came across a blog post by Nicholas Head which nailed it!

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.

I tried it and wow, the game has been running stable for hours since!

So, thank you Nicholas for posting that rather useful piece of information and good luck to all of you affected by this, enjoy you time roaming the Capital Wastelands!