Fallout stays under 1GB and always crashes at 1 hour mark

Post by **anstand** » Wed Nov 04, 2015 2:43 pm

Hey there,

this is a really really weird situation I have at the moment since I really have no idea what exactly is causing the time related crashes in my Fallout installation.

The thing is:

I always was able to run Fallout TTW with approx. 100 mods for about 2-3 hours until the game used up more than 2.2GB of RAM and became unstable (getting really laggy) and crashed after 10-30 minutes afterwards. I considered that to be normal and never had a problem with that, since being able to play a heavily modded Fallout for 2-2.5 hours is fantastic to begin with.

However, a week ago the hard drive for almost everything gaming related, expect Fallout which is on my system drive, said bye-bye and crashed my windows as well (crashed in case of windows doing a repair since the page file was located on that HDD). Sadly, since that incident, Fallout ALWAYS (and I mean always) crashes around the 1 hour mark with no symptoms which could indicate that the RAM is full (it actually always stays under 1GB during my 1 hour playtimes). The crash comes in form of a freeze (FalloutNV.exe 32bit not responding) with the sound being still active.

Am using the 4GB patch (witht the -laaexe .\FalloutNV4GB.exe shortcut), have a 8GB page file (virtual memory) on my system SSD this time around, NVSE (with Roy's config), NVAC, the tweaks from the performance guide, have a 7-8MB save file with 30 hours in it and am using ENB (memory tweaks aka speedhack deactivated, activating it shows the same result).

I don't consider one of the mods I have to be a problem (I am constantly checking mods for errors via NVEdit and am editing them as well) since the freeze, like I said, is time related (can happen everywhere, even in cells where there is no action).

I did reinstall my gpu driver (358), tested my GPU VRAM with EVGA OC Scanner X v3, tested my RAM via MemTest (RAM being fully used) and none of the programs showed any errors or results which could lead to faulty hardware

The rig is a 980GTX ASUS STRIX, i7k 4.4GHZ, Win8.1x64, 8GB DDR3 and 2x256 SSD's.

Any sort of info / hint / help / suggestion / "please post" is appreciated and I will donate at least 50€ to the guy who is able to fix my problem.

Post by **anstand** » Wed Nov 04, 2015 9:01 pm

Am using EO, but am not using any of its presets. I will try to deactivate it later and see how it goes.

I also forgot to mention, that while Fallout is installed on my system drive, Steam itself was (and is again) installed on the other drive of my computer.

Post by **RoyBatty** » Thu Nov 05, 2015 2:30 am

Try lowering NVSE's initial heap to 400 and 64.

1 GB sounds wrong...

Your pagefile is too large.

Try removing ENB.

Post by **anstand** » Sun Nov 08, 2015 3:29 am

Lowering NVSE's initial heap to 400 and 64 sadly did not change anything.

And another thing I noticed is that I don't even need to create the shortcut (-laaexe .\FalloutNV4GB.exe) for 4GB to get it working with ENB and NVSE, respectively, starting fnv4gb.exe in the root directory has the same impact than starting the shortcut with the recommended parameters.

Is this normal or does that mean that the 4GB is somewhat not working (I unblocked it and it runs as admin)?

Am using the Overgrowth ENB with the d3d9_sweetfx.dll.

fnv4gb.exe is 55KB, FalloutNV.exe in the root and in the /exes folder is 16.162KB and the FalloutNV4GB.exe in the root folder is also 16.162KB big.

Removing ENB is not an option here.

Sorry for the laste response. Kinda busy this week.

Post by **RoyBatty** » Sun Nov 08, 2015 5:20 am

All I can think now is that ENB has improper settings for memory.

Post by **anstand** » Mon Nov 09, 2015 9:14 am

The "ReduceSystemMemoryUsage" parameter of the ENB was responsible for keeping the RAM under 1 GB. But as it seems, the game still crashes at the 1 hour mark, even after setting it to false (Game reaches 2.3 GB after just 1 hour). And besides that, that option was also enabled before the whole fiasco. *sigh*

Btw, what sound / video codec's should I use for playing Fallout? Is it maybe possible that a wrong codec pack could cause those problems (I had to install a new one after my hdd died)?

Post by **RoyBatty** » Mon Nov 09, 2015 6:14 pm

Uhm, codec packs are junk uninstall them. If you need anything at all FFDShow is all that's required and it should already have the Fallout games in it's exception filter.

Post by **anstand** » Mon Aug 08, 2016 8:49 am

Ok guys, I think I have fixed the problem for the crashing.

What I did was to change the variables in the NVSE_config.ini to

[Memory]

DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB= 500 -> 400

ScrapHeapSizeMB= 128 -> 64

and changed these values in the fallout.ini's

bPreemptivelyUnloadCells= 1 -> 0

bSelectivePurgeUnusedOnFastTravel= 1 -> 0

The crashing problem is gone (3 hours without crash with 110 mods and all sorts of texture packs), although the memory leak is still here. And probably will stay for eternity.

Post by **RoyBatty** » Mon Aug 08, 2016 12:28 pm

Turns out the scrapheap setting isn't used in NV, dunno why it's there. 420 is exactly double of vanilla heap size.

You seem to have the exact opposite of how it works for most everyone else with the cell purging.

Post by **anstand** » Mon Aug 08, 2016 1:28 pm

[quote=RoyBatty]

Turns out the scrapheap setting isn't used in NV, dunno why it's there. 420 is exactly double of vanilla heap size.

You seem to have the exact opposite of how it works for most everyone else with the cell purging.

[/quote]

Are you sure that scrapheap is not working in FNV? Any source on that?

Also, here are my .inis for everyone who is looking for some kind of reference.

So far, I have been playing Fallout NV (with the new, stable variables) without any ENB memory management, gonna test some of them later. Maybe I somehow can delay the memory leak.